They break the Sabbath, I relax and refresh myself

Polo, as you may have heard, is something of an upper-class pursuit.  A sport that requires multiple horses for each player over the course of a single match isn’t something that little kids can pick up on the street.  It’s not an accident that Ralph Lauren’s aspirational clothing brand co-opts the image of a polo player and magnifies it beyond of all semblance of proportion.

It’s polo’s association with the wealthy and the famous that led to one of the more engaging exchanges of letters that I’ve come across in the archives.  Prince Philip, the Queen’s husband, is something of a polo fanatic.  Well, I have a feeling he doesn’t play much these days, seeing as he’s now almost 90 years old.  But in his youth, it seems as if there was no better way to spend a Sunday than playing polo.

Therein lies the problem (and how His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh is likely to end up in a PhD dissertation on postwar Christianity).  Back in the 1950s, sabbatarian groups like the Lord’s Day Observance Society didn’t take kindly to anyone playing sports on Sundays.  The Lord’s Day was for churchgoing (twice, if possible), prayer, and quiet time spent with the family.  In the eyes of the LDOS, virtually everything else was a sin against God and destined to bring about national ruin (seriously – here’s what they said about a 1966 bill that would have allowed theatres to open on Sundays: “the Bill […], if passed, […] will result in a further departure of our Nation from Almighty God, His Word and Commandments, with both ill effects upon the spiritual and moral life of the nation and the certain removal of the Divine Blessing from us as a people.”

So you can imagine why the Lord’s Day Observance Society wasn’t too happy about Prince Philip playing polo on Sundays, especially with hundreds of paying spectators there to watch him (and the other seven players).  For a period in the mid-1950s, the LDOS was writing to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, every year, pressing for Fisher to do something about 1) Philip’s Sunday polo playing and 2) the Queen’s presence at said polo matches.  Reading this correspondence, it’s pretty clear that Fisher wanted nothing to do with this dispute.  He didn’t have much sympathy for what he saw as sabbatarian fanaticism, and he definitely didn’t want to piss off Prince Philip or the Queen.  But in 1955, prompted by the Free Church of Scotland going public with its criticism of Philip’s Sunday polo-playing, Fisher delicately raised the issue with Philip.  While being careful to avoid personal criticism of Philip’s Sunday activities, Fisher warned that Sunday polo by a member of the Royal Family might provide ammunition for “all who are now constantly seeking to invade the domesticity of Sunday rest and recreations, and who when the time comes will press very hard for legislation to remove all restrictions upon the full secularisation and commercialisation of Sunday”.

Philip’s response to Fisher, unfailingly polite, began by agreeing with Fisher on the sanctity of Sunday, the importance of churchgoing, and the undesirability of any paid labor being done on the Sabbath.  This included professional sports on Sundays: “I would resist at all costs any suggestion of professional Sunday football.  I would go further.  I would ask all organisers of charity cricket or football matches on Sunday not to ask any professional to play in them.”  He went on to suggest that any recreation that involved “killing” (hunting, fishing, and the like) should be avoided on Sundays.

And yet, in spite of this apparent sympathy for a certain degree of sabbatarian rigor, Philip wasn’t at all ready to give up his Sunday polo.  As an amateur sportsman, his participation in Sunday polo would not violate his stricture against payment for activities performed on Sundays.  Nor was it his fault that spectators were interested in watching the game and willing to pay to do so.  “As far as I am concerned I would not mind playing behind a screen without anyone looking on but unfortunately the club which organises the game cannot afford to do this.  It encourages people to pay to come and watch in order to reduce to some extent the expense of the game.”

These “expense of the game,” it seems, was in large part paying the wages of the grooms, timekeepers, and bus-drivers that made the game possible and easier for spectators to watch.  Philip deemed these “paid services” “unfortunate,” but ultimately worth the while, since he needed physical activity on Sundays to “relax and refresh” himself from the hard mental work of the rest of the week.  “It so happens that I like playing polo.”

So there you have it.  Wage-earning on Sundays?  Bad.  Unless, of course, it enables someone else to relax, enjoy themselves, and re-charge the batteries for the next week, especially when that someone is married to the Queen.

A brief update

Not much time for blogging this week, what trips out to Reading for research at the BBC archives and the added time of having to fend entirely for myself.  But I may as well start the month off with something for the blog, even if it’s just a few quick bullet points.

