The Death of Christian Britain

— Personal Testimony and Religion 1800–1950 —
church activities: a Church of England Sunday school and Thursday
evening Bible class, a member of the Salvation Army Band of Love temperance
organisation and its Young People’s Band, attending three Army
meetings a week, concluding his account: ‘Spent practically all my life at
the Salvation Army.’ 125 The parents of Percival Chambers (born 1894)
were not churchgoers, but in West Norwood, London, he went to a massive
range of religious organisations, including Sunday school, Band of Hope
and the Church of England where he was a choirboy, before becoming
a Congregationalist during his mid-teenage years and a Baptist in his late
teens. He was, he said, attracted by young ladies and by fine preaching. 126
The parents of Mr F. Sunderland in Keighley in Yorkshire were not churchgoers
in the 1900s, but they kept a strict Sabbath with no games, play or
work, and clean and special clothes to be worn. 127 In the same town,
Norman Potter’s parents never attended church, but he became engrossed
in the 1900s with church activities and those of the Pleasant Sunday
Afternoon movement, and kept going to church during his adult life. 128
So common was this pattern of activity amongst English interviewees
born in the 1890s and 1900s that it deserves attention. Children of nonchurchgoing
parents were becoming involved with real intensity,
overwhelmingly at their own volition, in church and Sunday school activities.
But what of the parents? Some of the interviewees reveal that their
parents had been churchgoers when they had been in their childhood and
teenage years, had got married in church (or in Scotland, with different
legal arrangements, by the minister in any location – such as the bride’s
home, the manse or an hotel or ballroom), but had stopped attending church
after the birth of the first child. While returning to be ‘churched’ and to
christen babies, their attendance at church stopped. Sarah Cookson born
in 1887 in Keighley is typical in her account of her parents: ‘In their young
days – they were Church of England, really both of them – but in their
young days before they was married they both attended the Salvation Army
. . . [T]hat was before they were married, and I think they’d get married
when they were going there.’ 129 They then stopped attending church when
their family started, and Sarah became heavily involved in church activities.
This was an extremely common pattern of a child having major connections
to church organisations when neither parent attended church at all.
Out of a small sample of 39 transcripts that referred to non-churchgoing
parents in the Qualidata Archive, this pattern applied to 14 interviewees –
just over a third, all of them from England and none from Scotland or
Wales. 130 There was a family cycle to church connection in England in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In working-class families,
church connection was something entered into in childhood and teenage
years, enjoyed during courtship (with many romances beginning at church,
chapel or Sunday school), and then was put into suspension in the early
years of marriage when there were young children. In those cases, either
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