The Death of Christian Britain

— Personal Testimony and Religion 1800–1950 —
he would go into the priesthood – a profession ‘that was drilled in you’
as ‘something out of the ordinary’ and due ‘a very great respect’. However,
self-doubt that ‘I wouldn’t make the grade’ led to him turning down the
offer to join a priest going to South Africa, a decision he clearly regretted.
He recalled instead his religious life outside the priesthood in the Catholic
Young Men’s Society, Sunday evening concerts, and his continuing work
for the church: ‘And you think to yourself, well, I must make the grade.
I must save my soul if I can.’ His testimony then changes gear as he moves
into many pages of uninterrupted recollections of war service, standing
as an alternative and consummated identity that he delivers with vigour
and free from doubt or regret – an area of identity where he did ‘make
the grade’. 92
In evangelical households, boys were strongly encouraged to look
upon clergymen as heroes to emulate. Caradog Wells, born in 1903 in the
Rhondda, was told by his mother to model himself on his uncle from
farming stock, who ‘turned out eventually to be a local preacher’ with the
Wesleyans. ‘And she used to – always – when it came to be a question of
referring to anybody who we should follow and grow up and act like, it
was always my uncle Emmanuel.’ 93 From 1800 to the early twentieth
century, young boys in Wales and in the Scottish Highlands were known
to play at being preachers, by exhorting to dogs and livestock in the manner
of their favourite pastors. 94 Clergy were sometimes affectionately satirised.
Dolly Scannell’s family played a Christmas game called ‘Confessions’ in
which her brother ‘dressed up as a vicar, and as each person entered the
room he had to kneel in front of the priest and confess his sins, and when
the priest bent to give him absolution so of course he would be soaked
with water’. 95
One of the main attractions of the Church of England for young boys
was singing in a choir. Anglican choirboys were paid, and even those with
non-churchgoing parents were to be found in a choir. Lazarus Cox from
Oxford went to church three times on Sundays because he sang in the
choir, ‘and then that was a farthing a time, and if you mis-behaved yourself
you was in the chancel. The old vicar used to say, when we got down:
“sixpence off your money Cox, for talking”.’ 96 Thomas Upton, born 1904,
sang a great deal in church choirs: ‘I used to enjoy that thoroughly, but I
don’t think that made me particularly religious, but it took me to church.’ 97
Music was an important religious connection for working- and middleclass
men. In the Church of England, a surprising number of male oral
interviewees were bell-ringers, while an even larger group were in the
church choir as men and boys. Many in the working classes were in brass
bands, where religious and temperance music was located in an all-male
venue. But even more important was the vital familiarity which workingclass
neighbourhoods had with religious music. Before 1920, temperance
bands, works bands, club and lodge bands, and Salvation Army bands were
137