• I’ve spent the past few days at the BBC Written Archives Centre, probably the smallest archive I’ve visited in terms of number of desks for researchers.  You’d think that an organization with 23,000 employees would have a greater archival presence than a little bungalow in suburban Reading, but you’d be wrong.  What’s nice about the low-key surroundings is the informality of it all: there are no ID cards, no restrictions on the number of items you can have at your desk at one time, etc.  You even have an individual staff member looking after you!
• It’s been a pretty useful few days, but I won’t bore you with the details of the BBC’s policy towards controversy in religious broadcasting (the short version: a bit of controversy is okay and might even serve to get people more interested in Christianity, but let’s not get carried away and give rationalists a platform!).  Instead, an amusing anecdote.  During the later years of the Second World War, the BBC began annual broadcasts of bell peals from across the UK (and often Jerusalem) on Christmas morning.  There doesn’t seem to have been too much religious content to it, just a way of linking together the constituent nations in some good-natured holiday cheer.  But there was always one group of listeners who didn’t take kindly to the bell-ringing: bell ringers.  Apparently the BBC got it all wrong, choosing churches with a poor set of bells or, worse yet, having them rung poorly.  One bell-ringing enthusiastic went so far as to send in a county-by-county list of the best bells in England.  So if you’re ever in search of good bells, let me know.
• How about those Ashes?  For those you who couldn’t keep up, here’s a recap of how the first match went for England.  Day 1: Not so good.  Andrew Strauss, the captain, got out on the the third ball of the match.  An Australian bowler then went on to take a hat-trick: three wickets in three balls.  England were all out for 260 runs.  Day 2: Much better.  Due to some nice bowling from Steven Finn and Jimmy Anderson, Australia were on the knife’s edge at 220-5. Day 3: Outright bad.  Brad Haddin and Mike Hussey spent the better part of the day batting together, putting on 307 runs together in total.  At the end of the day, England were in serious trouble, faced with the prospect of having to bat for two days to save the match. Day 4: Recovery!  Centuries from Strauss and Cook put them in a pretty impregnable position at the end of the day.  Day 5: Rubbing it in the Aussies’ faces.  England ended up with 517 runs for the loss of one wicket.  That about says it all about the Australian bowling attack in this match.  So we move on to Adelaide, site of England’s utter embarrassment four years ago.  This time around, it could be Australia with egg on its face, seeing as it looks as if they’re going to change half their bowling after the first Test.
• It’s been snowing here in London!  Gatwick’s been basically shut down for the past few days, but on the whole I’d say that London’s snow is analogous to London’s rain: basically omnipresent (at least for the last few days), but never exactly overwhelming.  The sidewalks are a mess, which has made running something of an adventure. I had hopped to get some pictures of St Pancras (surely one of London’s most gingerbread-y buildings) encrusted with snow, but I haven’t found myself nearby in daylight.

That’s all for now, but I’ll be up for at least another hour and half waiting for the Ashes to begin, so we’ll see if I can’t think up a few more things to blog about…

Cows are to Oxford as Christianity is to Britain

At the beginning of September, Becca and I went to Oxford, she for a conference on health policy, me to check out some records of the Conservative Party related to religious education. But in addition to the professional activities, we also took some time to wander around town.  As we strolled along the maze of streams surrounding the city center, we came upon what might seem an odd sight in a city of 150,000: cattle.  Not many of them, but there they were.

This got me thinking about my dissertation (Tim Burke’s right: after a few years of grad school, nearly everything gets you thinking about your dissertation).  And what I came up with was this analogy: Cows are to Oxford as Christianity is to Britain.

No, seriously.  There are parallels here.  Cattle and Christianity are both marginal these days (literally in the case of the cows – they’re on the outskirts of the city).  If you were to start from scratch, you’d never think of grazing cows in the fields surrounding Oxford or establishing the Church of England as the state church.  Oxford’s economy is, these days, based largely on tourism.  Just 15% of British adults attend church on a regular basis.  It’s safe to say that Oxford is no longer an agricultural market town or Britain a solidly Christian country.

Yet… they’re there.  They're there because they were there in the past, and certain things stick around beyond what seems to be their natural or rational lifespan.  Path dependence is a crucial fact for understanding the world around us.  Simply put, history matters.

The difficult thing is figuring out the significance of these strange holdovers, these things that don’t quite make sense.  In some cases, like the cattle of Oxford, I’d readily admit that the significance is pretty minimal.  The cows are part of the ambience of the place, reminding visitors of Oxford’s agricultural past.  Along with certain architectural details in the city, the cows create a sense that Oxford is a place of the past, a place where you can step back time.

So what about Christianity?  Does it matter that the Queen still gives an annual Christmas message or that the school day, more often than not, opens with a recognizably Christian act of worship?  I don’t have a convincing answer to that question (yet!), but my current thinking is that it makes far more sense to think about Britain as “post-Christian” than simply “secular.”  The former label recognizes history; the latter simply effaces it in favor of observations about the present.

