‘Methodism Alive’: Mass Observation's Worktown Perspective

Introduction

With its Puritan tradition (it was often described as the ‘Geneva of the North’) 1, it is unsurprising that Bolton should have developed as a major centre of Methodism. The first Methodist society in the town was formed by John Bennet as early as 1747, while John Wesley made the first of his many visits in 1748 when he preached at the market cross, albeit not without encountering some opposition. A chapel was opened in 1751, and, notwithstanding Bennet's secession, the work prospered to the extent that Bolton had become the head of a circuit by 1784. During the nineteenth century, there was a rapid expansion in Bolton's population, largely driven by industrialisation, especially in textiles but also coal and engineering, and Methodism expanded accordingly.

The Wesleyans eventually created five circuits, including the Bolton Mission, the local expression of the Forward Movement; this was initially based at the Ridgway Gates chapel, but subsequently replaced by the Victoria Hall (1900) and the Kings Hall (1907). Non-Wesleyan Methodist denominations likewise established a permanent presence in the town, successively the Methodist New Connexion, Independent Methodists, Primitive Methodists, and the several strands that ultimately came together as the United Methodist Free Churches. Even the West Country Bible Christians made a belated and fleeting appearance (from 1889, opening a chapel in 1891). By 1932, at the time of Methodist union, besides the five Wesleyan circuits, there were two Primitive Methodist and three United Methodist ones. The aggregate membership was 7,403, some of whom were in societies beyond the boundaries of the county borough of Bolton proper. 2

As in the connexion at large, the process of administrative rationalisation following the 1932 union was slow. For the first three years, there appear to have been no changes in the town's ten circuits. Then, in 1935, the ex-Wesleyan Park Street circuit was expanded to incorporate several ex-Primitive Methodist and ex-United Methodist churches, and two ex United Methodist circuits (Hanover and St George's Road) were dissolved. Three years later, the final ex-United Methodist circuit (Albert Place) was dissolved, leaving Bolton with seven circuits, one amalgamated (Park Street), four ex-Wesleyan (Bridge Street, Wesley, Bolton Mission, and Farnworth), and two ex-Primitive Methodist (Higher Bridge Street and Moor Lane). These seven circuits had a combined membership of 6,906 in 1937, 7 per cent less than in 1932. Membership in the county borough alone must have been just over 6,000.

The year 1937 is significant in that it witnessed the birth of the social research organisation Mass Observation (MO) and the opening in March that year of one of its two research units, at 85 Davenport Street, Bolton. The latter was under the direction of Tom Harrisson, MO's co-founder (the other co-founder was Charles Madge, who headed up the sister centre in London). Using primarily qualitative methods, Harrisson set out to investigate the anthropology of everyday life in Bolton (disguised in MO's publicity as ‘Northtown’ and later as ‘Worktown’), with particular reference to the public house, leisure, politics, and religion. Books were planned on each of these themes, but only The Pub and the People (1943) was eventually published. Nevertheless, a vast treasure-trove of raw material, manuscript and typescript, was assembled and eventually deposited at the University of Sussex special collections in 1975. This Mass Observation Archive (MOA) is now accessible at The Keep, Brighton, with a significant proportion (including the entire Worktown Collection) also available through subscribing academic libraries as Mass Observation Online. 3 The current paper highlights the material in MOA that historians of Bolton Methodism may find helpful, not least in illuminating the lived experience of the town's Methodists at that time.

Bolton Methodism, 1937–38

MO's Bolton unit was staffed by a mixture of ‘paid’ observers (they mostly received board, lodging, and living expenses rather than wages) and volunteers (especially over the summer). The 42-year-old Joseph L. Wilcock (‘Brother Joe’) was recruited to co-ordinate the team working on the religion sub-project, which contained individuals from academic and creative backgrounds, with varying degrees of religious commitment and understanding. Wilcock's own credentials comprised Lancashire working-class roots and an ability to engage with Bolton's local religious leaders and win their confidence, ‘both as a social worker and as a Christian’. His previous career had included spells as a ‘tramp preacher’ and warden of St Christopher's hostel for destitute young boys in the East End of London, but, leaving his wife behind in Hornsea, he had moved to Bolton in search of employment. He had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the non-believer Harrisson, whom he feared might ‘make some blasphemous use of the material’. For his part, Harrisson judged Wilcock ‘a far-out fundamentalist’ who was easily taken in by religious sentimentality. 4

