A secularizing society? Case studies of English northern industrial towns in the 1950s

Abstract

Secularization continues to be a dominant, albeit contested, theme in the religious historiography of modern Britain.¹ Its origins, its nature, its scale and even its very existence remain the subject of vigorous debate. Yet, until quite recently, relatively little attention has been paid by scholars to the evolution of the religious landscape during the long 1950s (following three-quarters of a century during which religious allegiance and attendance declined in Britain, largely continuously).² There has been a greater tendency to emphasize allegedly transformational changes in the 1960s, a position most conspicuously taken by Callum Brown. In a complementary argument, he has also gone so far as to portray the late 1940s and 1950s (at least until 1956, in some cases until 1959) as characterized by ‘something of a religious boom’ and a ‘return to piety’, being ‘one of the most concerted periods of church growth since the middle of the nineteenth century’, with ‘surges of … church membership, Sunday school enrolment, [and] accompanied by immense popularity for evangelical “revivalist” crusades’. Additionally, Brown deployed discourse analyses to suggest that the long 1950s witnessed ‘one of the high points of British Christian culture, surpassed only by that of the Edwardian period’, with ‘a vigorous reassertion of “traditional” values’.³

Brown’s reading of the 1950s has been challenged by several of his fellow historians. Simon Green, for example, dismissed the ‘so-called “religious revival”’ as ‘a lamentable failure’, concluding that ‘Britain had ceased to be a Christian country by 1960’.⁴ In a similar vein, Nigel Yates perceived the revival to be ‘very fragile’, observing that the religious leadership of the 1950s ‘had already prepared for ways in which the churches might come to terms with the growing secularization of society and the questioning of traditional moral values’; overall, he envisaged the years 1950–70 as a continuum of moral, religious and social change, not as two sharply divergent decades.⁵ Although I do not deny that Britain remained an essentially Christian nation in some respects, I refute on quantitative grounds Brown’s claim that the 1950s witnessed ‘one of the most concerted periods of church growth since the middle of the nineteenth century’, based on my data derived from the churches, opinion polls, other social research organizations and individual academics, spanning the three dimensions of religious belonging, behaving and believing.⁶

Despite these contributions, and Brown’s, the 1950s continue to be the poor cousin to the 1960s in mapping and understanding the trajectory of British secularization. This is, perhaps, somewhat surprising, for it was during the 1950s that the sociology of religion took root in Britain, within both academia and the churches.⁷ It was also during the 1950s that significant societal changes occurred with the potential to impact the relationships between the people and organized religion. These changes included relative prosperity (after the austerity of the immediate post-war years) and low unemployment; the advent of the welfare state, rendering much church-based social service obsolescent; and new patterns of recreational and consumer behaviour, facilitated by major expansion in household ownership of cars and television sets and by other advances in technology and infrastructure. Collectively, these changes progressively supported lifestyle choices that did not have to revolve around places of worship and Sunday observance.

Inevitably, a good deal of such debate as exists about the religious condition of Britain during the 1950s has been informed by national evidence, especially time series of church statistics, cross-sectional sample surveys of the adult population, and the impact of special factors such as evangelistic crusades (notably Billy Graham’s). By contrast, the focus of this investigation is on local sources. Although there have already been a few local histories of religion whose extended timespan incorporates the 1950s, their structure does not always permit developments of that decade to be isolated and reviewed holistically.⁸ Possibly the most famous local history of all, Edward Wickham’s of Sheffield (published in 1957), was the product of the industrial mission movement, which surged in the 1950s and peaked in Britain in the late 1970s, albeit the book did not really offer a contemporaneous sociological survey of the religious life of that city.⁹ However, it was particularly relevant to the common perceptions of linkages between secularization on the one hand and urbanization and industrialization on the other. In a different category were individual community studies, mostly undertaken in small towns or rural areas, which only briefly touched on religion. Several of these were later restudied by Steve Bruce, the leading sociologist of the secularization thesis, yielding useful comparative temporal perspectives.¹⁰ We return to some of these community studies in the concluding section of this article.

The three case studies examined here are certainly not entirely unknown, but they have been underreported in the historiography of secularization. All derived from Northern England, all related to industrial towns, and two majored on religion and society as their core purpose. Thereafter, the similarities between them faded, with each ‘principal investigator’ (as we would now refer to them) implementing a customized methodology, constrained by the limited funding available. The projects were undertaken by William Pickering in Rawmarsh (now part of the metropolitan borough of Rotherham in the metropolitan county of South Yorkshire) and Scunthorpe (now part of the unitary authority of North Lincolnshire) in 1954–6, Peter Kaim-Caudle in Billingham (now part of the unitary authority of Stockton-on-Tees) in 1957–9, and Tom Harrisson and a team from Mass Observation in Bolton (now part of the metropolitan county of Greater Manchester) in 1960.

Collectively, the three studies addressed five main performance indicators of the strength of institutional Christianity in the 1950s. Church membership, quantified in Rawmarsh, Scunthorpe and Bolton, was the most familiar of these, with national time series widely available from the late nineteenth century; however, data were difficult to interpret on account of variations in the definitions of ‘membership’ between denominations and, locally, because of differences in ecclesiastical boundaries. Levels of churchgoing on an ‘ordinary’ Sunday (one not characterized by a religious festival or other special services) were measured in Rawmarsh, Scunthorpe and Billingham, along the lines of the local censuses of church attendance that were commonplace in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras;¹¹ it was also possible to reconstruct them for Bolton. More innovatively, Pickering and Kaim-Caudle measured churchgoing at a major religious festival, Easter, which demonstrated how much higher it was (at least in the Church of England) than on an ordinary Sunday. Equally innovatively, they counted the local take-up of the occasional offices of the church, the three principal rites of passage of baptisms, marriages and funerals; although there were official statistics for the religious solemnization of marriage, hitherto there had been no truly comprehensive local sources for baptisms and funerals. Finally, the process of religious socialization, through Sunday schools or other agencies, was explored in all three studies, by a combination of quantitative and qualitative research, including Pickering’s innovative use of life histories. It will be noted that, unlike Brown, no attempt was made by the investigators to undertake discourse analyses (valuable though that might have been). Following Bruce, this account privileges the measurable aspects of religion.¹²

The case studies will be considered in turn, before a summative assessment is made, relating them to the broader picture of religious change in 1950s’ Britain. In brief, they provide no real support for the proposition that the 1950s were a decade of ‘religious revival’. Whatever performance indicator is selected, these projects leave the reader with an impression of an English urban Protestantism (whether Anglican or Free Church) at an increasingly low ebb. While Roman Catholicism continued to grow, at least absolutely in terms of its baptized population, observance and retention issues among the faithful were already being flagged by its clergy. Overall, active allegiance to institutional Christianity appeared to be shrinking in these northern industrial towns, a direction of travel consistent with an already long-standing picture of progressive secularization.

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William Stuart Frederick Pickering (1922–2016) was born at Enfield, the only child of practising Anglican parents, and educated at Surbiton Grammar School. After national service during the Second World War, he entered King’s College London (K.C.L.), where he gained his Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1949, subsequently being ordained deacon (1950) and priest (1951) in the Church of England. He later registered as a graduate student at K.C.L., where he conducted innovative research between 1953 and 1956 into the religious life of Rawmarsh and Scunthorpe, based on archival, census, life history and other sources, submitting his thesis in 1957, and gaining his doctorate in 1958.¹³ During his time at K.C.L., he had been tutor in theology (1955–6), prior to appointment as assistant professor of sociology at St. John’s College, University of Manitoba (1956–66) and senior lecturer in sociology, Newcastle University (1966–87), after which he retired to Cambridge. Pickering is perhaps best remembered today for his writings on Émile Durkheim and for establishing the British Centre for Durkheimian Studies at the University of Oxford in 1991, as well as the journal Durkheimian Studies and the Durkheim Press.¹⁴

Pickering’s typescript thesis, formerly little consulted at K.C.L., but recently digitized through the British Library’s Ethos service and now much more accessible,¹⁵ is the principal output from his research into religion in Rawmarsh (population 19,540) and Scunthorpe (56,520).¹⁶ None of his working documentation or raw data from the project are known to survive in any public repository. Pickering began the thesis by outlining the evolution of the towns themselves and their economic foundations, Scunthorpe being a post-First World War boom town built around the iron and steel industry, while Rawmarsh still retained some of its coal-mining heritage.¹⁷ After defining his religious and theological terms of reference,¹⁸ he then proceeded to describe the history and demography of the individual places of worship (seventeen in Rawmarsh and thirty in Scunthorpe),¹⁹ and their pattern of growth and decline, in terms of seating accommodation,²⁰ church membership,²¹ Sunday schools,²² and past church attendance.²³ These two chapters (3–4) derived from extensive primary research in archival sources and local newspapers.