Christianity is still around.  If you start looking for it, you see it everywhere: churches, street names, schools, bishops on the front pages of the papers.

This is where my dissertation comes in – an exploration of why and how certain Christian institutions endured for so long.  Those questions are fairly easy to answer, given the archival materials available.  The tricky (and really interesting) problem is the significance of those elements of Christianity that stuck around for so long.  If all goes well, I’ll be able to tell you why we need to look at Christianity in order to understand the broader history of postwar Britain.  In other words, I suppose, my whole project is an attempt to prove the analogy of cows and Christianity wrong, to show that Christianity did not simply become a charming or eccentric anachronism.

Check back in a few years to see if I’ve done it.

Historians' quest for context in the archive

What do you do when you find the same sort of letter over and over again in the archives?  Like, say, this one:

I'll return to this letter in a minute.

Historians are big on context.  When teaching undergraduate students, this can be as basic as developing reading skills: Be sure to read around the passage or phrase you're interested in to make sense of it.  Be skeptical of claims based on quotations that seem too good to be true.  Things get more complicated when you consider the full document that a quotation is drawn from.

At another level, historians are interested in the circumstances in which events occur and ideas develop.  Unlike scholars in some disciplines who seek out "master factors" that explain everything, historians are suckers for making sure their stories incorporate lots of contextual information.  At its worst, this can degenerate into mere description and lose any analytic rigor.  But at its best, this "quest for context" (as I've heard Robert Self describe historians' project) helps us gain a richer understanding of the complexity and diversity of the human experience.

Now, back to that letter (go ahead, click on it).  On first reading, it doesn't seem that promising a source for the historian of religious education.  It's on a rather mundane topic: who should pay for particular educational materials, the Local Education Authority (think school board) or individual "voluntary" schools (schools that received some state funding but remained under the control of third-party, typically religious organizations).  Letters that contain the phrase "requisitioned in the usual way" aren't exactly the sort of thing that inspire excitement.

If you read a bit more closely and realize exactly what sort of education materials are at issue, the letter becomes more interesting.  This isn't a letter about math textbooks or art supplies.  Instead, what the letter-writer wants to know is whether the LEA is allowed to buy prayer books for local church schools.  Now things are starting to get juicy, right?  You'd never see anything like this in the United States.  State funds going to purchase explicitly religious materials for explicitly religious schools?  Welcome to post-WWII England.

So far, so good.  But this is just one letter.  Perhaps the Isle of Wight education authority was just super-careful and wanted to make absolutely sure that they could pay for prayer books requested by voluntary schools (as the law in fact permitted them to do).

In fact, there are dozens of letters just like this in the records of the Ministry of Education.  So many, in fact, that you get a clear sense of just how exasperated ministry officials were getting with these information requests. After reading a few of these letters, I could practically write the replies myself, "The local education authority is required to provide the funds for regular education expenses for voluntary schools, including religious education, as long as the costs are reasonable."

It wasn't just the Isle of Wight, in other words, that was unsure about the regulations surrounding religious education in the 1944 Education Act.  Across England, education authorities pestered the Ministry of Education about what sort of religious education they could and couldn't pay for.  In some cases, it's clear that the LEA wanted to support the denominational voluntary schools but were uncertain if the law allowed them to do so.  In others, like the West Riding of Yorkshire, the education authority, more secularist in outlook, had to be leaned on rather heavily by the Ministry of Education to fulfill its statutory obligation.

But there's a thread that connects all these letters: the question of "denominational" education.  In letter after letter, you see the phrases "denominational instruction," "distinctive of any denomination," and the like.  A phrase that seems technical or mundane in just one letter assumes far greater import when it's inescapable. 

So I would argue that this letter only makes sense in the context of the dozens of other letters raising the exact same issue.  The existence of so many letters on one topic reveals something deeper than any single letter on its own can suggest: that there was widespread confusion and anxiety about what constituted "denominational" religious instruction in the immediate aftermath of the 1944 Education Act.  This claim can also be spun into a larger discussion of denominational conflict in the immediate postwar era (of which there was plenty).

The historian's task, then, is more than just collecting a series of texts and reporting on their contents.  Historians have to look for connections across documents.  And it is those connections that allow the historian to transcend the particularities of any given piece of evidence to make broader claims about the past.

The food and parks are all well and good, but remind me why you're in England?

Ah yes, the aforementioned professional reasons for spending this year in England.  What is it that a(n) historian does on a daily basis, anyway?  Well, it depends on the day, but I'll describe today's activities to give you some sense of how I'm going to be spending the majority of my waking hours in the next ten months.