MO's research methods were not always very systematic and were sometimes, to modern eyes, idiosyncratic. However, it was readily understood that a logical first step in the religion sub-project was to prepare a list of all the places of worship in Bolton, which was lacking from contemporaneous local directories. Document A synthesises MO's findings in respect of Methodist churches in the county borough of Bolton in 1937–38. Including Independent Methodists, there were forty-four of them, equivalent to 28 per cent of all places of worship in the town, and more than the number belonging to the Church of England (thirty-eight). Total sittings in these Methodist churches were 22,000, sufficient to accommodate one in eight of Bolton's estimated population of 173,000 in 1937.

With its aversion to statistical techniques, rather paradoxical for an organisation that was driven after the Second World War into earning its living from quantitative market research, MO made no attempt to follow the lead of other British community studies of the period, such as Seebohm Rowntree's in York in 1935, 5 in organising a census of church attendance. Although MO eventually offered an estimate of 30,000 churchgoers in Bolton, 12,000 of whom were Catholics, 6 it was unable to break down the Protestant share of 18,000 into its constituent denominations. Since the Methodist Church did not begin to enumerate its worshippers until 1972, the aggregate size of its congregations in Bolton in 1937–38 must remain uncertain, albeit figures for isolated individual services were recorded in undertaking observations at particular churches.

MO did not devote equal effort to investigating each of Methodism's forty-four places of worship in 1937–38. Examination of the MOA online catalogue and of the digitised content in Mass Observation Online suggests that, of 155 Methodist-related documents in the Worktown Collection, 7 handwritten or typed by MO personnel between March 1937 and June 1938, sixty-six concerned the Victoria Hall on Knowsley Street, forty-nine of them authored by Wilcock. The Victoria Hall was the headquarters of the Bolton Mission and the nearest that Bolton had to a cathedral-like place of worship at that time. 8 The hall's minister, as well as the mission's superintendent, between 1927 and 1939 was Thomas Hannah, whom Wilcock had first encountered when he interviewed him on 23 December 1937. Hannah, who came across to Wilcock as ‘cold to approach, perhaps shy, and is gruff to disguise it’, had initially been cautious about co-operating with MO, fearing ‘there is a possible chance of our saying something and being misquoted, misrepresented … we feel that the Spirit is not something that can be measured’. However, Hannah relented somewhat and agreed to give Wilcock ‘the run of the place’ for one week early in the New Year, to enable him to engage with the full range of the Victoria Hall's activities. 9 Document B tabulates Wilcock's visitation on 15–23 January 1938, showing the daily programme and referencing the reports on events that Wilcock wrote, varying in length from one page to twenty or so pages. In August 1938, on the eve of his departure from Bolton, Wilcock also penned ‘Methodism alive’, transcribed as Document C, a summative assessment of his impressions of the Victoria Hall, singing its praises. 10, 11 Interestingly, Wilcock said little about the other half of the Bolton Mission, the Kings Hall on Bradshawgate, which was the subject of just five reports, only two of them by Wilcock himself.

It is easy to see why Wilcock was so impressed by the scale and range of the Victoria Hall's regular programme, and particularly by the large numbers of people drawn to the Saturday evening concerts (continued until 1941) and the Sunday evening services and, to a lesser extent, the women's meeting and Sunday school. Additionally, the hall hosted special events for local Methodism and the town, one example being the commemoration on 24 May 1938 of the bicentenary of John Wesley's ‘conversion’, which was chaired by Bolton's then mayor (who was a Methodist himself) and allegedly attended by 2,400 people. 12 At the same time, there can be little doubt that Wilcock viewed the Victoria Hall through rose-tinted spectacles, and that he allocated a disproportionate amount of his and MO's time to charting its work. After all, the Bolton Mission accounted for only one-fifth of Methodist membership in the town in 1937. In fact, in interviews with MO, Methodist ministers from other Bolton circuits, such as Robert Hasler and Hugh Brook of the Bridge Street circuit, privately voiced some criticism of the Victoria Hall for the ‘hurt’ that it inflicted on other Methodist churches in the town, denuding them of some of their best leaders and further weakening the fragile position of the already decaying town centre causes, which were only being kept open ‘for sentimental reasons’. 13 Hannah was very sensitive to any suggestion that his congregation was recruited in part from other Methodist churches. 14

