The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
familiar and common, not just on Sunday afternoons playing at bandstands
in public parks, but on Saturdays and weekday evenings playing at street
corners. Mr J. Partridge recalled how in Hackney during his childhood in
the 1900s ‘Salvation Army bands on a Sunday morning, used to come and
play, and you’d all turn out and listen to that or open your windows’. 98
Their repertoire was dominated by religious hymns and psalms, and their
familiarity made them well known in daily life. Interviewees recall the
singing of hymns on works outings and even in workplaces, especially
among women millworkers, pitbrow lasses, fishermen, fish gutters and
miners. 99 Music was one of the important male connections to religiosity.
The rise of the brass band from the 1870s in the working-class communities
of the Midlands, northern England, South Wales and central Scotland
created a characteristic male world, combining the masculinity of militaristic
uniforms, the machismo of the brass instrument, and the religious content
of the sacred music. To this was added the male voice choir in Wales which,
uniquely in Britain, developed a strong and enduring association with
Nonconformist religion. And organ music was not confined to churches.
When the movies came to Barrow-in-Furness in the 1900s they were
screened at an open-air fairground in the Market Square with ‘a beautiful
organ on the front, a huge organ right across the front of the marquee’
playing ‘gorgeous’ hymns and classical music which attracted people in
their hundreds. 100 Even modern cultural forms, with ‘secular’ content, could
be surrounded with religious symbols.
Music was also an important religious theme in the home. Many interviewees,
mostly of upper-working-class or middle-class parents, recall
Sunday evenings between the 1870s and 1910s around a piano or harmonium
singing psalms and hymns. Religious music in the home was not just
an addition but sometimes a substitute for formal church connection – as
a Scripture Reader discovered whilst door-to-door evangelising in Islington
in about 1898:
55 Popham Road: Mrs Hooker. Had conversation upon spiritual
matters. Is rather sceptical: sometimes thinks there is a heaven, and
sometimes she thinks there is not, but she certainly did not believe
there is a hell. She does not attend a place of worship; they generally
had some music at home, which she thinks is as good as going to
church. 101
Reginald Collins from Liverpool recalled the family singing in the 1900s
and 1910s: ‘We used to sing together but not organised. Me dad used to
sing. He used to – he used to sing some wonderful songs. Moody and
Sankey’s hymns, you know. And “Blind Boy”, I remember him – remember
him cry – we cried over that, yes.’ 102
Boys, however, had severe problems with churches. Whilst girls loved
wearing Sunday-best dresses, and revelled in the recollection in oral
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