First, a bit of historical background (you'll be seeing a lot of this on the blog, I'm afraid).  The Education Act of 1944 (sometimes known as the Butler Act) established a tripartite system of secondary education in England.  You don't need to know what "tripartite system of secondary education" means, but if you're curious, the Wikipedia page I've linked to provides the details.  More importantly for my project (and therefore this blog post), the Butler Act also mandated religious education in schools supported by taxpayer funds.  To be specific, the act requires that "religious instruction [...] shall be given in every county school and in every voluntary school."

So, how do you get from the Butler Act to me spending my day at the London Metropolitan Archives?  Well, as you've probably heard by now, one of the topics I'm exploring in my dissertation is the history of religious education in state-supported schools in England after the Second World War.  England (like much of Europe) is typically understood as far more secular than the United States, but in the area of religion in the schools, the links between church and state in Britain are taken for granted in a way unheard of in the United States.  While religion has largely been banished from American public schools, it is, by law, required in English schools that receive funding support from the state.  So one of the big questions I'm exploring in my dissertation is how Christianity continued to be inculcated in English students, even while few of them went to church on Sundays and even fewer of them endured the traditional form of Christian socialization: Sunday school.

As it turns out, religious education (RE) is one of the few topics for which there is (and has never been) a national curriculum.  In other words, each local education authority (Americans, think: school board) determined on its own what RE would look like in its schools: what teacher qualifications to require, what students would learn about religion, and the like.  So if you're interested in the history of RE in postwar England, you have to look at what was occurring in individual local education authorities.

And that (with only four paragraphs of prelude!) is what I was doing today at the London Metropolitan Archives.  The main archives for the City of London and its surrounding (and ever-increasing) metropolis (see Becca's recent post for an overview of "What is London?"), the LMA holds the records of the Inner London Education Authority, which, from 1965 to 1990, was responsible for education in Inner London from 1965 to 1990 (before 1965, the London County Council held that responsibility; after 1990, each individual borough took over the administration of education within that borough).  Within the ILEA, the Standing Advisory Council for Religious Education (SACRE) was, you guessed it, responsible for the provision of religious education.

So I spent today (and will spend many more days) trawling through the records of the Standing Advisory Council for Religious Education of the Inner London Education Authority, trying to find the evidence that will help me answer a few key questions:

- How did religious education in London change in the decades after the Second World War?
- What forces were responsible for those changes?
- How should we understand those changes within the broader history of religion in twentieth-century Europe, which is typically understood as a history of crises and decline?

Today was a meaty day, as archival days go: the SACRE minutes.  Virtually every page of those minutes could turn out to be significant for my dissertation, so I had to pay close attention.  Or I would have had to pay close attention if I were actually taking notes.  Instead I decided (since virtually every page of those minutes could turn out to be significant for my dissertation) to photograph almost every page I looked at today.  Different historians take different approaches to taking photographs in the archives.  When it comes to sources (like so many other things!), I'm something of a completist: if there's any chance I'll find it useful, I'm making a record of it.  So I basically spent six hours today photographing as many documents as possible.

Even while racing through the files, though, I still took the time to skim through the documents for particularly juicy bits of information.  Today's haul drove home for me a key point about historical scholarship: any number of stories could be told using the evidence from a given set of sources.  I'm expecting to use these sources to tell a story about how the growing presence of religious minorities in London after the Second World War forced members of the Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education to adopt a more pluralist model of religious education.  But you could just as easily use these sources write a history of local government or a history of the relations between the Church of England, the Free Churches, and the Roman Catholic Church.  The basic point here is that historical sources do not speak for themselves.  They're the detritus of human existence and tell no story on their own.  It is only when historians come along and try to make sense of them that they seem to cohere into an intelligible narrative.

And that is a daunting task.  Some time next summer, I'm going to start to systematically work my way through what will by then amount to thousands of photographs of sources.  Some of them as seemingly banal as the one on the left asking the catering manager to bill a lunch to the proper budgeting code.  And others as telling as the letter I found last summer in which a Jewish woman complained to the London County Council that the school that employed her was prohibiting her from teaching religious education on the grounds of her religion.  It's that kind of source that can be more revealing that dozens of policy papers or committee minutes.  But you don't realize the significance of sources like that until you've immersed yourself in the documents and read each of them carefully.

For those of you who followed the hellish-ness that was my preparation for my preliminary exams last fall, I'd point out that what I'm doing now is virtually the exact opposite of what I did then.  In preparing for my prelims, I raced through 300 books, reading the introduction and conclusion carefully and, in some cases, doing little more than glancing at the body of each book.  The whole point was to grasp as quickly as possible what each historian was trying to say.  Here, I need to take my time with the sources.  They might be trying to tell me something, but it's ultimately up to me to put all the pieces together.  But for now, I'm just trying to find all the pieces.