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 />
church activities: a Church <strong>of</strong> England Sunday school and Thursday<br />
evening Bible class, a member <strong>of</strong> the Salvation Army Band <strong>of</strong> Love temperance<br />
organisation and its Young People’s Band, attending three Army<br />
meetings a week, concluding his account: ‘Spent practically all my life at<br />
the Salvation Army.’ 125 <strong>The</strong> parents <strong>of</strong> Percival Chambers (born 1894)<br />
were not churchgoers, but in West Norwood, London, he went to a massive<br />
range <strong>of</strong> religious organisations, including Sunday school, Band <strong>of</strong> Hope<br />
and the Church <strong>of</strong> England where he was a choirboy, before becoming<br />
a Congregationalist during his mid-teenage years and a Baptist in his late<br />
teens. He was, he said, attracted by young ladies and by fine preaching. 126<br />
<strong>The</strong> parents <strong>of</strong> Mr F. Sunderland in Keighley in Yorkshire were not churchgoers<br />
in the 1900s, but they kept a strict Sabbath with no games, play or<br />
work, and clean and special clothes to be worn. 127 In the same town,<br />
Norman Potter’s parents never attended church, but he became engrossed<br />
in the 1900s with church activities and those <strong>of</strong> the Pleasant Sunday<br />
Afternoon movement, and kept going to church during his adult life. 128<br />
So common was this pattern <strong>of</strong> activity amongst English interviewees<br />
born in the 1890s and 1900s that it deserves attention. Children <strong>of</strong> nonchurchgoing<br />
parents were becoming involved with real intensity,<br />
overwhelmingly at their own volition, in church and Sunday school activities.<br />
But what <strong>of</strong> the parents? Some <strong>of</strong> the interviewees reveal that their<br />
parents had been churchgoers when they had been in their childhood and<br />
teenage years, had got married in church (or in Scotland, with different<br />
legal arrangements, by the minister in any location – such as the bride’s<br />
home, the manse or an hotel or ballroom), but had stopped attending church<br />
after the birth <strong>of</strong> the first child. While returning to be ‘churched’ and to<br />
christen babies, their attendance at church stopped. Sarah Cookson born<br />
in 1887 in Keighley is typical in her account <strong>of</strong> her parents: ‘In their young<br />
days – they were Church <strong>of</strong> England, really both <strong>of</strong> them – but in their<br />
young days before they was married they both attended the Salvation Army<br />
. . . [T]hat was before they were married, and I think they’d get married<br />
when they were going there.’ 129 <strong>The</strong>y then stopped attending church when<br />
their family started, and Sarah became heavily involved in church activities.<br />
This was an extremely common pattern <strong>of</strong> a child having major connections<br />
to church organisations when neither parent attended church at all.<br />
Out <strong>of</strong> a small sample <strong>of</strong> 39 transcripts that referred to non-churchgoing<br />
parents in the Qualidata Archive, this pattern applied to 14 interviewees –<br />
just over a third, all <strong>of</strong> them from England and none from Scotland or<br />
Wales. 130 <strong>The</strong>re was a family cycle to church connection in England in the<br />
late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In working-class families,<br />
church connection was something entered into in childhood and teenage<br />
years, enjoyed during courtship (with many romances beginning at church,<br />
chapel or Sunday school), and then was put into suspension in the early<br />
years <strong>of</strong> marriage when there were young children. In those cases, either<br />
143