The Death of Christian Britain

— Personal Testimony and Religion 1800–1950 —
testimony, boys generally hated their Sunday-best clothes. These were
dominated by two types: the sailor’s suit, and the Eton suit. The latter was
extremely common amongst all social classes. In the upper-middle-classes,
Ronald Walker blanched at the memory of being dressed as a boy in
Harrogate with a dark-blue sailor suit for winter and a white one for
summer, with an Eton suit as an alternative. The working classes and the
poor still equipped their boys aged seven to twelve years in such things.
Thomas Brennan and his brothers from Liverpool, brought up Catholics,
were supplied by their father with new knee trousers and stockings every
year for their appearances in the church choir. Reginald Collins, the son
of a Liverpool dock labourer who had long periods of unemployment, wore
an Eton suit on Sundays, whilst Arthur Turner, despite a very brutal and
poor upbringing in Manchester’s Hankey Park, had a sailor’s suit. 103
Religious clothes changed for funerals. In Wales, William Pugh recalled that
it was the custom for the people organising a funeral to give on the morning
of the burial a black tie and a pair of black gloves to everyone invited. 104
Not one male oral interviewee recollected this sartorial regime with affection.
If the religious signification of girls’ Sunday-best dresses supported
their own signification of femininity, it did not do this for boys.
For boys, Sundays were days of encasement in suits of stupefying
grandeur and pretension, suits which imprisoned the spirit of the carefree
physicality of puberty and adolescence. Boys were frequently deprived of
a churchgoing role-model father; oral interviewees from many Church
of England families report that their fathers were not churchgoers. Lazarus
Cox was born in 1879 in Oxford, his father an illiterate and nonchurchgoing
builder’s labourer, and it was his mother who ‘always saw
that we gone to church all right’ where he became a choirboy. 105 Boys were
being trained to be ‘religious’ by mothers, and it was mothers who ‘dressed’
boys in Sunday best. Boys’ Sunday-best clothes were seemingly uniformly
detested, in large part because they represented a cultural imprisonment
symbolic of the virtually universal ban on Sunday games. Ball games and
especially football, the emerging adoration of males of all ages and social
classes between the 1880s and 1920s, were banned from public spaces by
bye-laws and community expectation. Men were trained to perceive their
masculine tendencies, even those promoted by muscular Christianity, as
curbed on the Sabbath. Sunday was feminised, and men’s games were
rendered immoral and criminal. 106
This was only part of a much wider phenomenon – the way in which
evangelicalism was designed to induce guilt in men for their manly pleasures.
Religious discourse on drunken men and impoverished families, on
male tendencies to dissipation, sexual impropriety, gambling and ‘rough’
behaviour, threw blame for immorality on men. This intensified from the
1850s to the 1920s as men were increasingly demonised by the publicity
campaigns of religious pressure groups, leading to new laws restricting their
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