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May 05, 2006
Never on a Sunday? Not Any More, Sunshine, Now We’re All Busy DIY'ing It
Those of a similar generation to the present writer will be able vividly to recall just how dull it was to grow up as a child in Britain during the 1950s.
The Goons, Billy Cotton, and then Hancock’s Half Hour on the BBC Home Service (now Radio 4) in the background, over a bland but nutritious and entirely alcohol-free Sunday lunch – for the adults as well, that is!
Then followed a walk to the local park for a desultory kick around of a football, before home to tea of jam and bread, with a few squashed fly-biscuits or a slice or two of Jamaica ginger-cake as well if lucky, all eaten to the accompanying strains of a worthy but dull edifying black and white TV programme, before homework and an early bed in preparation for the school-week ahead.
Back then cinemas did not open on Sundays before the evening. Nor were any professional football matches played on that day. Pubs opened briefly for an hour or so at lunch-time, and the local high street was practically deserted with all shops shut apart from corner newsagents and convenience stores.
It wasn’t just post-war austerity at work here.
Much of the dullness of a traditional British Sunday back then -- and even well before, since, as I recall, even Friedrich Nietzsche commented on their dullness in Beyond Good and Evil -- was deliberate.
Sunday trading laws imposed severe restrictions on trading and entertainment to preserve and protect the sanctity of the Christian Sabbath.
There were special exemptions for Jewish retailers who operated in traditionally Jewish neighbourhoods. Thus, I recall there was a big open air Sunday morning market in London’s East End where, for a song, you could purchase a puppy or a kitten, and, for not much more, a kid – the animal that is, not the content of some depraved imaginations brought to life by the Internet and the dissolution of the traditional two-parent family.
The thinking behind this particular exemption to the trading laws was that, since Jews were presumed to observe their Sabbath which fell on the previous day, allowing them to buy and sell on Sunday in areas in which they were heavily concentrated gave them parity with the Christian majority.
Whether this exemption was a good thing, or the beginning of the thin edge of a multicultural wedge that, in time, would eventually threaten to destroy the very fabric of the traditional British way of life, is an issue whose discussion can be postponed to another occasion.
Certainly, as I understand it, that concession to Jews was made as a special favour, and not as the outcome of some militant campaign on their part demanding their human rights. At that time, British Jews were only too well aware of just how much they owed to Britain. To be in the business of demanding any special favours.
I digress, however, from my main point which was that life in early post-war Britain was terribly dull in comparison with how life is now.
But, as the driver of the London taxi said of that period earlier this week, when the ever-malfunctioning Northern Line forced me to hire a cab:
‘We was all poor back in them days, but we was all happy.’
He then went on to elaborate:
‘Every child had two parents then who would all sit down together to eat at the week-ends.’
I was put in mind both of this period and of what my taxi-driver had said of it by a report in today’s Times about something of which until today I had previously been totally unaware but the significance of which deserves to be more widely noted.
Apparently, not content with the partial lifting of the restrictions on Sunday trading that were brought in by Parliamentary Act in 1994, and that allowed big retailers like B & Q and Tesco to open on Sundays but for only 6 hours, the DIT has been conducting since last year a cost-benefit analysis of the remaining restrictions on Sunday trading and the results of their deliberations are due to be announced today.
I would lay money that, given an administration that would allow casinos to be built on practically every village-green in the country, not to mention giving Jo public 24-hour drinking, the last remnants of legal restrictions that made Sunday a special day are about to be lifted.
They will be removed in a blaze of government rhetoric extolling the virtues of our new vibrant multicultural entrepreneurial society in which all such restrictions that privilege one religious tradition, however, previously well-established and dominant, have been finally rendered outmoded by changing demographics and secularisation.
Undoubtedly, on the cost side of further de-regulation, there will be mentioned the concerns of small traders who will now face even more intensified competition from the big retailers.
But I doubt whether the DTI will so much as mention, let alone consider it a cost rather than a benefit, the fact that further de-regulation of Sunday trading laws will further secularise society and rob Sunday of its traditional connotations as the Christian day of rest.
For what it is worth, I personally deplore this social trend, and whole-heartedly wish from the bottom of my heart that the special character of Sunday could be preserved. I would gladly trade the ability to go and see a matinee film or some over-paid professional footballers foul each other, let alone enjoy the delights of wandering around the shelves of IKEA or MFI on a Sunday, for a little more collective quiet and decorum on that traditional day of rest.
I can still today hear the local church bells’ summoning the faithful for prayer as I go for my regular Sunday-morning amble in the park. But their chimes are increasingly being drowned out by the traffic’s roar and by the other detritus of the waste-land to which this Government has seemed so hell-bent(!) on reducing this once green and pleasant land for which the poet William Blake held out such a different an
d altogether more edifying vision.
Posted by David Conway at May 5, 2006 01:35 PM
Comments
How I agree with your comments. I grew up during the war and remember the immediate postwar years very well. Sundays may have been dull but I can't remember any resentment that it was so. It is very apparent that it has been the policies of successive governments, not public demand, that have led to the increasingly secular society that prevails today. We now have a society that has lost, not only its religious affiliations (which I don't grieve too much) but - and much more importantly - the moral rectitude that arose from those affiliations. Money and material acquisitions have become the prime targets and we have a national economy that can survive only as long as people are willing to get more and more into debt chasing the materialist dream. Not only have successive governments caused the loss of our Christian identity but their immigration policies are well on the way to destroying all other aspects of our national identity; and not a single member of the political class has raised his voice in anger at what has happened.
