Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T18:50:58.992Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Religious selfhoods and the city in inter-war Manchester

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2011

CHARLOTTE WILDMAN
CHARLOTTE WILDMAN*
Affiliation:
School of Arts, Histories and Cultures, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract:

Manchester's processional tradition began in the nineteenth century and every Whit weekend, until the 1960s, Catholics and Protestants organized separate large celebrations. This article argues that the Catholic Whit celebrations peaked in importance between the two world wars and that this was related to the impact of Manchester Corporation's wider investment in urban redevelopment. It is a story about religion and the self, which reveals important details about the cultural meanings of the inter-war city and contributes to an emerging field of cultural geography that explores the relationship between space and faith.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , May 2011 , pp. 103 - 123
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Spring, H., Shabby Tiger (London, 1965), 128–9Google Scholar.

2 See Waller, P.J., Democracy and Sectarianism: A Political and Social History of Liverpool, 1868–1939 (Liverpool, 1981)Google Scholar, and Boyle, R. and Lynch, P., Out of the Ghetto? The Catholic Community in Modern Scotland (Edinburgh, 1998)Google Scholar.

3 See Kong, L., ‘Religious landscapes’, in Duncan, J., Johnson, N. and Schein, R. (eds.), A Companion to Cultural Geography (Oxford, 2004), 365–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Nash, D., ‘Reconnecting religion with social and cultural history: secularization's failure as a master narrative’, Cultural and Social History, 1 (2002), 302CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Of the three volumes of The Cambridge Urban History of Britain published in 2000, only one chapter explicitly engages with religion, see Rosser, G., with Scottish material by E.P. Dennison, ‘Urban culture and the church 1300–1540’, in Palliser, D.M. (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. I: 600–1540 (Cambridge, 2000), 335–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 See Nead, L., Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (London, 2000)Google Scholar; Houlbrook, M., Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (London, 2005)Google Scholar.

7 Morris, J., ‘The strange death of Christian Britain: another look at the secularization debate’, Historical Journal, 46 (2003), 963–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Hastings, A., A History of English Christianity 1920–1985 (London, 1985), 193Google Scholar. Ross McKibbin also writes, ‘by the standards of many European countries or the United States England was a “dechristianized” country’, R. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998), 276.

9 Walton, J.K., ‘Policing the Alameda: shared and contested leisure space in San Sebastián, c. 1863–1920’, in Gunn, S. and Morris, R.J. (eds.), Identities in Space: Contested Territories in the Western City since 1850 (Aldershot, 2001), 228Google Scholar.

10 Sperber, J., ‘Festivals of national unity in the German Revolution of 1848–1849’, Past and Present, 136 (1992), 116CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Cohen, A.P., The Symbolic Construction of Community (Chichester, 1985), 50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Fielding, S., Class and Ethnicity: Irish Catholics in England, 1880–1939 (Buckingham, 1993), 76–7Google Scholar.

13 See Hamlett, J., ‘“Nicely feminine yet learned”: student rooms at Royal Holloway and the Oxford and Cambridge colleges in late nineteenth-century Britain’, Women's History Review, 15 (2006), 137–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 A collection of oral testimony recording during the early 1990s by the North-West Sound Archive has been used. For methodology and debates regarding oral history see Summerfield, P., Reconstructing Women's Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (Manchester, 1998)Google Scholar.

15 Manchester Guardian (MG), 4 Dec. 1936, Manchester Central Library Local Studies Collection (MCL LSC) Cuttings Collection: Box 481 Religion.

16 Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, 30.

17 Belchem, J., ‘Irish and Polish migration: some preliminary comparative analysis’, in Belchem, J. and Tenfelde, K. (eds.), Irish and Polish Migration in Comparative Perspective (Essen, 2003), 14Google Scholar.

