Changing York: what we did during weekends of yesteryear

HOW do you spend your weekend? Doing the weekly shop at the supermarket? Spending the afternoon in the pub? Or do you go to work? Sixty years ago, it would have been different. Up until 1972 English pubs were closed for much of Sunday, and there was no Sunday shopping until 1994.

A French visitor to England in 1672 noted that ‘there is no kingdom where Sunday is better observed’.

Even as recently as the 1930s or 40s, the chances are that many York people would go to church once or possibly twice on a Sunday.

Go one or two centuries further back in history and you could be fined if you didn’t attend church services. Attendance at Church of England services at least twice a year was a legal obligation in the UK up until 1791.

Technically, the legal requirement for compulsory church attendance wasn’t finally abolished until 1969 with the passing of The Statute Law (Repeals) Act, even though it hadn’t been enforced for about one hundred years or more.

This partly explains why there are so many churches in the city. And you couldn’t just go to any church. The divisions were rigidly denominational and, to a certain extent, based on social class.

Nor could you simply turn up in your weekday clothes. On Sunday, most people wore their good clothes or ‘Sunday best’, if they could afford it, and they wouldn’t dream of letting their family down by wearing casual clothes to church.

If you were a Methodist, you went to the Methodist chapel. If you were Roman Catholic, it was St Wilfrid’s, St George’s, or English Martyrs in or near the city centre. Anglicans went to the Minster or one of the many parish churches in York.

Seebohm Rowntree

Then there was Sunday school, either after the morning service or in the afternoons. For decades the Sunday School movement provided an opportunity for pupils to learn basic literacy skills as well as promoting, if not always succeeding, in inculcating moral behaviour and a sense of social responsibility. Susan, a York resident, recalls how as a girl she always had to wear a hat and gloves to Sunday school. “My mum used to scold me for repeatedly running my hands across pews and other surfaces and coming home with dirty gloves,” she recalled.

But it would be wrong to think that the majority went to church. In his 1941 Poverty and Progress, an update to his earlier monumental study of poverty in York, the Quaker Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree chronicles the Sunday behaviour of many York residents around the turn of the 20th century. Rowntree discovered that although York’s population had increased by almost 50 per cent between 1901 and 1935, total Sunday church attendance had fallen by 25 per cent during the same period. Interestingly, he calculated that in both years of his census, altogether between 35 per cent and 48 per cent of men attended a church service on Sunday; the figure for women was between 51 per cent and 64 per cent.

Yet Sunday was the Sabbath day and was considered by many as a day of rest when no real activity was undertaken except some light (or better still devotional!) reading, walking, or visiting relatives and friends. The social pressures were considerable: certainly no football matches or theatre performances. When my mother was in nurse training between the wars, my grandmother was horrified on one of her visits to the nurses’ home to see that my mother was mending her uniform. “Irene, it’s Sunday!” she exclaimed. But the reply came from my mother that she couldn’t do it at any other time, and it needed to be done.

Nowadays, as you roam around York you can see that many churches have been turned into cocktail bars like Jalou in Micklegate, especially busy at the weekends, or cafés like the one in Spurriergate (now closed), The former church of St Sampson’s has long been a social centre and café. Other places evoke the religious vestiges of the city such as the nightclub Salvation in Tanner Row, the Divine Cafe, also on Micklegate, and the Habit on Goodramgate.

Jalou in Micklegate

That was Sunday. So, what about Saturday? Before 1842 almost everyone worked a six-day week. There had long been a tradition of mass absenteeism and poor work performance on Monday which came to be known as Saint Monday, a thoroughly secular phenomenon which aped the previous saints’ days holidays. That year saw the launch of a group called The Early Closing Association which campaigned for half-day working on Saturdays. The weekend as we know it didn’t exist in Britain until 1933 when John Boot, chairman of Boots, decided to give his employees two days off on both Saturday and Sunday. Boot noticed that these two days off reduced absenteeism and he realised that his workforce would turn up on Monday morning ready and invigorated after 48 hours of leisure. The two-day weekend subsequently caught on. People could then enjoy football and other sporting events as well as spend more time with their families.

The irony is that after several decades of free time on Saturdays and Sundays, many people are now finding that their weekend is disappearing in the drive for zero-contract hours and flexible working. Even the five-day working week is being called into question. And the weekend is certainly not what it used to be.

David Wilson is a community writer with The Press