Of the various metrics identified by Pickering to enumerate the reach of organized religion, church membership was the one on which most previous sociological commentators had focused, since, insofar as there were national-level religious statistics in existence, they largely related to membership.²⁴ The difficulties, however, were that not all denominations and faiths embraced the concept of ‘membership’ and, among those that did, there were no consistent criteria and age of entry. Nevertheless, from Pickering’s research and estimation, it is possible to calculate the level of church membership in Rawmarsh and Scunthorpe in 1953. For the Church of England, Pickering used the number of Easter Day communicants (the traditional, and canonical, yardstick of Anglican belonging), rather than the official definition of names on the church’s electoral rolls. For the Roman Catholics he employed an equivalent indicator of persons making their Easter duties, rather than the time-honoured criterion of baptized Roman Catholics (including children) known to the local parish priests, which would have been a much higher figure.²⁵ In the case of the Free Churches and the sects, which had (or could be presumed to have) a concept of membership broadly coincidental with the transition from adolescence to adulthood, sometimes also linked to profession of faith or ‘conversion’, Pickering recorded members. Adding these different elements together, church membership in Rawmarsh was 1,381, equivalent to 7.1 per cent of the town’s total population; for Scunthorpe, church membership was 4,753 or 8.4 per cent of inhabitants. If membership is expressed solely as a proportion of adult residents, then these figures are, respectively, 9.7 per cent and 11.7 per cent.²⁶

In practice, Pickering did not place huge emphasis on time series of church membership. He was more attracted to enumerating churchgoing, a universal indicator of religious allegiance and activity, the importance – indeed, necessity – of which was stressed by all denominations. There had been no census of church attendance in either town since 1851, when the decennial population census had surveyed religious accommodation and attendance nationally.²⁷ In fact, there had been relatively few local censuses of churchgoing anywhere in England after the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. As a clergyman, Pickering well understood that congregations varied from one Sunday to another and, accordingly, that a single day’s count in each town would not suffice. He therefore planned a census of morning, afternoon and evening services on the three consecutive Sundays (Passion Sunday, Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday), building to the holiest festival of the Christian calendar. Additionally, from these three sets of data, he derived a fourth measure, corresponding to an average or ordinary Sunday. He calculated this by taking the highest single attendance at either morning or evening service (as a corrective for ‘twicing’, the practice of some individuals worshipping more than once on the same Sunday, thereby being double-counted), and by scaling back to the observed size of congregation at other services in the same place of worship that Pickering had attended in the run-up to Easter. At Scunthorpe, the censuses were taken on 4, 11 and 18 April 1954, and at Rawmarsh on 27 March and 3 and 10 April 1955. The task of enumerating worshippers was generally left to lay officials of each church, potentially exposing them to charges of bias. On the other hand, it could have been argued that, given that they were most familiar with their fellow congregants, the data-gathering would be of enhanced accuracy. As a compromise, Pickering factored in some random checks by neutral observers. The enumerators were asked to record attendances at the principal services by sex, age and (for male attenders only) perceived social class (according to the Registrar-General’s fivefold classification of occupations); and also to note the size of collections,²⁸ attendance at Sunday schools, and details of weekday activities.²⁹

Turning to outcomes,³⁰ in Rawmarsh, all-age attendances for all denominations amounted to 1,601 on Passion Sunday, 1,948 on Palm Sunday, 2,257 on Easter Sunday and 1,643 on an average Sunday; these figures represented, respectively, 8.2 per cent, 10 per cent, 11.6 per cent and 8.4 per cent of the town’s population. The uplift for Easter Day services was greatest in the Church of England, whose congregations were 131.3 per cent above average, bringing them into near parity with the Free Churches (excluding sects). However, on an ordinary Sunday, the Free Churches (including sects) accounted for 54.1 per cent of attendances, with the Church of England share standing at 22 per cent and Roman Catholics on 23.9 per cent. All-age attendance ratios in Scunthorpe were somewhat higher than in Rawmarsh: 10.7 per cent of the population on Passion Sunday (when there were 6,034 attendances), 10.9 per cent on Palm Sunday (6,142), 15.5 per cent on Easter Sunday (8,770) and 10.1 per cent on an average Sunday (5,708). As in Rawmarsh, Anglican congregations were most elevated on Easter Day, when they were 111.9 per cent greater than average. The average attendance data revealed the Church of England and the Free Churches (excluding sects) to be almost exactly equal, with Roman Catholics in third and sects in fourth position; with the sects, the Free Churches accounted for 44.6 per cent of worshippers on average.³¹

Pickering asked his enumerators to estimate the ages of attenders, assigning them to three categories: sixteen years and under, seventeen to forty-nine years, and fifty years and over. The second and third of these are here combined to create figures for the adult population aged seventeen and above (see annex for the raw data). Attendance ratios for adults were slightly lower than for the all-age population. In Rawmarsh, they were 7.4 per cent of the adult population on Passion Sunday, 9.5 per cent on Palm Sunday, 10.9 per cent on Easter Sunday and 7.7 per cent on an average Sunday. Church of England attendances at Easter were 124.6 per cent higher than average, compared with only 13.2 per cent for all other denominations combined. The Free Churches and sects together accounted for 49.3 per cent of congregants on an average Sunday, with the Church of England and Roman Catholics having one-quarter each. In Scunthorpe, adult attendances were a little better relative to the adult population: 10.6 per cent on Passion Sunday, 10.4 per cent on Palm Sunday, 16.4 per cent on Easter Sunday, and 9.9 per cent on an average Sunday. The Anglicans registered 131.2 per cent bigger congregations on Easter Day than average, while other denominations recorded an uplift of 34.4 per cent. On an average Sunday, the Church of England was the largest of the four denominational groupings, but its market share was still just 31.3 per cent, and it was surpassed by Free Churches and sects (42.9 per cent), if their attendances are added together.³²

Comparison of the number of worshippers with the available sittings in churches revealed a massive over-provision among the Free Churches; in Rawmarsh they had 3.7 times as many seats as attendances on an average Sunday, and in Scunthorpe 2.5 times as many. The Church of England also had plenty of spare capacity in Rawmarsh (with 3.5 seats per worshipper), although less so in Scunthorpe (1.5). The Roman Catholics were the most economical in their use of their churches, with ratios of 0.6 in Rawmarsh and 0.3 in Scunthorpe; this was because they held several morning Masses in quick succession, each of which attracted a different and full congregation. In aggregate, there were 2.8 sittings per attender in Rawmarsh and 1.5 in Scunthorpe. All the above ratios were based on all-age attendance data but were also calculated for adults alone, the overall number of sittings per attender then rising to 4.2 in Rawmarsh and 2.1 in Scunthorpe.³³

The demographic profile of worshippers was most clear-cut by gender, there being a disproportionate number of women in most congregations, with the notable exception of Roman Catholics in Scunthorpe. At Rawmarsh, 63.8 per cent on an average Sunday were females, with a peak of 66.8 per cent in the sects, followed by 64.6 per cent in the Church of England, 64.2 per cent in the Free Churches, and 60.2 per cent for Catholics. In Scunthorpe, 60.7 per cent of attendances on an average Sunday comprised women, with 69.2 per cent among Anglicans (and over 70 per cent on Passion Sunday and Easter Sunday), more than five points greater than in the Free Churches and sects.³⁴

In terms of age, attendance rates relative to the respective section of the general population did not vary substantially between the two demographic cohorts studied (seventeen to forty-nine and fifty and above) in Rawmarsh. However, at Scunthorpe, the ratio for an average Sunday was 10.6 per cent for the older of the groups against 9.7 per cent for the younger. Since there were twice as many seventeen to forty-nines as fifty and overs in Scunthorpe, the practical effect of this age differential may not have been substantial.³⁵

The most problematic break was by perceived occupational status. Despite collapsing Registrar-General’s classes III and IV (respectively, skilled and semi-skilled manual workers), the occupational data were acknowledged by Pickering to be somewhat imperfect, especially in distinguishing between classes III–IV and V (unskilled workers). Notwithstanding, although the number of attenders drawn from classes I and II (upper and middle classes) was disproportionately large, relative to the adult male population, in both Rawmarsh and Scunthorpe on Palm Sunday, the overwhelming majority of worshippers (85.3 per cent in the former town and 78.8 per cent in the latter) were from classes III–V, that is, they were working class.³⁶

In parallel with the two church censuses, Pickering developed a large corpus of religious life histories, as a means of gaining a deeper understanding of the beliefs, behaviour and opinions of ‘active church members’.³⁷ These were obtained from interviews, conducted ‘without any warning’, in 1954–6, with 379 people (156 in Rawmarsh and 223 in Scunthorpe) from the 443 names drawn at random from church membership rolls or ministerial address books. Pickering conceded that the sample probably did not reflect the denominational distribution of active church members in the two towns. For one thing, 10.8 per cent of interviewees were categorized as ‘lapsed’, in that they attended church only once or twice a year or less, with a further 7.4 per cent worshipping less than monthly.³⁸

