Leisure and Class in Victorian England

Rational recreation and the contest for control, 1830-1885

Peter Bailey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317973607
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 2006. Part of the Studies in Social History series, this volume looks at leisure and class in Victorian England, 1830-85, including topics of popular recreation, middle class and working class differences and rational recreation for the masses and the case of Victorian Music Halls in the entertainment industry.

1

Popular Recreation in the Early Victorian Town

The early historians of England as an urban industrial society have left us with an overall picture of popular recreation which is cramped and joyless — the Hammonds, for example, concluded that ‘the new towns were built for a race that was allowed no leisure. … recreation was waste’ — yet, while it must be recognised that the town worker suffered from lack of time and space for recreation, and that the amusements of the poor were still under frequent attack from the superior classes, what is just as remarkable is the vitality and adaptability displayed by popular recreation under these siege conditions. (1)

I

In seeking first to demonstrate the vitality of popular recreation in this period, one must allow that the evidence for this does in part help to confirm the Hammonds' picture of gross deprivation. Foreigners had frequently been alarmed at the exuberance of the Englishman at play — a Frenchman who witnessed a football game in Derby in 1829 was moved to remark that, if Englishmen called this playing, it would be impossible to say what they would call fighting — but it becomes clear enough that such occasions were often now formless and convulsive compensations for the strains of a coercive industrial society, rather than the ritualised exercises of a traditional popular hedonism. The new industrial wage-earner was still in a minority in the workforce, but the unprecedented regularity and intensity that characterised his working hours were gradually being demanded of all sections of the labouring population and, in general, the pattern of tension and release in working life had become tauter. Contemplating Manchester in 1844 another Frenchman, Léon Faucher, was much disturbed at the immoderation in all things which characterised the new industrial Englishman. He thought that overworking was a malady which Lancashire had inflicted on the whole country; it was balanced only by another extreme, the incontinence of the Englishman's recreation. ‘They cannot partake of anything in moderation; they must partake of it to repletion.’ Francis Place, recalling the grinding demands placed on his early working life, remembered how he would tear himself away from his work and rush out to some park or open space in the city for a brief respite before ‘returning to his vomit’. Given such experience, he professed himself well able to understand the reactions of the ‘uninformed man’, and the latter's urgent need ‘to procure the excitement which MUST be procured’. Looking back at the improvement in manners from the vantage point of 1867, two students of working-class life recalled the pattern of the 1830s as one of ‘noisy, drunken riot … alternated with sullen, silent work’. (2)

Noise and drink were common accompaniments of popular recreation — in some minds no doubt their dual presence thereby constituted a riot — but they did not always or necessarily indicate a simple reflex action of despair to the grinding tedium of work. Mention of them should, however, remind us that working-class leisure was for the most part public and gregarious, and that its principal everyday setting was that of the public house. As an old workingman pointed out in recalling conditions in industrial Yorkshire in the 1830s: (3)

There were only two places to go in spending spare time away from one's own house — church, chapel or alehouse; the former were seldom open, while the latter was seldom closed. The first was not attractive, the second was made attractive.

Among the attractions of the pub were a great variety of recreations which brought enrichment as well as escape to the life of the town worker.

Reports in Bolton's local press reveal how diverse and extensive were the activities held in the pub or its gardens: bowling, quoiting, glee clubs and free and easies, amateur and professional dramatics, fruit and vegetable shows, flower shows, sweepstake clubs and the meetings of trades' and friendly societies. (4) The latter occasions combined business with pleasure, and serve as an example of how the pull of the public house as the institutional hub of working-class recreation was reinforced by the wide range of social and economic services which it offered. The pub served as a labour exchange, a pay station and a port of call for the tramping artisan. Initiation into particular trades and other customs of the workplace still often demanded the treating of workmates, which tied men further to the credit of the local pub. For the single man in lodgings the pub was the closest thing to a home — here he would take his meals and read the newspapers. And always there was beer — ‘the friendly mug of beer’ — which, as Charles Booth later remarked, ‘was the primordial cell of British social life’. Thus in an age of social dislocation the pub remained a centre of warmth, light and sociability for the urban poor, a haven from the filth and meanness of inadequate and congested housing, a magnet for the disoriented newcomer and the disgruntled regular alike. ‘There is plenty of gas and company to keep us alive’, explained the customers who were quizzed by an enquiring cleric; ‘there is always society in the pubs, and the men there are so very agreeable.’ (5)

