The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
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— Personal Testimony and Religion 1800–1950 —<br />
testimony, boys generally hated their Sunday-best clothes. <strong>The</strong>se were<br />
dominated by two types: the sailor’s suit, and the Eton suit. <strong>The</strong> latter was<br />
extremely common amongst all social classes. In the upper-middle-classes,<br />
Ronald Walker blanched at the memory <strong>of</strong> being dressed as a boy in<br />
Harrogate with a dark-blue sailor suit for winter and a white one for<br />
summer, with an Eton suit as an alternative. <strong>The</strong> working classes and the<br />
poor still equipped their boys aged seven to twelve years in such things.<br />
Thomas Brennan and his brothers from Liverpool, brought up Catholics,<br />
were supplied by their father with new knee trousers and stockings every<br />
year for their appearances in the church choir. Reginald Collins, the son<br />
<strong>of</strong> a Liverpool dock labourer who had long periods <strong>of</strong> unemployment, wore<br />
an Eton suit on Sundays, whilst Arthur Turner, despite a very brutal and<br />
poor upbringing in Manchester’s Hankey Park, had a sailor’s suit. 103<br />
Religious clothes changed for funerals. In Wales, William Pugh recalled that<br />
it was the custom for the people organising a funeral to give on the morning<br />
<strong>of</strong> the burial a black tie and a pair <strong>of</strong> black gloves to everyone invited. 104<br />
Not one male oral interviewee recollected this sartorial regime with affection.<br />
If the religious signification <strong>of</strong> girls’ Sunday-best dresses supported<br />
their own signification <strong>of</strong> femininity, it did not do this for boys.<br />
For boys, Sundays were days <strong>of</strong> encasement in suits <strong>of</strong> stupefying<br />
grandeur and pretension, suits which imprisoned the spirit <strong>of</strong> the carefree<br />
physicality <strong>of</strong> puberty and adolescence. Boys were frequently deprived <strong>of</strong><br />
a churchgoing role-model father; oral interviewees from many Church<br />
<strong>of</strong> England families report that their fathers were not churchgoers. Lazarus<br />
Cox was born in 1879 in Oxford, his father an illiterate and nonchurchgoing<br />
builder’s labourer, and it was his mother who ‘always saw<br />
that we gone to church all right’ where he became a choirboy. 105 Boys were<br />
being trained to be ‘religious’ by mothers, and it was mothers who ‘dressed’<br />
boys in Sunday best. Boys’ Sunday-best clothes were seemingly uniformly<br />
detested, in large part because they represented a cultural imprisonment<br />
symbolic <strong>of</strong> the virtually universal ban on Sunday games. Ball games and<br />
especially football, the emerging adoration <strong>of</strong> males <strong>of</strong> all ages and social<br />
classes between the 1880s and 1920s, were banned from public spaces by<br />
bye-laws and community expectation. Men were trained to perceive their<br />
masculine tendencies, even those promoted by muscular <strong>Christian</strong>ity, as<br />
curbed on the Sabbath. Sunday was feminised, and men’s games were<br />
rendered immoral and criminal. 106<br />
This was only part <strong>of</strong> a much wider phenomenon – the way in which<br />
evangelicalism was designed to induce guilt in men for their manly pleasures.<br />
Religious discourse on drunken men and impoverished families, on<br />
male tendencies to dissipation, sexual impropriety, gambling and ‘rough’<br />
behaviour, threw blame for immorality on men. This intensified from the<br />
1850s to the 1920s as men were increasingly demonised by the publicity<br />
campaigns <strong>of</strong> religious pressure groups, leading to new laws restricting their<br />
139