Among the many and diverse results of these life histories, Pickering was particularly struck by the importance of a religious upbringing in passing on the faith, with more than two-thirds of respondents reporting that one or both their parents had been practising Christians, and nine-tenths noting they had been (sent) to Sunday school or church fairly regularly as children. At the same time, their faith journey had not been continuous, with almost two-thirds admitting their churchgoing had become less regular or even stopped entirely at one or more points. Leaving school and starting work was found to be the single most significant trigger for turning away from regular attendance, while the influence of the marriage partner or a friend was the most potent agency in bringing people back to church. There was also a considerable switching of denomination after the age of sixteen; in Rawmarsh, one-third of this sample of church members had been raised in a different denomination to their present one, and in Scunthorpe it was two-fifths.³⁹

The remaining questions in this survey of church members mostly concerned religious practices, religious beliefs and opinions on topical issues. As well as participation in weekday religious and socio-religious activities, two facets of private devotion were investigated, with as many as 75.1 per cent of respondents professing to pray once or more each day (albeit 13.7 per cent never did so); on the other hand, only 21 per cent read the Bible on a daily basis, and no more than 36.6 per cent at least monthly, with a plurality (46.4 per cent) never reading it and the majority (69.4 per cent) disbelieving or doubting that the Bible was literally true.⁴⁰ The short module on religious belief did not include a straightforward question about God, but two questions were posed about Jesus Christ: asked about His divinity, 56.4 per cent of church members described Him as the Son of God and a further 23.5 per cent as God and man, while 90.4 per cent were convinced of His resurrection. Similarly, 80.2 per cent claimed to believe in life after death, 61.1 per cent of whom also believed that divine judgment preceded entry to heaven.⁴¹ Among the topical issues covered by Pickering were: the drinking habits of church members (52.3 per cent professing to be abstainers, 41.4 per cent occasional drinkers and a mere 6.3 per cent regular drinkers); their attitudes to the remarriage of divorcees in church (60.2 per cent approving under certain circumstances but 31.3 per cent under none); and voting in the previous (1955) general election (54.2 per cent Labour and 45.8 per cent Conservative).⁴²

Beyond this survey of church members, Pickering strove to build up a picture of the persistence of the traditional rites of passage, historically a key component of working-class religion,⁴³ and with a far wider reach than either churchgoing or church membership. This was a topic to which he was to return at a later date.⁴⁴ Although the Registrar-General had recorded the mode of solemnization of marriages, including by religious rites, since 1838, albeit on a rather irregular basis after the First World War,⁴⁵ evidence about the take-up of baptism and religious funerals was much patchier. In the case of baptisms, Pickering was able to use church registers for the two study towns to trace (with some gaps) the proportion of children baptized at decennial intervals back to 1871, the figure tending to rise over time. By 1951 96 per cent of newborn children in Rawmarsh and 90.4 per cent in Scunthorpe were being baptized, filling Pickering with confidence that ‘Baptism is as popular a rite as ever it was’, notwithstanding the apparent decreases in 1954, notably at Rawmarsh.⁴⁶ He was even more emphatic about religious officiation at funerals: ‘An “atheistic” burial is virtually unknown at the present time. Everyone who is buried is committed to the earth in the presence of some priest, minister, or religious leader, and this happens even if the deceased lacked religious faith or devotion’. In Scunthorpe in 1954 almost three-quarters of these funerals were conducted by Anglican clergy, but in Rawmarsh it was just over half.⁴⁷ Pickering attributed the persistence of both rites to social and family loyalties, not to be baptized nor to have a religious burial being looked upon as ‘acts of social disaffection’.⁴⁸ However, it was a different story with marriages, where religious solemnization was already falling, nationally and locally, and weddings in registry offices rising (to 23.5 per cent in Rawmarsh in 1953 and 29 per cent in Scunthorpe). Pickering linked the growth in civil ceremonies to an increase in divorce and the existing barriers against the remarriage of divorcees in church, especially in the Church of England.⁴⁹

As both priest and sociologist, Pickering was well aware of the significance of children and young people to the prospects for organized Christianity in the nation and the two towns. Infant baptism was just one of several links in the chain. As we have already noted, his two censuses of church attendance had included a separate tabulation of children aged sixteen years and under in church, expressed as a proportion of the general population in the same cohort. In Rawmarsh, the figure on an average Sunday was 10.4 per cent of the relevant age group, and in Scunthorpe it was 10.5 per cent; the Free Churches were in the majority in Rawmarsh and a plurality in Scunthorpe, with a decidedly low share for the Church of England and sects in Rawmarsh.⁵⁰ The numbers of children attending church was much smaller than those counted as present in Sunday schools, which were still largely separate institutions before the 1960s. On an average Sunday, 1,174 scholars attended Sunday school in Rawmarsh, equivalent to 34 per cent of the population aged four to fourteen, while in Scunthorpe, it was 3,812 (38 per cent); calculated against an alternative baseline of children aged five to twelve years, the ratios were somewhat more favourable (47 per cent and 53.5 per cent, respectively). The number of Sunday scholars on the rolls was rather higher, 1,410 in Rawmarsh and 5,280 in Scunthorpe, representing (respectively) approximately 41 per cent and 53 per cent of the child population aged four to fourteen.⁵¹ According to a third survey of children by Pickering, a self-completion questionnaire administered to 400 junior school pupils aged ten and eleven in Rawmarsh, ‘Many of the problems of evangelism appear already among children’. In particular, the results indicated that ‘the greatest chances for a child becoming a regular church member go to a girl rather than a boy, in the upper half rather than the lower half of the intelligence scale, who at the same time comes from a “good” social area’.⁵²

Although this by no means exhausts the potential of Pickering’s thesis, the topics discussed above are those with maximum resonance to the other two urban research projects we are about to consider. Pickering’s remaining chapters, addressing the historical and contemporary situations in Rawmarsh and Scunthorpe, concerned two facets of the institutional church (clergy and finance),⁵³ and five aspects of church and society (church and industry – management; church and industry – employees; church and politics; church and sex; and religion and leisure).⁵⁴

In summary, Pickering’s research in Rawmarsh and Scunthorpe was unquestionably the single most extensive and most important local study of religion in England during the 1950s. Sadly, until very recently, its riches have largely gathered dust in the form of a paper thesis. It is remarkable for the breadth of its topical coverage; its combination of quantitative and qualitative methods; and the equal weight given to historical and contemporary evidence. Among its more significant aspects are: the conduct of church attendance censuses on three consecutive Sundays, Pickering narrowly beating John Highet, the Scottish sociologist of religion, to this record;⁵⁵ quantification for the first time of the extent of churchgoing on Easter Day across all denominations and, particularly, the Easter uplift in the Church of England;⁵⁶ disaggregation of worshippers by gender, age and (somewhat problematically) occupation; collection of local statistics about the aggregate take-up of church baptisms and burials, for which no national data existed; interviews with a large sample of ‘active church members’ about their faith journeys, religious practices, religious beliefs and opinions on current issues; and sundry investigations into the religion of children. Overall, outward religious life in the two towns seemed to be at rather a low ebb, especially among Protestants as a whole, even more so in the Church of England, which, on an average Sunday, attracted no more than 2 per cent of the adult population of Rawmarsh to its services and 3.1 per cent in Scunthorpe; the Church of England’s ties to the people were more likely to be found in attracting them to the occasional offices of baptism and burial. The total index of adult church attendance on an average Sunday was below 10 per cent in both places, slightly less than the levels recorded by Seebohm Rowntree and George Russell Lavers in High Wycombe and York in 1947–8,⁵⁷ and there was massive over-provision of church sittings. The Roman Catholic presence in Rawmarsh and Scunthorpe was insufficient to compensate for Protestant decline. Even among ‘active church members’, two-thirds admitted their churchgoing had been discontinued at stages in their lives.

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The religious survey in 1957–9 of the Billingham Urban District, an industrial area situated in the south-east corner of County Durham, on the northern side of the tidal estuary of the River Tees, with shipbuilding and chemicals the major employers, was overseen by Peter Robert Kaim-Caudle (1916–2010). Born to a German Jewish family, in 1933 he had been sent to England by his parents to escape Nazi persecution. He read for an economics degree at the London School of Economics, graduating in 1939. After the Second World War, when he was interned as an enemy alien for fifteen months, he lectured first at the University of Dundee and then (from 1950) at Durham University, where he became the university’s first professor of social administration, renowned for his expertise in comparative social policy. It was during his time as staff tutor in social studies of the Board for Extra-Mural Studies of the Durham Colleges that he carried out this pioneering project in the sociology of religion, as leader of one of a number of groups undertaking a broader social survey of the Billingham Urban District (whose population was estimated at 28,000 in 1958). The principal research output on religion was just a modest sixteen-page pamphlet, written in the summer of 1959 but not published, by the Billingham Community Association, until June 1962.⁵⁸ So far as can be ascertained, no administrative records for this particular project nor any personal papers of Kaim-Caudle are lodged in a recognized archival repository.