The most prominent among the many clubs and associations which met on pub premises were the friendly societies. Their activities were well reported in Bolton where membership grew during the 1830s and 1840s despite frequent hard times, and in 1850 there were over 200 lodges of the various societies in the town. Sociability and entertainment were among the prime functions of these fraternities of working people and the ‘Grand Lodge Circular’ of the Bolton Oddfellows records the recitations and songs with which members regaled one another throughout the year, but the annual feasts were the great occasions. As many as thirty or forty might be held on a single night, with the lodge banners decorated with evergreens flying from the pub windows. Foot races and dancing were held in the street, but it was the inner man (and woman) who came first, for it was food and drink in abundance which marked the successful anniversary. (6) The staples of roast beef and strong ale were not merely customary — they were part of the birthright of the freeborn Englishman; ‘a mechanic at a feast’, noted a contemporary, ‘thinks himself scurvily used if he is supplied with less than a gallon of strong ale.’ (7)

But as the previous inventory of activities demonstrates, pub life was not all cakes and ale, and there was enough ‘rationality’ in popular recreation inside and outside the pub, to secure the acknowledgement of middle-class contemporaries alert to such qualities. In Nottingham, reported James Hudson, in his survey of adult education written in 1851, ‘there are several Working Men's libraries HELD IN PUBLIC HOUSES’ (the emphasis seems more intended to counter the incredulity of the reader than to underline the exceptional). ‘At two of these houses’, Hudson continued, ‘political discussions are also held under judicious regulations.’ A churchman in Bolton recorded how two workingmen explained their absence from a Sunday lecture at chapel — they were attending a discussion at their local pub on the existence of God. From Manchester, Faucher reported that Handel and Haydn were ‘as household words’ in the manufacturing districts of Lancashire; there was no difficulty in raising choirs among the factory operatives. (8) The popularity of clubs and choirs confirms the continuing communal nature of working-class recreation, but one must note here too the already familiar exception of the working-class solitary: Job Legh, the weaver botanist, in Mrs Gaskell's ‘Mary Barton’; Joseph Gutteridge, a weaver from real life who studied natural history in the fields around Coventry; Charles Manby Smith, a journeyman printer from London, who painted water-colours and studied the pianoforte. (9) In these and certain other interests individual workingmen found a private freedom of expression in their leisure time. Thus literate and intellectual interests coexisted with the more boisterous traditional recreations among a working class whose culture had been as much stimulated as disrupted by economic upheaval and social conflict. Whatever the partisan emphasis, Samuel Bamford's pride in listing the accomplishments of his Lancashire workmates in 1844 seems well justified: (10)

they are the greatest readers; can show the greatest number of good writers; the greatest number of sensible and considerate public speakers. They can show a greater number of botanists; a greater number of horticulturists, a greater number who are acquainted with the abstruse sciences; the greatest number of poets, and a greater number of good musicians, whether choral or instrumental.

II

Together with this resilient and diverse vitality, popular recreation displayed the further strength of adaptibility, as revealed in the response to those constraints noted by the Hammonds: the curtailment of time and space, and the hostility of the superior classes.

