Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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Was football’s popularity a consequence of the ‘dull monotony of life in our
large towns’ – as was suggested in ? Scattered occupational data suggest that
football crowds in this period were disproportionally drawn from artisans and
white-collar workers, rather than labourers (whose wages still meant life was
more about endurance than enjoyment). The excitement of sudden-death cup
competitions certainly gave an enormous impetus to the spread of the game.
Crowds of four, and even five, figures were soon common, especially after
when Blackburn Olympic showed a northern club could win the FA Cup.
However, soccer supporters’ enthusiasm also reflected a continuity of function
with sporting events in the less-urbanised past, and their communal loyalism
sometimes meshed with religious and cultural sectarianism: in Edinburgh and
Dundee, and, most notoriously, in Glasgow where the Protestant Rangers versus
Catholic Celtic rivalry also incorporated elements of Scottish and Irish nation-
alism (though Catholic Everton versus Protestant Liverpool represents more
myth than substance).
41
Already by clubs in large Midland and Lancashire towns were enabled
by buoyant gate receipts to pay ‘foreign’trainers and players (especially Scotsmen)
to enhance competitiveness, with the result that one dominant team usually
developed in each area (with more in great cities), and by the anguished
amateurs at the Football Association were forced to accept overt professionalism
Douglas A. Reid
Footnote (cont.)
centre of innovation –’, International Journal of the History of Sport, (), ; A. J.
Arnold, ‘The belated entry of professional soccer into the West Riding textile district of north-
ern England: commercial imperatives and problems’, International Journal of the History of Sport,
(), ; D. D. Molyneux, ‘The development of physical recreation in the Birmingham dis-
trict from to ’ (MA thesis, University of Birmingham, ), pp. –, and appen-
dices A and B; Tony Mason, ‘The Blues and the Reds’, Transactions of the Historical Society of
Lancashire and Cheshire, (), , n. ; M. Huggins, ‘The spread of Association foot-
ball, in North-East England, –: the pattern of diffusion’, International Journal of the History
of Sport, (), , ; Bailey, Leisure and Class, p. ; Keith Sandiford and Wray Vamplew,
‘The peculiar economics of English cricket before ’, British Journal of Sports History, (),
–, ; R. Holt, ‘Working-class football and the city: the problem of continuity’, British
Journal of Sports History, (), –; R. Holt, ‘Football and the urban way of life in nineteenth-
century Britain’, in Mangan, ed., Pleasure, Profit, Proselytism, pp. –; Cunningham, Leisure in
the Industrial Revolution, p. ; [Political and Economic Planning], ‘The football industry’,
Planning, , (), , , .
41
Ernest Ensor, ‘The football madness’, Contemporary Review, (), –; Mason, Association
Football and English Society, pp. –, , –, , –; Beattie, Blackburn, pp. –; Lincoln
Allison, ‘Association football and the urban ethos’, in J. D. Wirth and R. L. Jones, eds., Manchester
and Sao Paulo (Stanford, ), pp. –; David Russell, Football and the English:A Social History
of Association Football in England, – (Preston, ), pp. , , –; Trainor, Black Country
Elites, p. ; Bill Murray, The Old Firm: Sectarianism, Sport and Society in Scotland (Edinburgh,
), pp. –, ff; Mason, ‘The Blues and the Reds’, –. For earlier parochialism expressed
through recreation see Malcolmson, Popular Recreations, pp. –; for small town rivalry over
wakes and cock fighting and bull baiting see Walton and Poole, ‘The Lancashire wakes’, p. ,
and Reid, ‘Beasts and brutes’, pp. ‒; and over brass-band contests see Russell, Popular Music
in England, p. , cf. p. .
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to avoid losing control over the sport. By the most commercially advanced
clubs formed the Football League (Preston, Everton, Burnley, Bolton,
Blackburn and Accrington from Lancashire, and the Midlands’ Aston Villa,
Derby, Notts County, Stoke, West Bromwich Albion, and Wolverhampton
Wanderers). Significantly, only two were from towns of less than , popu-
lation. The League attracted , spectators during the first season, and was
joined in by Sheffield’s United and Wednesday. The Southern League
() also soon attracted very large numbers, especially to London clubs. The
Scottish League () sanctioned professionalism in .
42
Football grounds grew from simple roped-offfields in the s to pitches with
grandstands attached in the s as spectator numbers swelled; by –,
million spectators were attracted, giving an average home crowd of ,. After
crowds of several tens of thousands became commonplace in the new First
and Second Divisions. The roar of the crowd, and its forceful flow through the
streets surrounding a stadium, was another characteristic element of the modern
townscape – captured artistically by Lowry’s The Football Ground ().