18 See Rea, A., Manchester's Little Italy: Memories of the Italian Colony of Ancoats (Manchester, 1988)Google Scholar.

19 Kidd, A., Manchester (Edinburgh, 2002), 219Google Scholar.

20 Manchester University Settlement, Ancoats: A Study of a Clearance Area. Report of a Survey Made in 1937–1938 (Manchester, 1945), 48, 16 and 61.

21 Ibid., 13.

22 Ibid., 13.

23 Ibid., 4.

24 Manchester Corporation, How Manchester Is Managed: A Record of Municipal Activities, with a Description of the City (Manchester, 1933), 138 and 140–1.

25 Parkinson-Bailey, J., Manchester: An Architectural History (Manchester, 2000), 158Google Scholar.

26 Nevertheless, financial burden was expressed by a significant proportion of a survey undertaken of 304 families living in housing estates in Manchester in 1935. Manchester Evening News (MEN), 16 Nov. 1935, MCL LSC Cuttings 421 Architecture: Housing, Planning, Manchester Corporation.

27 Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, 30.

28 R. Wright, ‘Italian fascism and the British–Italian community, 1928–43: experience and memory’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Manchester, 2005), 8.

29 Bolton, C.A., Salford Diocese and its Catholic Past: A Survey (Manchester, 1950), 6Google Scholar.

30 The provisions of Catholic schools were the other key issue. See M. Broadley, ‘The episcope of Thomas Henshaw, bishop of Salford, 1925–1938’ (M.Phil. thesis, University of Manchester, 1998).

31 Ibid., 129.

32 Bolton, Salford Diocese, 133.

33 Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, 2 and 13.

34 Cohen, Symbolic Construction, 46.

35 Parkinson-Bailey, Manchester, 148–9.

36 Ibid., 150.

37 Ibid., 143.

38 Ibid., 147.

39 Yearsley, I. and Graves, P., The Manchester Tramways (Glossop, 1988), 98 and 108Google Scholar.

40 Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, 76.

41 The Authorised Official Programme of the Catholic Whit-Friday Procession 1927 (Manchester, 1927), 7.

42 North-West Sound Archive Oral Testimony Collection (NW SA OTC). Edith, in Alec Greenlaugh, ‘Mam, I can hear a band’.

43 With the notable exception of C.G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (London, 2000), 164.

44 It is not always possible to distinguish the Protestant and Catholic processions, particularly in the early 1900s, which is why they have been counted together, rather than separately.

45 Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, 76.

46 NW SA OTC. Ivy Bolton b. C. 1925 and Edie Smythe b. c. 1920.

47 Fielding, S., ‘The Catholic Whit-Walk in Manchester and Salford, 1890–1939’, Manchester Regional History Review, 1 (1987), 9Google Scholar.

48 Ibid., 3–10.

49 Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, 76–7.

50 St Paul's Ancoats, 1920, MCL LIC Ref m69185.

51 Manchester University Settlement, Ancoats, 13.

52 MEN, 22 May 1920, 2.

53 See St Gabriel's Church, Whit Walk, Manchester 1915 MCL LIC Ref m69199; St Joseph's Roman Catholic Walk, Mossley, GMCRO IC Ref 1036/9; Joynson Memorial Church Whit Walk, Manchester, 1920 MCL LIC Ref m69206.

54 Catholic Procession, Manchester, 30 May 1921, Pathé Online Film Archive (POFA), Number 234.41

55 Protestant Procession, Manchester, 19 May 1921, POFA 234.21.

56 R. Judge, ‘Merrie England and the Morris, 1881–1910’, Folklore, 104, 1/2 (1993), 124–43.

57 Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, 76.

58 Prescott, A., ‘“We had fine banners”: street processions in the Mitchell and Kenyon Films’, in Toulmin, V., Russell, P. and Popple, S. (eds.), The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film (London, 2004), 127Google Scholar.

59 MG, 10 Jun. 1922, 5.

60 Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, 73.

61 Herbert, M., The Wearing of the Green: A Political History of the Irish in Manchester (London, 2001), 108–15Google Scholar.