Conditions of regular employment in the manufacturing towns appeared to allow only the merest scrapings of free time. In the previous century normal working hours had been long enough — ten hours was the traditional day's labour — and in many trades the week had culminated in a feverish climax of activity to catch market deadlines, but the rhythm of work had been largely self-imposed and often leisurely, weekends had been elastic and holidays numerous. The stricter work discipline of capitalist production had severely curtailed such liberalities. (11) In 1840 the prominent factory inspector, Leonard Horner, found that the twelve-hour working day that was now normal in textile mills left the worker ‘utterly unfit for anything like mental improvement … and not very fit for much social enjoyment with his family’. John Fielden, the reforming manufacturer, was greatly struck by the testimony of a youngster in one of the mills that there was ‘never any time to play’; another millowner admitted that the time left for recreation and improvement after the average working day was scarcely two hours. (12) Sunday was the only day commonly free from work, but for the working wife it was the one day available for the washing and other accumulated domestic tasks; for the rest of the family the propensity to stay in bed on a Sunday was no doubt less a matter of choice than a necessary recruitment of strength. (13) By 1834 there were only eight statutory half-holidays in England, and the traditional calendar of religious feast days and the celebrations of seasonal tasks or particular trades had been considerably pruned, both by the employers and the Church. (14)

But the working classes stretched the meagre allowance of free time. Sunday's leisure, for example, could still be extended through the largesse of ‘St Monday’, who continued to claim many devotees. Disraeli recorded the popularity of the extended weekend in describing the industrial town of Wodgate in ‘Sybil, or the Two Nations’, his novel on the ‘Condition of England’ in the 1840s: (15)

The social system is not an unvarying course of infinite toil. The plan is to work hard, but not always. The men seldom exceed four days of labour in the week. On Sunday the master workmen begin to drink; for the apprentices there is dog-fighting without stint. On Monday and Tuesday the whole population is drunk. Here is relaxation, excitement.

It was in the 1840s too that the factory commissioners reported frequent occasions when extra holidays were conceded. ‘It was’, they remarked, ‘not due to liberality on the part of the masters, but to custom.’ In one area of Lancashire it was averred that the workers enjoyed a fortnight's break at Christmas, a full week at Whitsun, ‘three or four days at Ringley Wakes, about the same at Ratcliff Races, and at odd times besides’. Often it was sport as much as drink that was irresistible. Thus the exploits of Ben Hart, Bolton's pedestrian champion of these years, drew crowds which left the local mills half-empty. From the Warwickshire pits a witness reported: (16)

When there is such a matter of universal interest as a prize fight most go to see it, and it is a day's play. Upon the average there may be five or six such occasions in the course of a summer.

Elections also occasioned impromptu holidays — when an MP complained of a certain bill in 1828 which proposed to limit the duration of elections, that ‘it abridged the constitutional enjoyments of the people’, he was not referring to their rights of suffrage; similarly, ‘The Times’ noted that the great reform demonstration in Birmingham in 1833 had ‘the appearance of a great fair … the excuse for making holyday’. (17) Also relevant here, of course, is the measure of what might be called involuntary leisure in working-class life, when the work schedule was interrupted by structural breakdowns in production, seasonal drops in particular trades or periods of general business depression. Though they rued the economic consequences, men habituated to such fluctuations must have developed some capacity for improvising casual diversions in these breaks. In any case, enough has been said to nod in agreement with one experienced contemporary who concluded that the workingman ‘possesses more facilities for getting holidays than is generally supposed’. (18)

