The Death of Christian Britain

— Personal Testimony and Religion 1800–1950 —
However, once married, the woman of the working classes usually
changed her relationship with Sunday churchgoing. Sunday was a highly
gendered day for parents. Characteristically, in households without
domestic servants, mothers remained at home in the morning to look after
young children and prepare Sunday lunch, whilst older children and the
father went to church, chapel or Sunday school. A man from Essex recalled
in the first two decades of the twentieth century how in the morning the
children ‘went to the Sunday school, and then from Sunday school into
chapel. Father went Sunday morning in the morning, Mother stopped at
home to cook the meal.’ The children went back to Sunday school again
in the afternoon, and after tea at home went back to chapel, this time with
Mother. 71 Tom Willis’ mother said to him in around 1930:
‘You don’t have to go to church, do you? I mean you can live a
decent life without all the rigmarole, can’t you? Strikes me that half
the people who go to church are humbugs anyway, Sunday
Christians.’ She smiled. ‘No, I don’t think He’ll hold it against me.
When I get to the pearly gates He won’t hold it against me, I’m sure
of that. And if He does, I’ll tell Him straight. I was too busy on
Sundays getting dinner and tea for you bloody lot to have time to sit
on my arse in church.’ 72
Domestic ideology expected women to cook meals, and the most important
meal of the week in virtually all households in nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Britain was that at Sunday lunchtime. Even for poor and
working-class families it was the day for meat, the best that could be
afforded. In Barrow in Lancashire one interviewee recalled: ‘We always had
a big joint which used to do Monday as well of course, but we always had
cold meat for supper on Sunday night, always. We had all the trimmings
of course with Yorkshire pudding. Yorkshire pudding first and then you’d
have your joint after and always a pudding after that if you wanted it, milk
pudding after that.’ 73 Such meals took time to prepare, and for Protestants
without domestic servants this meant in almost all cases the woman of the
household missed Sunday morning worship, which in most churches was
timed at a single service starting at 11 am and finishing at anytime between
12.30 pm and 1.30 pm. This meant that women’s attendance at morning
worship was dramatically reduced – an issue we explore in statistical detail
in the next chapter. Even in Scotland, Sunday lunch was, by the start of
the twentieth century, an important ritual in most families. In the interwar
period one woman recalled that ‘my mother wouldn’t have thought
Sunday was Sunday without a joint of meat’, whilst the mother of another
couldn’t afford proper ‘butcher’ meat but still laid out ‘a wee bit meat and
maybe our soup and tatties’. 74 If the family was strictly sabbatarian, then
the food would be cooked on Saturday night and reheated. 75 Arrangements
in the Catholic Church were different. There were multiple morning masses
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