The group responsible for the Billingham religion survey quickly rejected the use of questionnaires or interviews as a mode of data collection, on the grounds that ‘information obtained by such means would often be unreliable and that people would reasonably object to being interviewed about their religious practices and attitudes’. Accordingly, ‘The approach adopted was to consider in the first instance those aspects of religion which are capable of measurement by either observation or consultation of existing records. This method was made possible by the willing co-operation of the ministers of all denominations’.⁵⁹ The first implementation of this research strategy was an enumeration of the take-up of the three principal rites of passage in 1957.

Billingham clergy reported that they had baptized 659 children in 1957, two-thirds of them in Anglican churches. The total was equivalent to 93.9 per cent of births in Billingham in 1957, but this would have omitted children baptized outside the town. Weddings in Billingham places of worship in 1957 and 1959 numbered 431, one-half solemnized in Anglican churches. As a proportion of all marriages in those years, this represented 74.9 per cent, the remaining 25.1 per cent being conducted in the registry office (located in Stockton). There were 243 deaths registered in Billingham in 1957, with the local ministers officiating at 85.2 per cent of funerals for the deceased. However, the four undertakers who were responsible for practically all funerals in Billingham claimed they did not know of any burial or cremation that had taken place without religious rites. The discrepancy between this perception and the church data was explained by funerals outside the area and other circumstances.⁶⁰

The next task to which the members of Kaim-Caudle’s group applied themselves was an enumeration of church attendance. This occurred on two Sundays in spring 1959, on Easter Sunday (29 March, when congregations were expected to be at their annual peak) and on an ‘ordinary Sunday’ a fortnight later (12 April). These censuses covered morning and evening services of all Anglican (four), Roman Catholic (four) and Free Church (six) places of worship but excluded smaller groups such as the Salvation Army, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Spiritualists. Counting was not done by independent observers but by two enumerators per service appointed from within each church’s membership; besides recording total numbers, they had to distinguish attenders by gender within five age groups. In practice, the youngest age group was discounted and published attendances related to the adult population above fifteen years (estimated to be approximately 20,000, of whom 3,500 were baptized Catholics).⁶¹ See annex for the raw data.

On Easter Sunday, 4,070 persons above the age of fifteen attended worship, which, assuming there was minimal twicing by Protestants and none by Catholics,⁶² represented 20.4 per cent of Billingham’s adult population. However, this proportion varied considerably between professing Catholics (52.8 per cent of whom worshipped at Easter) and non-Catholics (13.5 per cent). For the ordinary Sunday on 12 April, total attendances were 3,122, or 15.6 per cent of the adult population (53.4 per cent among Catholics, who accounted for three-fifths of all attendances on the day, and 7.6 per cent of non-Catholics). In the Church of England Easter congregations were 122.8 per cent higher than on an ordinary Sunday, which was five times the differential in the Free Churches (24.5 per cent), while Catholics appeared to be equally dutiful every Sunday.

Female outnumbered male worshippers at all services, accounting for 59.9 per cent of Easter congregations and 58.9 per cent on the ordinary Sunday, denominational figures (averaged across the two censuses) being: Church of England, 65.4 per cent women; Free Churches, 67.5 per cent; and Roman Catholic Church, 53.2 per cent. Age breakdowns were cited only for 12 April, congregations subdividing in the aggregate between 58.8 per cent aged fifteen to forty-four years and 41.2 per cent forty-five years and above. A majority (55.2 per cent) of Free Church worshippers were forty-five years and above, whereas for the Roman Catholics the figure was only 40.2 per cent and for Anglicans even lower (33.2 per cent).⁶³

A certain amount of supplementary information about religion in Billingham was gathered through desk research and conversations with local clergy. This related to the same fourteen places of worship enumerated in the church censuses, with particular reference to ministers, other staff and voluntary workers; financial arrangements; and organizations and activities.⁶⁴ Kaim-Caudle was especially struck that ‘in some respects the Free Churches as a group affect more people than the Church of England’,⁶⁵ instancing numbers of Sunday scholars and members or attenders at women’s groups and youth clubs or uniformed organizations. For Sunday scholars, the comparison was 900 Anglican and 1,200 Free Church, implying that nearly half of all children between four and thirteen years went to Sunday school. There were no Sunday schools in the Roman Catholic churches; arguably, there was no need for them, since virtually all Catholic children attended Catholic schools (only forty attended county schools) as well as Catholic church services. Taking a broad definition of religious socialization, therefore, seven out of ten children in Billingham in the late 1950s will have been in receipt of some church-based form of it. Such evidence helped shape Kaim-Caudle’s summative assessment that, ‘in a prosperous, working class town where social roots are not very deep, the impact of religion and churches is still one of the strongest in the life of the community’.⁶⁶

Four years after the 1957–9 study had been formally written up, Kaim-Caudle decided to replicate it in Billingham in 1966, by which time the town’s population had grown by one-quarter, to reach nearly 35,000. The results of this second enquiry were published in a Christian newspaper in 1967.⁶⁷ With regard to rites of passage, there had been decreases in the proportion of children being baptized, from 94 per cent in 1957 to 93 per cent in 1964 and 88 per cent in 1965, and of couples marrying in church, from 74.9 per cent in 1957 and 1959 to 70.2 per cent in 1964–5, with corresponding growth in registry office weddings. However, according to the local undertakers, religious rites at funerals were no less universal than they had been during the first study.⁶⁸

As in 1959, two censuses of churchgoing were conducted in 1966, on Easter Sunday (10 April) and an ordinary Sunday a fortnight later (24 April). See annex for the raw data. Aggregate attendances by persons above the age of fifteen had fallen over the intervening seven years, by 9.6 per cent on Easter Sunday and 3.3 per cent on the ordinary Sunday. This decline was confined to the Church of England (especially) and the Free Churches; Roman Catholic congregations, by contrast, rose absolutely by 4.1 per cent at Easter and 3.5 per cent a fortnight later. Relative to the estimated adult population of Billingham (24,400, including 3,900 Catholics), attendances at Easter 1966 represented 15.1 per cent of residents (49.3 per cent among Catholics and 8.6 per cent of non-Catholics) and 12.4 per cent on an ordinary Sunday (49.6 per cent of Catholics and 5.3 per cent of non-Catholics). All these proportions had declined since 1959, only modestly for Catholics (who now constituted almost two-thirds of all attendances on an ordinary Sunday) but markedly for non-Catholics (particularly at Easter). Allowing for occasional worshippers, the evidently dismayed Kaim-Caudle reckoned the number of non-Catholics attending church at least once or twice a year might have dropped from one in seven to one in ten between 1959 and 1966. Invoking the spread of the ‘weekend habit’, he even anticipated that ‘the time may well come in the not too distant future when more people will go to church on a week-day evening than on a Sunday’. He also questioned the expediency of Billingham’s churches in continuing to invest so significantly in new buildings when the existing ones were not full.⁶⁹

In summary, Kaim-Caudle’s study of religion in Billingham was much shorter in duration and narrower in scope than Pickering’s investigation in Rawmarsh and Scunthorpe, and it also left behind much more limited documentation. However, in one important respect, it went further than Pickering in offering, not just a snapshot of the religious landscape at a single point in time, but a sense of change over time, in this case between 1957–9 and 1966, which is a critical period for scholarly debates about the timing of English secularization. Kaim-Caudle’s two key metrics, the take-up of the three principal rites of passage and church attendance on Easter Sunday and on an ordinary Sunday a fortnight later,⁷⁰ both pointed to absolute and relative decline in the Protestant churches. In respect of occasional offices, three in ten weddings were celebrated in the registry office by 1964–5, and the proportion of church baptisms had started to slide, having fallen to 88 per cent in 1965. The number of adults worshipping on an ordinary Sunday decreased from 15.6 per cent of adult population in 1959 to 12.4 per cent in 1966 (with a much higher decline on Easter Sunday). This index of attendance was appreciably higher than in Rawmarsh and Scunthorpe, entirely due to the strength of Roman Catholicism in Billingham; by 1966 almost two-thirds of all adult worshippers there were Catholics. Notwithstanding, even Catholic numbers in the pews were beginning to fall in relative (but not absolute) terms, from 9.3 per cent of adult population in 1959 to 7.9 per cent in 1966. Among the Protestants, the Church of England was weaker than the Free Churches collectively, not simply with regard to churchgoing but membership and attendance at Sunday schools and other religious agencies, also.