All but four of the eighty-nine remaining Methodist-related documents in the Worktown Collection, and originated between March 1937 and June 1938, concerned thirty-one individual Methodist churches besides the Victoria Hall. Of these, thirteen were ex-Wesleyan Methodist, six ex-Primitive Methodist, four ex-United Methodist, seven Independent Methodist, and one uncertain. Wilcock compiled at least twenty-two of the eighty-nine reports, 15 the majority being the work of other observers (including Harrisson).

Twenty-four of the thirty-one churches had three or fewer observations each, Bridge Street (ex-Wesleyan Methodist) and St George's Road (ex-United Methodist) having most, ten apiece. The subject matter of these documents was diverse. Although descriptions of ordinary services were numerous, there was good coverage of special services, including, as well as religious festivals such as Easter and Christmas, the annual Sunday school ‘sermons’ that were such a tradition of the North-West and the sportsmen's services which became a feature of the inter-war religious scene. 16 Other events observed included concerts, plays, and bazaars. Of the few interviews conducted with local Methodist ministers, the most informative was probably that with Hasler on 6 January 1938, not least for his counsel against the Church entering into competition with cinemas, a strategy which he detected was ‘all the rage now’, as a means of countering the slide towards secularisation. 17 MO's attempts to capture the direct voice of the laity, through a life histories stream of the religion sub-project, were a conspicuous failure, albeit several interesting submissions were made by past and present members of Harvey Street Primitive Methodist Church, including accounts of its Christian Endeavour society, football club, and concerts. 18

Bolton Methodism, 1939–40

The religion sub-project had begun to run out of steam by early summer 1938 and was disrupted by changes in personnel. Funding for Wilcock's post had ended by this stage, and he moved to London, working initially for the Labour Party in the capital and later with Norwegian sailors in Newcastle. Furthermore, in September and October 1938, Harrisson and Madge swapped roles, partly in consequence of a crisis in Madge's personal life, Harrisson relocating to London and Madge to Bolton to take charge of the Worktown study. However, Madge's preoccupation was with a new project on spending and saving, the intended subject of a fifth Worktown book, rather than with the four existing strands of Worktown research (among them religion), and following its completion in autumn 1939 he originally intended to close down the Davenport Street unit altogether. Then the war intervened, bringing new research priorities (not least in connection with MO's contracts with the Ministry of Information), so the Bolton operation was eventually kept open until August 1940, although conscription of its observers (and their non-replacement) impeded its work.

This temporary reprieve for the Worktown project facilitated a minor revival of the religion sub-project at the hands of Brian Allwood, with reference to the impact on the town's religious life of the first months of the Second World War, 19 albeit the specifically Methodist element of his investigations was fairly limited. Three Methodist ministers were interviewed, two mostly about Moral Re-Armament, 20 the most wide-ranging being with Hasler of the Bridge Street circuit on 19 December 1939. Speaking of Britain's entry into the war, Hasler was convinced ‘we did the right thing, in view of what seemed likely to happen. The bulk of people in my congregation think so too. There are a few COs [Conscientious Objectors] and pacifists, but they’re in a very small minority. I think their attitude is a hopeless one.’ He described Hitler as ‘like a pirate. You’ve got to check him.’ Within his own church, Hasler noted that fewer social activities had taken place since the war started, and that the reduced tram and bus service on Sunday mornings had made it more difficult for some people to attend worship. Overall, however, attendances had ‘fluctuated a bit, but they are more or less the same now as they were’. 21 More generally, MO intermittently enumerated Sunday morning congregations at five churches of the principal denominations in Bolton between September 1939 and July 1940, including ten Methodist ones. The first three counts were at St Georges Road followed by seven at the Victoria Hall, where attendances dipped from 127 on 5 November and 129 on 12 November 1939 to 91 on 9 June and 90 on 23 June 1940, perhaps in line with the traditional mid-summer trough. 22