62 The Authorised Official Programme of the Catholic Whit-Friday Procession 1925 (Manchester, 1925), 15.

63 The Authorised Official Programme of the Catholic Whit-Friday Procession 1932 (Manchester, 1932), 13.

64 See also St Williams Catholic Whit processions 1926, MCL LIC Ref m69219 and m69220.

65 The Authorised Official Programme of the Catholic Whit-Friday Procession 1931 (Manchester, 1931), 19.

66 NW SA OTC. Margaret Kierman b. 7 Mar. 1925.

67 Procession and Crowning of the Rose Queen, 1928, 35mm, British Film Institute Archive, St. B/W POS 606487A.

68 NW SA OTC. Alec Greenhalgh, ‘Mam I can hear a band’.

69 NW SA OTC. Winifred Kelly b. 1913.

70 NW SA OTC. Edith in Alec Greenlaugh, ‘Mam, I can hear a band’.

71 Steedman, C., ‘Englishness, clothes and little things’, in Breward, C., Conekin, B. and Cox, N. (eds.), The Englishness of English Dress (Oxford, 2002), 35Google Scholar.

72 Alexander, S., ‘Becoming a woman in London in the 1920s and 1930s’, in Feldman, D. and Stedman Jones, G. (eds.), Metropolis: London, Histories and Representations (London, 1989), 264Google Scholar.

73 NW SA OTC. Winifred Kelly.

74 NW SA OTC. Margaret Kierman and Ivy.

75 Catholic Herald, 2 Jun. 1934, 1.

76 Cohen, A.P., Whalsay: Symbol, Segment and Boundary in a Shetland Island Community (Manchester, 1987), 181Google Scholar.

77 See Alexander, , ‘Becoming a woman in London in the 1920s and 1930s’, and S. Todd, ‘Young women, work, and leisure in interwar England’, Historical Journal, 48 (2005), 789–809Google Scholar.

78 The Tablet, 4 Jan. 1919, 133, 559. This led to the formation of leagues against ‘immodest dress’, by Catholic women throughout the world.

79 L. Charles, bishop of Salford, ‘Regina Pacis: an advent pastoral letter’, The Acta, 1919, Salford Diocesan Archive (SDA).

80 L. Charles, bishop of Salford, ‘Lenten pastoral letter’, The Acta, 1921, SDA.

81 NW SA OTC. Margaret Kierman.

82 Catholic procession in Manchester, 28 May 1934, POFA 787.21.

83 NW SA OTC. Essie and Ronnie Strul (b. 1926 and 1929).

84 NW SA OTC. Alma Todhill and Ivy Bolton.

85 Protestant procession 1933, GMRCO Image Collection Ref. M38/39.

86 Mass-Observation Archive: WT 20/g.

87 Harvest, 5 Apr. 1938, 177.

88 Cohen, Symbolic Construction, 46–50.

89 For an excellent anthropological study of Catholic celebrations in New York City, see Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of the 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (London, 1985).

90 T.G. Fraser, The Irish Parading Tradition: Following the Drum (Basingstoke, 2000).

91 Liverpool's Scotland Road area, home to the majority of the city's Irish Catholic population, was not subject to redevelopment until the 1950s and new suburban housing was too expensive for the majority of the working-class population. M. McKenna, ‘The suburbanisation of the working-class population of Liverpool between the wars’, Social History, 16 (1991), 181.

92 Valiulis, M., ‘Neither feminist nor flapper: the ecclesiastical construction of the ideal Irish woman’, in O'Dowd, M. and Wichert, S. (eds.), Chattel, Servant or Citizen. Women's Status in Church, State and Society (Belfast, 1995), 175Google Scholar.

93 Brown, Death of Christian Britain, 192.

94 Cronin, M. and Adair, D., The Wearing of the Green: A History of St Patrick's Day (London, 2002)Google Scholar.