43
The great bulk of interwar ‘shilling supporters’ were still adult male working
men, though improved living standards increased the proportion of labourers,
enhancing football’s function as a source of communal identity. There were
many others who followed the game as readers of the football ‘specials’ (estab-
lished in most towns by the s), and as radio listeners from the s. In large
cities the press thus helped in generalising support beyond its traditional territo-
ries, as in Birmingham in response to Aston Villa’s Cup and League success
before and in the s. Clubs in smaller towns, such as Swindon or
Barnsley, were only able to survive the Depression (and the effects of rival attrac-
tions such as betting, motorcycles and cinema) by means of community action,
such as supporters’ club and fund-raising activities. Huge celebrations of cup vic-
tories drew upon this shadow support. Brass bands played ‘See the conquering
hero comes’, civic dignitaries mounted receptions and enthusiastic crowds con-
tained significant proportions of normally excluded women, creating an uplift-
ing sense of community, which was then transmitted to the rest of the town by
newspaper reports.
44
Playing and praying
42
Mason, Association Football and English Society, pp. –, ; Russell, Football and the English, pp.
–; Holt, ‘Working class football and the city’, ; Fraser, ‘Developments in Leisure’, p. .
43
Fraser, ‘Developments in leisure’, pp. , ; [Political and Economic Planning], ‘The football
industry’, , ; Holt, ‘Working-class football and the city’, ; Simon Inglis, The Football
Grounds of England and Wales (London, ); Mason, Sport in Britain, pp. –, , ; Russell,
Football and the English, pp. –, –; Mervyn Levy, The Paintings of L. S. Lowry (London, ),
plate , cf. plate , Going to the Match, .
44
Mason, Association Football and English Society,pp.–, –; Russell, ‘“Sporadic and
curious”’, , –; Russell, Football and the English,pp.–, ;Jeff Hill, ‘Rites of spring: cup
finals and community in the North of England’, in Jeff Hill and Jack Williams, Sport and Identity
in the North of England (Keele, ), pp. , ; Sutcliffe and Smith, History of Birmingham,p.
; Fishwick, English Football and Society,pp.–, , ‒, –, ‒, –, –.
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In football dominated sports’ spectatorship: million saw the ninety-
two Football League clubs; million watched non-League football and
million Scottish League matches. Rugby ( million) and cricket ( million) were
large also-rans. It is true that gambling opportunities attracted million people
(particularly men) to mechanical greyhound racing (established in at Belle
Vue, and at neon-lit tracks in most major towns within a year), and ‘hero-
worship’ attracted million (mainly female) spectators to speedway racing
(which was introduced from Australia in ). Nevertheless, soccer, had much
more social visibility, and it is not too much to say that popular civic identity was
more generally created and sustained by the successes of sports teams than by any
other factor.
45
Yet despite football’s popularity, in nearly five times more people went
to cinemas than to every other form of taxable entertainment, and spent twice
as much there. Cinema appealed to men, women and children – particularly to
women. In Salford they especially liked ‘the love tales, anything that made you
cry’; in the s male working-class Londoners tended to go only when taking
a girl out or ‘when they have nothing better to do’; the women pursued ‘matinée
idols’ (as did bored lower-middle-class housewives lonely in the new suburbs).
Nationally, million people attended cinemas every week by ; in , the
peak year, attendances numbered more than million, every week.
46
However, cinema attendance was not proportional across the country. In
general, the further north a town, the greater the cinema’s popularity: thus, in
, of forty-nine provincial towns and cities with populations of more than
, the notional ‘average person’ in Preston, Glasgow, Blackpool,
Manchester and Newcastle attended the cinema at least once a week, whereas
in Coventry, Luton, Plymouth and Bristol he or she attended only once a fort-
night. Despite its large and luxurious cinemas the ‘average Londoner’ only went
once every ten days.
47
Why was cinema going generally more popular in northern towns? Contem-
porary commentators stressed that audiences in the s were still preponder-
antly female, working class and young: factors which surely explain variations in
cinema attendance. Thus Coventry and Luton (expanding towns with many
male immigrants) had very low male/female ratios, and low cinema attendances.
Similarly, working-class towns and cities like Preston, Glasgow and Sunderland
Douglas A. Reid
45
[Political and Economic Planning], ‘The football industry’, , ‒; Graves and Hodge, The
Long Week-End, pp. –; New Survey of London Life and Labour, , pp. –; Mark Clapson, A
Bit of a Flutter: Popular Gambling and English Society, c. – (Manchester, ), pp. –;
Norman Baker, ‘Going to the dogs – hostility to greyhound racing in Britain: puritanism, social-
ism, and pragmatism’, Journal of Sport History, (), –.