*

Religious life in Bolton (a predominantly working-class town, with an industrial heritage rooted in textiles, coal and engineering) was investigated in 1960 as part of the Britain Revisited project by Mass Observation (M.O.).⁷¹ M.O. had been established in 1937, to research the anthropology of everyday life, by Thomas Harnett Harrisson (1911–76),⁷² an ornithologist turned anthropologist, together with Charles Madge, a poet who eventually became an academic sociologist, parting company with M.O. in 1940, leaving Harrisson in sole control.⁷³ Under Harrisson’s supervision, M.O. made an intensive survey of Bolton (its identity initially disguised as ‘Northtown’ and later as ‘Worktown’) in 1937–8, including from the perspective of religion,⁷⁴ as well as of Blackpool, where many Boltonians spent their summer holidays.⁷⁵ The results of this religious enquiry were never published, although the raw material and partial book drafts survive at the Mass Observation Archive (M.O.A.), which is part of the University of Sussex Special Collections, now housed at The Keep, Brighton.⁷⁶ M.O.’s Bolton unit was closed in 1940, but not before Brian Allwood had the opportunity to document the early effects of the Second World War on the town’s religious life.⁷⁷ Thereafter, funding pressures pushed M.O. in an increasingly commercial direction, and in 1949 it was transformed into a private limited company focused on market research.

Following military service during and after the Second World War, Harrisson worked as curator of the Sarawak Museum between 1947 and 1966. In summer 1960 he took leave from this posting and gathered together his old friends to retrace their steps in Bolton and Blackpool. Although great names from M.O.’s past (such as Francis Huxley, John Sommerfield, Humphrey Spender and Julian Trevelyan), as well as Harrisson’s second wife, Barbara, were involved in a voluntary capacity, two research assistants, Rayner Atkins and Nell Umney, were engaged to undertake the basic spadework. Umney was responsible for the religious side of the enterprise, and for much else besides. She lived with her son and daughter at Gillamoor Mill in Kirbymoorside, North Yorkshire, but travelled to work for M.O. on a casual basis, her next assignment after Bolton being in Bournemouth.⁷⁸

During the course of July and the first half of August 1960 Umney collected magazines and other printed ephemera from fifteen places of worship, obtained statistics from four denominations, interviewed twenty-one local religious leaders and (albeit briefly) twenty-three lay Boltonians, and assisted with observations of twelve religious services made by the team.⁷⁹ However, she did not write the chapter on religion (entitled ‘For God’s sake’) in Britain Revisited.⁸⁰ This was said by Harrisson to be principally the work of Celia Margaret Fremlin (1914–2009), one of M.O.’s leading wartime observers and later a famous novelist.⁸¹ She had been named as the intended author of the chapter from as early as 4 July, the date of the first plan of the book, even though (being resident in London) she could have played little part in the actual fieldwork. Extant drafts of the chapter also reveal significant input by Harrisson. He, Fremlin and the other contributors evidently worked at lightning speed since the typescript of the whole book was said to be in the hands of the publisher by October 1960, the volume appearing the following March.⁸²

No full list of places of worship in Bolton in 1960 survives in M.O.A., but there is a tabular numerical summary in Britain Revisited, recording 134, from forty denominations, exclusive of those in cemeteries and funeral parlours.⁸³ This summary has been compared with a list published in a 1958 directory of Bolton,⁸⁴ and with some contemporary printed denominational sources. The comparison suggests sundry inaccuracies on the part of M.O., resulting in a net underestimate of nine places of worship. The revised total of 143 may have represented some reduction on that for 1937–8 but just how much cannot be said with certainty. This is because M.O. gave inconsistent figures for the earlier date, ranging from 140 to 204, and operated within fluid geographical boundaries, not necessarily confining itself to the area covered by the county borough (the relevant local government unit in both 1937–8 and 1960, the metropolitan borough not being created until 1974). At one stage, however, M.O. reckoned there had been twelve closures and four openings of churches during the previous quarter-century.⁸⁵

More specifically, in 1960 M.O. returned thirty-four Anglican churches (divided between ‘high’ and ‘low’ wings). Although probably accurate in terms of benefices,⁸⁶ the figure apparently omitted the seven missions listed in the directory, each associated with a parish church, so the true figure should be forty-one. The twelve Roman Catholic churches noted by M.O. seem to have overlooked the two new parishes of St. James the Great and St. Thomas of Canterbury, created in 1954 and 1958 respectively, meaning there were actually fourteen. M.O. recorded twenty-six Methodist chapels in 1960 but there were in fact twenty-eight, according to the official Methodist list for that year.⁸⁷ The Methodist Church had ten fewer chapels and 5,500 fewer sittings than in 1937–8, having started to implement a programme of rationalization consequent on the reunion of the three main branches of Methodism in 1932; the most significant of the closures was of the 1,370-seater King’s Hall in Bradshawgate in 1958. The superintendent minister of the Bolton (Wesley) Circuit made it plain to M.O. that there was still much more to be done in this regard and bemoaned the stubbornness of the ‘old guard’ in resisting amalgamations.⁸⁸ These Methodist figures exclude the Independent Methodist Churches, which had six places of worship according to the directory, one more than identified by M.O.

M.O. seems to have included among its five Baptist chapels in 1960 the one in Farnworth (which was a municipal borough in its own right, not part of the county borough), so there were actually only four in Bolton itself. Its returns of Congregational, Presbyterian, Unitarian and Salvation Army places of worship appear correct. There were two rather than three meetings of the Plymouth Brethren, M.O. having duplicated entries for the Open Brethren at Hebron Hall. For the Spiritualists, M.O. noted the two main groups, the Spiritualists’ National Union and the Spiritualists’ Alliance, but it failed to list the Greater World Christian Spiritualist Church. The New Jerusalem Church was recorded twice. The Church of the Nazarene in Daubhill was missed. Somewhat implausibly, M.O. charted the arrival since 1937–8 of the declining Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion (which dated back to the eighteenth century) and disappearance of the Jehovah’s Witnesses (who were growing fast in Britain after the Second World War). The tiny Christian Community did not feature on M.O.’s 1960 list but was referred to in the text of Britain Revisited.⁸⁹ M.O. claimed five (unnamed) non-denominational missions but only four have been traced.

Umney’s intention had been to establish the membership of these churches and chapels, in both 1937–8 and 1960, but she was frustrated by the inconsistent criteria of membership applied by the various denominations, non-availability of data and lack of co-operation from some religious leaders. Most of the information she gleaned, relating to Anglican, Baptist and Congregational churches, was published in Britain Revisited, albeit without identifying individual places,⁹⁰ the fuller returns being available in M.O.A.

Church of England membership was measured by names on its electoral roll, data being obtained for twenty-nine of the thirty-four parish churches, whose rolls presumably incorporated their associated missions. The total, allowing for the missing five parish churches, can be estimated at 12,500 electors out of a total 1960 Bolton population of 161,000. Based on statistics for twenty churches, electoral rolls had declined in aggregate by 7.1 per cent between 1950 and 1960. It is possible the real decrease may have been greater for, as M.O. remarked, ‘There are all sorts of inconsistencies and variations in the degree of registration, and the extent to which the rolls are kept up to date – or even kept at all’.⁹¹ The incumbent of St. Luke acknowledged that, in his parish, they had not been properly revised for fifteen years; while new names had been added, those who had died or left the area had not been removed.⁹²

Roman Catholics counted as members the baptized community (including children) known to the parish priest. M.O. had suggested there were 12,000 Catholics in the town in the late 1930s,⁹³ a figure that had almost doubled, to about 23,000, by 1960, according to returns by parish priests and subsequent revisions thereof.⁹⁴ The picture is slightly complicated because, although most of the county borough lay within St. Peter’s Deanery, the latter also included two parishes beyond the county borough while one parish in St. Paul’s Deanery was within the county borough. The figure is consistent with the statement to Umney by the priest of St. Edmund that Catholics comprised more than a tenth of Bolton’s citizens.⁹⁵ The increase is in line with the general post-war expansion of the Catholic Church in England and Wales arising from mixed marriages, above-average fertility, conversions and – particularly – migration from Catholic countries in Europe, including Ireland; for instance, by 1960 St. Patrick’s parish was ministering to a flock of 300 Ukrainians.⁹⁶

The Free Churches mostly operated a concept of membership associated with the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Umney was able to obtain a total for only one of the four Bolton Methodist circuits (Bridge Street), including chapels outside town. The membership in all four was 4,333 in 1960,⁹⁷ or approximately 3,400 for Bolton alone, excluding places beyond the county borough (by means of applying a member/sitting ratio). Independent Methodists had 310 members.⁹⁸ As returned to M.O.,⁹⁹ Congregational membership was around 1,400 in 1960, including an estimate for one missing chapel, 28.9 per cent down on the 1939 level. Baptist membership, again as returned to M.O.,¹⁰⁰ was about 325, 35.7 per cent less than in 1940. The remaining thirty-nine Free Church, sectarian and non-denominational places of worship perhaps had no more than 2,000 members between them. Thus, in Bolton in 1960 ‘church membership’ stood at 23,000 Catholics, 12,500 Anglicans and approximately 7,500 others, or 43,000 in all. This represented 26.7 per cent of Bolton’s population but excluded non-member adherents in the Free Churches while including children in the Catholic Church.