The practice of such time-honoured delinquencies as St Monday obviously varied according to the economic setting. In Disraeli's Wodgate (modelled on the lockmaking town of Willenhall in Staffordshire) small workshops rather than factories provided the typical work situation, and there masters and men shared a common indulgence. Domestic outworkers were less confined than factory hands — in Bury in the 1830s the handloom weavers would drop their work whenever the hounds passed by and join in the chase. (19) Men in relatively minor trades, on the other hand, might lack the numbers necessary to outface their employers — we learn from the ‘Bolton Chronicle’ for 9 August 1834 that five apprentice combmakers ‘who seemed to consider that they had a prescriptive right to a holiday on the Horse Fair Day’ were successfully prosecuted for absenteeism. Among factory workers, for whom industrial discipline was tightest, the claims of St Monday and other unscheduled and illicit breaks were far from extinguished, but here labour's principal response to the new rigorism was that of organised protest rather than the sporadic reaffirmation of traditional rights. The northern textile workers' struggle for the Ten Hours Bill (passed into law in 1847) was in a sense conservative, for it sought a return to the traditional measure of a normal day's work, but its logic was modern and forward-looking. The movement implicitly acknowledged the separation of work and leisure into exclusive domains while trying to negotiate a more humane balance between the two; in principle labour was now prepared to accept the austere regimen of factory production in return for the guaranteed regularity of a fair level of leisure time. The simultaneous demand for a Saturday half-holiday reflected the same philosophy and was supported by a substantial minority of employers who appreciated that such a concession on their part might not only win better attendance and punctuality in working hours, but might also effectively stabilise the workers' leisure within the fixed limits of a mutually defined weekend. The ‘short Saturday’ written into the 1847 act was still eight hours long, but a further measure in 1850 obliged textile mills to cease work at 2 p.m. on Saturday and in Manchester the new hours soon became standard for most other trades. Elsewhere these gains were still to be won, but in the north-west the modern English weekend was clearly taking shape. (20)

Restrictions on space were severe in the industrial town, and were more difficult to overcome. Open space vanished before the march of bricks and mortar: in Coventry, the mayor complained of the enclosure of the town's open park which had deprived the young men of ‘much active exercise’ and driven them into the public house; in Bolton, the gardeners' club, which had been formed to encourage workingmen's allotments, had become the preserve of gentlemen's gardeners from the suburbs as the patches of old cottage gardens disappeared from the town itself. (21) One common resort, the pub garden, was vulnerable to the pressure on building space, rising ground rents and neighbours' complaints of the crowd nuisance. In London, the somewhat more ambitious pleasure gardens, often descendants of eighteenth-century institutions, had long since lost their fashionable clientèle, and were similarly prone to complaints from the respectables. (22) It is commonly suggested that even in the 1850s and 1860s few towns or cities were so large that the countryside was more than a few minutes' walk away. It should be pointed out, however, that, on the evidence of Bolton, it seems that such an apparently simple excursion could be extremely hazardous where it meant negotiating the often hostile streets beyond one's immediate neighbourhood. In any case, access to the countryside was further limited by the denial of footpath rights by the landowners. (23)

The most obvious escape from confinement was the mass breakout such as Dickens described in the Londoners' ‘spring rush’ to Greenwich Fair. Bolton held major fairs in its market square at New Year and Whitsuntide, but equally popular were the wakes, a succession of fairs celebrated in late summer in the villages and townships surrounding the borough. At Whitsun the country cousins came to town and their awe at beholding the big city gave the break its local title of ‘Gaping Sunday’; in August and September the flow was reversed and the town workers burst out into the villages. (24) Race meetings were other great occasions in the popular calendar. The progress of the London crowds from the metropolis to Epsom Downs on Derby Day was advertised by the huge swirling cloud of dust which hung over their route. On race days Mancunians debouched to Kersal Moor, the ‘mons sacer’ of the cotton towns as Engels called it. Belle Vue pleasure gardens (the scene of early brass band contests) also provided an important outlet for Manchester. (25)...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Popular Recreation in the Early Victorian Town
• 2 Rational Recreation: Voices of Improvement
• 3 The New Leisure World of the Mid-Victorians: the Expansion of Middle-class Recreation, its Practice and Problems
• 4 Dispensing Recreation to the Masses in the New Leisure World
• 5 Rational Recreation in Operation: the Working Men's Club movement
• 6 Rational Recreation and the New Athleticism
• 7 Rational Recreation and the Entertainment Industry: the Case of the Victorian Music Halls
• Conclusions
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index