The Death of Christian Britain

— Notes to pages 173–175 —
15 Colquhoun, Harringay Story, pp. 232–3; Allan, Crusade in Scotland, pp. 8, 108.
In the Mission England crusade of 1984, 61 per cent were under 25 years of
age; D. Williams, One in a Million: Billy Graham with Mission England,
Berkhamsted, Word Books, 1984, p. 184.
16 Children were special targets. Ten thousand Glasgow state-school pupils were
marshalled by the Education Authority to a daytime meeting to hear Graham
preach. Allan, Crusade in Scotland, p. 19.
17 Comment to the author by his cousin, 1998. The aunt was the author’s mother.
18 Haringay attendances were 1.756 million, Greater London population
(1951 census) was 8.3 million; Glasgow attendances in 1955 were 830,670,
Glasgow city population (1951) was 1.09 million. The demographics of later
missions were interestingly different. Billy Graham events in London in
1966–7 (700,000 attenders) and a six-city Mission England event in 1984 (1.026
million attenders) achieved far lower penetration of the media and density of
popular participation, but achieved significantly higher rates of coming forward
– 9.4 per cent in 1984 compared to 2 per cent in 1954–5; Williams, One in a
Million, p. 184. The recession and the coal strike of 1984 created an encouraging
economic backdrop for attendance and conversion amongst those who
still retained a discursive ‘memory’ of Christianity. If the argument of this
book is correct, missions of the new millennium will fail amongst the young
because of their unfamiliarity with discursive Christianity due to its disappearance
from the family and youth media, and the young’s absence from
Sunday schools.
19 J. Pascal, ‘Prima ballerina absoluta’, in Heron (ed.), Truth, Dare or Promise,
p. 29.
20 S. Pixner, ‘The oyster and the shadow’, ibid., p. 85.
21 B. Miles, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, London, Vintage, 1998,
p. 32; C. Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives,
London, Virago, 1986, p. 71.
22 I. Macdonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties,
London, Pimlico, 1995, p. 6.
23 V. Walkerdine, ‘Dreams from an ordinary childhood’, in Heron (ed.), Truth,
Dare or Promise, p. 65.
24 Ibid., p. 72.
25 C. Steedman, ‘Landscape for a Good Woman’, ibid., p. 117.
26 In addition to three of The Beatles, the art colleges produced Eric Clapton,
David Bowie, Pete Townsend of The Who, all of Pink Floyd, Keith Richards,
Ron Wood, Ray and Dave Davies of the Kinks, Jeff Beck and Eric Burdon.
Macdonald, Revolution in the Head, p. 13; A. Marwick The Sixties, Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 57–9.
27 Miles, Paul McCartney, p. 40.
28 E. Roberts, Women and Families: An Oral History, 1940–1970, Oxford,
Blackwell, 1995, p. 159.
29 A.H. Halsey, Trends in British Society since 1900, London, Macmillan, 1972,
p. 311.
30 QA, FAM, interviewee QD3/100/FAM/74.
31 Steedman, ‘Landscape for a Good Woman’, in Heron (ed.), Truth, Dare or
Promise, p. 105.
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