Posted by: Henry Kaye at May 6, 2006 11:15 AM
Fully agree with Henry Kaye, being from the same generation, bombs and all. But the main comment on lack of open pubs was a little bit astray, on Sundays they opened from 12.00 to 14.00 and 19.00 to 22.00. Been there, done that.
Posted by: Derek Buxton at May 7, 2006 02:35 PM
Incredibly, some of us were actually able to arrange our own entertainment!
Curious that recent studies indicate that, despite being considerably less well off, and entirely lacking microwave ovens, we were a great deal happier in those boring, Big Brother-deprived times.
As for church bells, I believe there is now, courtesy of the EU, a limit on their volume. Someone might HEAR them, and we can't have that.
Posted by: David Walker at May 7, 2006 06:08 PM
The idea that Sunday was special was foisted upon us by the Church (of England) who feared that its influence was waning, and that what was needed was a strong dose of joyless Puritanism to instil a modicum of religious feeling into the otherwise irreligious English. The 50’s English Sunday (which I also remember) never was the golden age that Mr Conway tries to suggest. No music or laughter, everything closed, and everyone expected to wear a dour religious face. It’s still happening in Scotland today, as is demonstrated by the recent controversy over the island ferry link (Catholics pro, Wee Frees contra).
At the beginning of the 20C the wealthy used to force their servants to attend church on Sunday; in our school we were forced to attend morning assembly, on pain of the cane if we didn’t. You can’t coerce people into being religious by making Sunday as depressing as it was all those years ago.
Mr Conway is right that we should have a choice of what to do on Sunday. For many of us it still is a special day when we meet with friends and family, and if we so choose we go to the cinema or a football match or queue up at Ikea. It’s our choice. Why knock it?
Some religious communities, ironically immigrants I would suggest, seem to have found ways of simultaneously being religious and enjoying themselves. If you don’t believe me, stand outside any mosque or any Afro-Caribbean church. The Catholic countries of Europe also seem able to combine religious duty with secular enjoyment. (They even vote on Sundays!)
Times have changed, things have moved on and I don’t agree that we should be continually looking back at the past for inspiration. This nonsense about protecting the Christian Sabbath and preserving the British way of life is continually trotted out by people who actually have quite another agenda: protecting the white anglo-saxon population against the hordes of (non-white) immigrants.
The “we wuz all poor but happy” quote sounds like a parody from a 50’s war film with the young Richard Attenborough playing the cheerful cockney chappy who knew his place.
We are now in a 24/7 world. We have embraced the free market, we love globalism, and we all juggle the work-life balance in a flexible labour market. Irregular shift patterns, plus the need to pay off a big mortgage, has led to increasing flexibility in shop opening, fostered of course by aggressive propaganda from retailers.
So when Mr Tesco opens up shop 24 hours per day, that’s putting flexibility, globalisation and the free market into practice. Put simply, they want to increase their profits and that’s why successive governments have bowed to their demands for more opening hours. You can’t have your baguette and eat it.
Incidentally, you didn’t point out that many of the retailers who were most vociferous about increased opening hours are Jewish in origin. M & S, Tesco, Dixon’s/Curry’s, Sainsbury’s, Philip Green’s empire all have impeccable Jewish roots. Why should they keep Sunday special?
Mr Conway stretches credulity by suggesting that the government will claim that further changes to Sunday trading are the result of multiculturalism. Nonsense. It’s about “the free market”, and “flexibility”, and “responding to customer (and voter) demands” to create a “vibrant, modern economy”.
Posted by: Anthony Withers at May 8, 2006 01:18 PM
I think it is hardly fair to presume that the majority of British citizens would like to have a choice of activities taken away from them once a week.
As ever, us Brits are hanging on tightly to the last remnants of our childhood and all those things that once upon a time we held dear.
The Christian church had a vice like grip on this country for hundreds of years, bullying people into religion.
For a multitide of reasons, people no longer hold the church as being important in their lives anymore, although establishment remained firmly rooted in such traditions.
Now, the government realises that this new British society quite literally does not have the time to spend money. The days of weekends off work are long gone for many, and so Sunday remains the only day that the majority of people can enjoy themselves by doing whatever they themselves choose to do.
For many true Christians this is a good thing, as their church on a Sunday will be full of people who have defied the 'temptations' of a brunch at M and S to attend service.
For the church in general, it is abhorred.
If the establishment wanted to remain firm in this nation's support for a 'Holy' Sunday then here are a few pointers.
1) Stop all television transmissions before midday
2) Stop sporting events being staged
3) Close all non religious establishments
4) Close all major highways
5) Close all airports and seaports
I think it now hardly matters if Tesco is open for 6 hours or 12 on a Sunday, or on Christmas Eve. It's a case of sinning a little or sinning a little more.
Posted by: Andrew at May 18, 2006 12:47 PM
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