Membership did not necessarily translate into regular religious practice, which was usually measured by churchgoing. Except for the Seventh Day Adventists and Jews, who numbered only 100 between them, Sunday was the conventional day for public worship. As Harrisson’s account of one Bolton Sunday (10 July 1960) made clear, a Sabbatarian climate generally still prevailed in the town, which did not begin to come to life until late afternoon, many venues being closed throughout the day and even public transport beginning only mid-morning.¹⁰¹ This Sabbatarianism partly reflected continuing legislative restrictions on Sunday activities but also convention and the social conservatism of the town, on which several religious leaders interviewed by Umney commented.¹⁰² The Boltonian ‘deference’ to Sunday, in terms of the relatively low incidence of drunkenness on that day, had previously been noted by M.O. in the late 1930s.¹⁰³

Unfortunately, neither in 1937–8 nor in 1960 did M.O. organize a census of church attendance in Bolton, so it had to rely upon impressionistic and unsystematic evidence. Back in 1937–8, M.O. had guessed there were some 30,000 churchgoers in the town, with the Anglicans seldom grossing more than 2,500 at any one time, whereas over 5,000 Catholics regularly attended the 10 a.m. Mass.¹⁰⁴ By 1960 it sensed that ‘the decline in the numbers of people attending places of worship throughout Worktown is very general; the only exceptions are the Roman Catholics, and some of the special occasions of individual small sects’. The assessment was subsequently qualified somewhat: ‘Often, the drop in actual worshippers on a Worktown Sunday has been less than the drop of those on the rolls. It seems that the “faithful few” are becoming only slowly fewer, and certainly not less faithful’.¹⁰⁵

In reality, M.O.’s surviving sources for churchgoing in 1960 are very limited, confined to some twenty places of worship where data are available from either counts made by observers at services or averages supplied by religious leaders. It is possible that these data were not fully representative. This is especially so of the observations, several of which took place on 10 July, which, as an indignant vicar of Bolton pointed out when Britain Revisited was published, was the Sunday immediately after Wakes Fortnight (Bolton’s annual holiday shutdown), a day on which ‘practically nobody goes to church’.¹⁰⁶ His own church (St. Peter), which could seat 1,000, recorded a congregation, excluding the choir, of just thirty-two at Matins.¹⁰⁷ The morning of 10 July was also very wet, which may have been an additional deterrent.

The following estimates derived from the Britain Revisited material must therefore be regarded as very tentative. In summer 1960 the thirty-four Anglican parish churches probably averaged no more than 150 worshippers at morning and evening services combined, with only a modest overlap in the two congregations (twicing). Factoring in a lesser mean for the mission churches, this would suggest about 5,500 attendances each Sunday, less than half the electoral roll membership. In downtown districts, Anglicans found themselves rattling around empty churches, with, for instance, St. Paul, Deansgate having a mean turnout of seventy in the morning and 110 at night compared with seating for 1,000. Its incumbent served a parish of 3,000, but all those coming to the church lived outside the parish.¹⁰⁸ More ‘suburban’ parishes drew more local congregations.

Of course, the Church of England’s greatest reach over the population came, not through regular Sunday worship, but the occasional offices or rites of passage (baptisms, marriages, funerals), where it traditionally had a majority (and formerly close to monopoly) share. This was coming under threat, not least from the opening of Bolton crematorium in 1954. For, as the incumbent of Deane mused, ‘The biggest change is the preference for cremation. If we don’t get the ashes or the funeral, not only is the link with the church broken, but we are losing a lot of revenue. This also affects the minister’s stipend. We cannot turn ourselves into a business company to compete. Since Bolton crematorium opened, we have lost much’.¹⁰⁹

Roman Catholics, virtually none of whom were twicers, must have had many more attenders each Sunday than the Anglicans. For example, there were 1,800 present at the Masses at St. Patrick,¹¹⁰ and 750 at St. Edmund,¹¹¹ the total in each case being double the seating. No wonder M.O. described their churches as ‘bulging, with “standing room only” near the door’.¹¹² There were also 500 worshippers just at the 10 a.m. Mass at St. Peter and St. Paul. Grossing up for all fourteen Catholic places of worship, some of which were smaller, there could easily have been 12,000 Mass-goers each week, about half the baptized Catholic population. This would be consistent with actual figures for Mass attendance in Bolton of 13,028 in 1965 and 12,457 in 1966.¹¹³ However, priests continued to report room for improvement to M.O. At St. Edmund, where the priest was ‘very concerned about “the leak”’, ‘evening devotions have fallen down’ – ‘it used to be the meeting place for girls and boys’, but evening cinema and television had diverted their attention. On the other hand, evening Mass was increasingly popular with older groups who ‘like to lie in bed on Sundays and read the News of the World’.¹¹⁴

Bolton had once been known as the ‘Geneva of the North’,¹¹⁵ but there was little sign of this legacy in terms of attendance at services for the Free Churches and sects. The largest gathering recorded for the Britain Revisited study was 150 at an afternoon meeting at the Salvation Army citadel.¹¹⁶ For the rest, congregations (as enumerated by M.O. observers or returned by their ministers) rarely exceeded 100 at either morning or evening service and were usually considerably less. What was arguably the ‘cathedral’ of Bolton Nonconformity, the Methodist Victoria Hall in Knowsley Street, drew only sixty-seven worshippers for a morning service taken by a deaconess.¹¹⁷ Of the other downtown chapels, the Congregational Mawdsley Street seemed to be in the worst numerical state, with, in the morning, merely ten adults and seven children occupying pews that accommodated 700.¹¹⁸ According to its minister, the young people and children had left for churches nearer to their homes; ‘The time is coming very quickly when it should close down’.¹¹⁹ His denominational colleague at St. George’s Road had been able to maintain his position as a town centre church only by virtue of a wealthy congregation with a high degree of car ownership; the majority of his worshippers travelled in from Heaton, three-quarters of them by car, taking advantage of good car parking on site.¹²⁰

There was a considerable size variation among non-Anglican and non-Catholic places of worship, the sum of morning and evening attendances at each mostly ranging from fifty to 250. Taking 100 as a fair average would suggest about 9,000 attendances in the aggregate, with no deduction for twicing (which was most prevalent in the Free Churches). This total was still somewhat above church membership, indicating that non-member adherents had not completely disappeared. Conjectural churchgoing on a typical Sunday in Bolton in 1960, uncorrected for twicing, could thus have been 26,500 (5,500 Anglicans, 12,000 Catholics, 9,000 others) or 16.5 per cent of the population, higher than in 1937–8 (entirely thanks to Catholic growth). An interesting aside on the motivation for public worship, acknowledging an English-style ‘McCarthyism’, was made by the minister of Fletcher Street Methodist Church: ‘Amongst certain classes churchgoing is proof of non-communistic tendencies’.¹²¹

Protestant worshippers were disproportionately female and elderly, television having depleted churchgoing by the middle-aged, according to the Fletcher Street minister.¹²² The demographics of Catholic congregations are harder to read because there was a different profile for each of the Sunday morning Masses. Although four-fifths of those at the 10 a.m. Mass at St. Patrick’s were females, this was partly because it was a convenient hour for women to worship, still leaving them time to go home and cook the Sunday lunch.¹²³ Relatively few comments were made about the social status of congregants, the exception being in relation to St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church of England, for which contrasting reports were made, M.O.’s observer describing them as ‘upper working class or lower middle class, probably’,¹²⁴ while the minister claimed it to be ‘a very wealthy church. A large percentage of the members are doctors and specialists’.¹²⁵

All denominations (including the Catholics) complained of difficulties in reaching children and young people. The problem was compounded by demographic factors. As the minister of Fletcher Street Methodist Church remarked, ‘The small family of today does not provide fodder for Sunday school. The hard core of the congregation are past child bearing age’.¹²⁶ Sunday schools had traditionally been the bedrock of Protestant churches, but they were mostly in freefall by 1960 (Somerset Road Presbyterian Church of England being one of the few places to buck the trend – its school was said to be ‘flourishing’ on the back of younger family groups returning to church).¹²⁷ Enrolment in the Congregational Sunday schools of Bolton declined by 46.3 per cent between 1939 and 1960, and by 31.2 per cent from 1940 to 1960 in Baptist schools, with a similar collapse in the number of Sunday school teachers.¹²⁸ The afternoon session was increasingly abandoned, and the morning one partly merged into a new family service, the first element of which was attended by the scholars, who received a special children’s address from the minister before they left. The advent of the motor car, enabling Sunday family outings, was widely blamed for the demise of Sunday schools, but at Seymour Road Methodist Church the enterprising minister was utilizing a fleet of cars to ferry in children from non-churchgoing families.¹²⁹ Also disappearing was the adult Sunday school class that had existed in some of the Free Churches and had functioned, in the words of two Methodist ministers, as ‘a social centre’ and ‘a political debating society’.¹³⁰