Bolton Methodism, 1960

After mid-summer 1940, when this second phase of the Worktown study abruptly concluded, MO's fieldwork in Bolton was only carried out on an ad hoc basis. Twenty years were to pass before the threads of 1937–40 were briefly picked up in a restudy of Bolton undertaken by Harrisson (then on leave from his post as curator of the Sarawak Museum in Borneo) and some of his former MO associates during July and the first half of August 1960. Much of the spadework for the religious strand was carried out by Nell Umney, while Celia Fremlin and Harrisson were responsible for writing the religion chapter in the book arising from the restudy 23 MO recorded (but generally did not name) twenty-six Methodist chapels in 1960, although there were in fact twenty-eight in the county borough, according to the official Methodist list for that year,²³ with an estimated membership of 3,400 (reduced by 43 per cent since 1937–38). 24 The Methodist Church had ten fewer places of worship, 5,500 fewer sittings, and three fewer circuits in the town than in 1937–38, 25 having started to implement a programme of rationalisation consequent on the union of the three main branches of Methodism in 1932. The most significant of the closures was of the 1,370-seater Kings Hall on Bradshawgate in 1958. Joseph Needham, superintendent minister of the Bolton (Wesley) circuit, made it plain to MO that there was still much more to be done in this regard and bemoaned the stubbornness of the ‘old guard’ in resisting amalgamations. 26 The foregoing Methodist figures excluded the Independent Methodist Churches, which had six places of worship according to a contemporaneous local directory, one more than identified by MO, 27 with 310 members. 28

The 1960 restudy of Bolton religion generated only six significant Methodist-related manuscript/typescript documents. Two were observations of services, one in the morning at the Victoria Hall (which was led by a deaconess, and expertly reported upon by Julian Trevelyan) and the other in the evening at St Georges Road. 29 On the whole, however, the interviews conducted by Umney with three Methodist ministers were more enlightening, they being Needham of the Bolton (Wesley) circuit and Donald Smethurst and Kenneth Lawton of the Bolton (Bridge Street) circuit. 30 According to their testimonies, Methodism in the town was struggling. This was particularly evident in terms of recruitment of people, both to Sunday schools and the Church. As Smethurst lamented: ‘the small family of today does not provide fodder for Sunday school. The hard core of the congregation are past child bearing age.’ Adult Sunday schools, which had traditionally served as ‘a social centre’ (Smethurst) or ‘a political debating society’ (Lawton) for men were equally losing ground. Three root causes of declension were identified: the much increased availability of motor cars, enabling family Sunday outings and, according to Smethurst, making it difficult to find local preachers; 31 more widespread ownership of television sets in the home, especially drawing away the middle-aged from church; and outward migration from the town centre, either to Bolton's suburbs (with their new council estates or private housing developments) or to other places (at Beverley Road Independent Methodist Church, a major challenge was ‘the fact that the younger members leave the town after marriage’). 32 On the positive side, the ministers interviewed welcomed the new era in church finance, with a switch to enhanced levels of individual covenanted giving, 33 and even a rise in ministerial stipends.

Conclusion

The MOA is a rich source of information about one phase in the history of Methodism in Bolton, and an archive which, for that purpose, has been largely overlooked by Methodist and local historians. Although it is not a complete record of the evolution of Methodism in the town, and must be used in conjunction with the extant administrative records of Methodism in the area (many preserved by the Bolton Archives and Local Studies Service at Bolton Central Library), the MOA is useful for filling in gaps about the lived experience of Methodism, notably during the late 1930s as a second global war approached and the implications of Methodist union in 1932 began to play out. The current paper hopes to offer both a guide to its main components and how to access them, as well as impetus for other scholars to make use of its rich detail for further output.