As M.O. noted,¹³¹ mixed reports were received about the state of youth work. A few ministers were upbeat, the incumbent of St. Paul, Deansgate stating that the young ‘are taking an interest in religion – as long as they are not pushed, and are treated as mature people’,¹³² while the superintendent minister of the Bolton (Wesley) Methodist Circuit celebrated ‘the awakening among youth’.¹³³ However, most comments concentrated on the challenges of reaching young persons. Uniformed organizations and/or youth clubs were the universal panacea, but the latter raised issues about activities that should be permitted on church premises. As the minister of St. Paul, Halliwell, said, ‘We make a distinction between the religious and social side. We feel dances and jive would be popular but only a form of blackmail. We offer them sports activities instead. The world is going at such a speed towards pleasure, we want an increase in spiritual life’.¹³⁴ Likewise, at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church of England: ‘They are not interested in open youth work. I tried it, but it doesn’t fit in. They are conservative in their outlook. They prefer dramatics to rock ‘n roll’.¹³⁵ St. George’s Road Congregational Church was planning a coffee bar in the basement to entice young outsiders.¹³⁶

There was somewhat better news for M.O. to relay when it came to finance. ‘The great majority [of churches], including some of those with the sharpest numerical drops in congregation, not only receive more gross cash, but feel more comfortable financially than they did in 1937’.¹³⁷ This was less the consequence of new endowments (although St. George’s Road Congregational Church had recently been endowed with £8,000 by Lord Leverhulme),¹³⁸ than of the introduction of planned giving schemes, which greatly increased the regular income from church members and worshippers, as well as improving its predictability. At Seymour Road Methodist Church, for example, ‘we are wealthier now than we have ever been’,¹³⁹ while at the Queen Street mission, ‘people are more generous than they have ever been’, weekly income having risen from £4 in 1952 to £18 during the previous two years.¹⁴⁰ At Rose Hill Congregational Church annual giving had climbed from £240 in 1940 to £600 in 1960. As a result, the traditional reliance on one-off fundraising events, such as bazaars, had diminished.¹⁴¹

It will be seen from the foregoing that the religious focus of Britain Revisited was principally on the fortunes of institutional Christianity. Although it touched practically every family at some stage of their lives, M.O. recognized that ‘organised religion plays no more part in the everyday talk and thought of Worktown than does organised democratic politics’.¹⁴² In another contemporary restudy, M.O. had replicated a proper sample survey of religious beliefs in the London borough of Hammersmith, first undertaken in 1944–5,¹⁴³ but no such ambitious project was attempted in Bolton. Instead, a more limited investigation was made, through ‘soundbite’ interviews in shops and streets, into the popular understanding of ‘religion’, testing assumptions about working-class attitudes in Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy.¹⁴⁴ The fourteen male and nine female respondents were obviously not representative, and certainly contained nobody from a semi-skilled or unskilled working-class background, but they provided illustrative insights into the mindset of non-churchgoers (there were only four confirmed churchgoers among them). These Boltonians were not especially antipathetic to religion, and the majority exemplified the phenomenon that later sociologists of religion, notably Grace Davie, encapsulated as ‘believing without belonging’.¹⁴⁵ As two informants replied, ‘Without a religious background, you’re like a ship without a rudder’ and ‘Without religion inside you … I don’t think the world would survive at all’.¹⁴⁶

M.O. did not revisit Bolton again during Harrisson’s time, but we know something of the metropolitan borough’s subsequent religious evolution thanks to research by Bruce. Since 1960 there has been a marked reduction in the number of Protestant churches and attendances, even extending to the Roman Catholics. In parallel, there has been substantial growth in the Hindu and, more especially, Muslim populations, reflected in the national religious censuses of 2001, 2011 and 2021, and in their places of worship; there were no mosques in Bolton in 1960, but thirty had sprung up by 2018. Bolton was also the scene of the first ritual book-burning in modern Britain, of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses on 2 December 1988, with 7,000 Muslims present.¹⁴⁷

In summary, M.O.’s study of religion in Bolton was the shortest in duration (a matter of weeks in summer 1960) and the weakest (in terms of social scientific rigour) of the three projects, with the principal published output (in Britain Revisited) notably inadequate. Notwithstanding, it offers us two distinct advantages. It was a partial replication of a much more intensive investigation by M.O. of Bolton’s religious life in 1937–8; and it left behind a reasonable amount of raw material (now in M.O.A.) from which, with the aid of some supplementary primary sources, the religious landscape of the town can be reconstructed, at least in terms of the number of places of worship, church members and (somewhat more speculatively) churchgoers on an average Sunday. As in the other two studies, Protestantism was at an increasingly low ebb, particularly in the inner areas of Bolton, and recruitment and retention of children and young people had become problematical. The Church of England was again outperformed by the Free Churches, but both were outperformed by the Roman Catholic Church. The baptized Catholic population of Bolton had risen from 12,000 in 1937–8 to some 23,000 in 1960, and the average Sunday Mass attendance was perhaps 12,000 in 1960, almost half of all worshippers in the town. Catholic growth had ensured that Bolton’s index of church attendance increased between 1937–8 and 1960, to reach an estimated 16.5 per cent, perhaps the highest of known figures for English towns in the 1950s, although (unsurprisingly) it was less than the 20.1 per cent index attained in Glasgow (which hosted an even greater proportion of Catholics) in 1954.¹⁴⁸ The one glimmer of hope for Protestant places of worship seemed to lie in their more stable financial situation, consequent upon the adoption of covenanted giving. However, M.O. exaggerated the significance of this development, which was not peculiar to Bolton but part of a national trend; in any case, the beneficial effect was very short-lived, inflationary pressures from the late 1960s, culminating in an economic downturn following the oil crisis in 1973, precipitating a crisis in ecclesiastical finance.¹⁴⁹

*

All three studies reported in this article were low-budget affairs, largely dependent on voluntary efforts. The single most obvious consequence of these resource constraints was the absence of any representative sample survey of the general population of the study areas, such as had taken place in Greater Derby in 1953,¹⁵⁰ and Greater London in 1960.¹⁵¹ Of the three projects, Pickering’s was the most ambitious in scope, in the sense that it covered the widest range of topics, which were examined from both historical and contemporary perspectives, and in that it was conducted in two communities some distance apart; it was probably manageable only because they were relatively small and the timescale for fieldwork was fairly lengthy and (seemingly) continuous. Kaim-Caudle’s initial (1957–9) project in Billingham was the next longest, but intermittent, and its impact was limited by the brevity of its principal published output. Harrisson’s investigation of Bolton was by far the shortest, the least rooted in the relevant academic literature, and the most unsystematic. Like much of M.O.’s work, it was somewhat chaotic in the field and in the writing-up, albeit the availability (at the M.O.A.) of much of the raw data gathered on the ground has enabled gaps to be filled and correctives to be introduced by the present writer.

Turning to specifics, estimates of ‘church membership’ can be computed for only two of the three study areas. Even then, the results are not directly comparable because of significant differences in methodology affecting Anglicans and Catholics. In Rawmarsh, 7.1 per cent of the population were members and in Scunthorpe 8.4 per cent (raised to 9.7 per cent and 11.7 per cent, respectively, when calculated on the basis of adults alone), using Easter communicant data (for the Church of England) and Easter duties (for the Roman Catholic Church). In Bolton, by contrast, as many as 26.7 per cent of the population were church members, derived from electoral roll figures for the Church of England (which were greater than Easter communicants) and baptized persons (including children) known to parish priests, in the case of the Catholic Church. Since there were 23,000 of the latter alone, it is unsurprising that overall membership in the town should have been so high; if average Mass attendance had been substituted for baptized Catholic population, the proportion would have been reduced to 19.9 per cent. Time series data indicated a steady decline in Protestant (Anglican and Free Church) membership, only the Catholics (although not everywhere) and some sects bucking the trend, at least absolutely.

Regular churchgoing had long ceased to be a majority activity, particularly among Protestants, and its extent in individual places depended upon the number of Catholics among the residents. Average attendances in Rawmarsh (equivalent to 8.4 per cent of the entire population or 7.7 per cent of adults) and Scunthorpe (10.1 per cent and 9.9 per cent, respectively) were towards the bottom end of the spectrum largely for this reason. In Billingham, by contrast, where there was a strong presence of Catholics, worshippers on an ordinary Sunday equated to 15.6 per cent of adults in 1959, falling to 12.4 per cent in 1966, the Catholic share growing from three-fifths to two-thirds between these dates. The proportion of Catholics in the population was even greater at Bolton, which explains why church attendance there on a typical Sunday may have reached 16.5 per cent of inhabitants, with Catholics making up almost half of congregants. The top end of the spectrum was perhaps reached in Glasgow, a very Catholic city, where (as previously noted) 20.1 per cent of adults were in the pews in 1954. The momentary uplift in churchgoers on Easter Day, especially in the Church of England, was demonstrated by Pickering and Kaim-Caudle. Worshippers were disproportionately female, mainly among Protestants, and there were emerging signs that they were becoming disproportionately elderly. At Rawmarsh and Scunthorpe, they were also drawn disproportionately from Registrar-General’s occupational classes I and II, even though congregations as a whole there remained overwhelmingly working-class.

Occasional churchgoing was often associated with the rites of passage, which, for participants, were as much communal and social events as they were religious. The Registrar-General’s data had long revealed that solemnization of marriages according to religious rites was on the slide, if still the majority, and the number of registry office weddings was on the rise, and this was reflected in the local statistics gathered by Pickering and Kaim-Caudle; in Billingham, for instance, religious marriages declined from 74.9 per cent in 1957 and 1959 to 70.2 per cent in 1964–5. Pickering was inclined to blame the wider availability of divorce and the Church of England’s unwillingness to remarry divorcees. According to Pickering and Kaim-Caudle, the take-up of infant baptism was much higher, nine-tenths or more of newborns receiving the sacrament, but the Billingham data suggested the start of a downward trend (from 94 per cent in 1957 to 88 per cent in 1965). Religious officiation at funerals was universal and remained so for several decades to come.

The emerging challenge to infant baptism was part of a wider threat to religious socialization, the induction and retention of children and young people in the faith, with responsibilities shared between parents, the churches and day schools. The qualitative evidence gathered by M.O. in Bolton and the quantitative data from the other towns surfaced a range of issues among Protestants (Catholics, as was shown at Billingham, mostly still receiving strong religious instruction through attendance at Mass and Catholic day schools). Although Sunday schools remained important, they were nowhere near as important as they had been before the First World War, enrolment in Rawmarsh, Scunthorpe and Billingham being about half the eligible age group. In the two former towns, just over one-third of children attended Sunday schools, but only a tenth of children attended church services. Pickering’s life histories offered fascinating insights into the operationalization of religious socialization and the causes of discontinuities in the faith journey over the life cycle. If this was the reality with ‘active church members’, how much more difficult must it have been for the churches to reach out to the generality of the population?

Although we get few direct glimpses in these three studies of the religious beliefs, opinions and world views of this generality, except as mediated and interpreted through the mouths of local clergy, the research of Pickering, Kaim-Caudle and Harrisson provides no real support for the proposition that the 1950s were a decade of ‘religious revival’. Specifically, they reveal no signs of engagement with large-scale evangelistic missions of the time; after all, these locations were far removed from London, where Billy Graham’s crusades took place in March–May 1954 and May 1955. Whatever performance indicator is picked, the three projects leave the reader with an impression of English urban Protestantism (whether Anglican or Free Church) at an increasingly low ebb. Whether or not they can be considered as substantiating Green’s thesis of ‘the passing of Protestant England’ by c.1960,¹⁵² this trio of studies certainly exemplifies a society in retreat from religious participation. While, almost exceptionally, Roman Catholicism was continuing to advance, at least in aggregate absolute terms, with the benefit of hindsight, we know that it would not be that long before the winds of change reached its shores, too, as the traditional engines of its growth (such as high fertility and infant baptism, and immigration from Ireland) stuttered to a halt, and ‘leakage’ emerged on a large scale.¹⁵³

The reasons for this religious decline are not entirely clear, since the studies are largely silent about causation, but changing leisure patterns (facilitated by relatively greater prosperity) were certainly mentioned as a factor by informants, not least dramatic increases in car and television ownership during the 1950s, which provided alternative attractions to places of worship outside and inside the home.¹⁵⁴ In turn, greater leisure opportunities linked to weakening Sabbatarianism, epitomized in the ‘weekend habit’ bemoaned by Kaim-Caudle, which, according to Pickering, very soon led to the general transformation of Sunday into ‘the weekend’.¹⁵⁵ There are also hints in Pickering’s work in Scunthorpe and Rawmarsh, both in the life histories and children’s questionnaires, of an emerging deficit in the religious socialization of children and adolescents, a theme that is attracting increasing scholarly attention as an agent of post-war religious change.¹⁵⁶

Of course, it is legitimate to ask whether these three studies mirrored the religious experience of other English communities at this time. Unfortunately, there are no alternative sources of equivalent richness with which to compare them, but there is some extant evidence, including for three other industrial towns (Sheffield, Glossop and Slough). In his historical account of the religious life of Sheffield, Wickham characterized the first half of the twentieth century as years of decline and fall, ‘the deflation of the religious habits of the people’, exemplified by the 63.1 per cent reduction in Anglican attendances between 1881 and 1956, and by the decline in Baptist and Congregational membership of almost two-fifths between the 1930s and 1954–5.¹⁵⁷ At Glossop, in 1953–4, a survey revealed 11 per cent of adults as having no religion, with the majority of the 89 per cent professing religious attachment conceding they were non-practising; although 35 per cent of respondents claimed to attend church at least once a month, a census of churchgoing one Sunday and figures supplied by local clergy confirmed that average congregations equated to 11.9 per cent of the 18,000 residents.¹⁵⁸ In Slough the churches were evidently struggling to keep pace with the fast-growing population, and there were few signs of any general recovery during the 1950s; although a few of the Free Churches were making headway, combined Protestant membership was only around 5 per cent c.1960, with a marked fall in Anglican Easter communicants from 3.8 per cent of the population in 1958 to 2.7 per cent in 1964.¹⁵⁹

Banbury, sixty-three miles distant from Slough, was a traditional market town being transformed by new industries when first visited by a team of sociologists in 1949–52. Self-identification with a religion there was high, at 97.1 per cent in 1950 (and still 98.1 per cent in 1967, when the study was replicated), but church membership (mostly supplied from church records) was much lower and falling, from 24.4 per cent of the adult population in 1950 to 15.1 per cent in 1967, the Anglican share dropping from 11.4 per cent to 5 per cent over these seventeen years, and even Roman Catholics losing some relative ground. Both members and churchgoers in the town were disproportionately elderly and female.¹⁶⁰ Nor was the religious landscape significantly more idyllic in archetypal English villages. In Little Munden, Hertfordshire (population 429), for example, the Church of England was the only place of worship in the village. Of the 269 adults who professed to be Anglicans in 1950, only 82 had their names on the church electoral roll, and, across six ordinary Sundays, there was an average of just 53.5 persons in the pews (inclusive of children); it was estimated that 10 per cent of inhabitants were regular churchgoers (every Sunday), 30 per cent irregular and 60 per cent non-attenders.¹⁶¹ Gosforth, in Cumberland, was an isolated farming community (population 723) when investigated by Bill Williams in 1950–3, its overwhelmingly Anglican residents were remarkably compliant with Church of England occasional offices for baptism, marriage, burial and confirmation; yet, otherwise, participation rates were (and had been for a long time) fairly low, Anglican Easter communicants and Methodist members comprising no more than one-fifth of the population in 1951, and churchgoing at an even smaller level, with a widespread disregard for Sunday observance.¹⁶² In the other isolated farming community examined by Williams, Northlew in Devon (population 519) in the late 1950s, the strong (albeit diminishing) Methodist presence (almost rivalling the Church of England’s) made for a more Sabbatarian culture; however, Anglican Easter communicants and Methodist members together represented less than one-third of adults, not all of whom attended church or chapel regularly.¹⁶³

In short, neither the three case studies explored in detail, nor the supplementary communities whose religious lives were more cursorily described by contemporary researchers, furnish any substantive evidence that England (at least) was in the grips of a post-war religious revival during the 1950s. No traces have been found of any lasting legacies from Billy Graham-style evangelistic crusades, local performance indicators for Protestant churches almost universally moved in a negative direction, and even the Roman Catholic Church was peaking (in some instances was past its peak) in absolute numbers. Perhaps more qualitative perspectives, which certainly enrich Brown’s writings on the 1950s, may modify this picture a little; in general, however, the local sources, while exhibiting some diversity, still largely concur with the previously published national overviews of religious change by Green, Yates and myself. The 1950s did not disrupt Britain’s longer-term trajectory towards secularization.

Footnotes

Annex

Adult church attendance, Scunthorpe, 1954 (numbers)

Adult church attendance, Scunthorpe, 1954 (% population)

Adult church attendance, Rawmarsh, 1955 (numbers)

Adult church attendance, Rawmarsh, 1955 (% population)

Adult church attendance, Billingham, 1959

Adult church attendance, Billingham, 1966