46
Calculated from Browning and Sorrell, ‘Cinemas and cinema-going’, –; New Survey of
London Life and Labour, , p. ; Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty,pp.–; B. S. Rowntree,
Poverty and Progress: A Second Social Survey of York (London, ), p. ; Jackson, Middle Classes,
p. .
47
Browning and Sorrell, ‘Cinemas and cinema-going’, –, .
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were high on the cinema-going scale, whereas middle-class dormitories like
Wallasey and Southend were low. Overcrowded housing surely drove people to
the cinema in the twentieth century as to the pub in the nineteenth: hence
Glasgow, Dundee and Tyneside’s towns went frequently compared with less-
crowded Norwich and Northampton. Finally, cinema audiences were predom-
inantly young, and those of them who were still at school could surely afford to
go less often. Certainly Bristol, whose citizens had the least propensity to go to
the cinema, had more than one third of its over-fifteens in school, and Swansea
and Plymouth showed similar contrasts.
48
The very act of going to city-centre and even town-centre cinemas was a
defining element of the urban experience because it was a night ‘on the town’.
However, Charlie Chaplin aside, the most popular films probably contributed
more to the formation of a sense of national than of urban identity. In Bolton
in the s these were historical dramas, at one level providing escape from dis-
agreeable social circumstances, but more important in providing role models and
gender images of tough guys and womanly women within an increasingly patri-
otic, democratic, sentimental, public culture. Of course, demographically, by the
s the town was the nation.
49
Critics (often inspired by nonconformity) feared passivity, the end of self-
expression and the Americanisation of taste. J. B. Priestley, for instance, depicted
cinema going as part of ‘the new urban life’ of the s ‘in which amusement
was sold to a “passive drowsy crowd . . . who can do nothing for themselves”’.
However, cinema goers were not simply passive spectators, but had pronounced
tastes (voting with their feet in favour of entertaining American films vis-à-vis
unexciting and stilted British-quota productions). Cinema going in the s
was a communal rather than an individualistic experience, through the experi-
ence of queuing, community singing and (in South Wales) attending the numer-
ous cinemas established by miners’ institutes. Large city cinemas incorporated
dance halls and cafés.
50
Priestley harked back to the lively musical and mutual improvement scene of
his Bradford youth, and it is indeed impressive that there were some fifty choirs
Playing and praying
48
Kathleen Box, ‘The cinema and the public’, The Social Survey, new series, (), –;
Richards, Age of the Dream Palace, pp. –; for socio-economic differences between towns see
C. A. Moser and W. Scott, Br itish Towns (Edinburgh, ), pp. –ff. Cf. R. McKibbin, Classes
and Cultures (Oxford, ), p. .
49
Jeffrey Richards, ‘Cinemagoing in Worktown: regional film audiences in s Britain’, Historical
Journal of Film, Radio and Television, (), –; J. Sedgwick, ‘Cinema-going preferences in
Britain in the s’, in Jeffrey Richards, ed., The Unknown : An Alternative History of the British
Cinema, – (London, ).
50
Glass, The Town and a Changing Civilisation, pp. –, ; Priestley cited in Stephen Ridgwell,
‘South Wales and the cinema in the s’, Welsh History Review, (), –; New Survey
of London Life and Labour, , pp. n. , ; Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, p. ;
Richards, ‘The cinema and cinema-going in Birmingham’, –; Richards, Age of the Dream
Palace, pp. ‒ff.
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and bands extant in Bradford and its environs in –, playing Bach to
Wagner. Such intense musical culture was widespread throughout the North and
in South Wales – and in smaller towns rather than large cities, where occupa-
tional communities were stronger, patronage was more accepted and commer-
cial entertainment was less influential. Yet even in London in the s
systematic social investigators found evidence that ‘the human spirit’ craved
‘active means of self-expression’, through sport, drama, dancing, gardening,
flower growing, angling, pigeon fancying – they might also have mentioned
knitting, needlework and pub sing-songs. Moreover, the London Survey actually
found ‘a marked increase in the popular appeal of music’ since the s, fos-
tered by schools, the new adult education services, youth organisations and
workplace and religious bodies, and expressed in bands, choirs and orchestras –
with a musical society in ‘nearly every suburb’. Nevertheless, parlour musical
gatherings were eroded by radio and gramophones, and cinema was quintessen-
tially ‘the people’s amusement’.
51
(v)
Although the aristocracy and gentry revelled in country life, landowners were
leading figures in early nineteenth-century urban leisure. Nevertheless, this came
increasingly under a cloud of evangelical disapproval – directed particularly
against theatres, taverns, pleasure gardens, and assemblies – and resulting in legal
curbs on cock fighting, gaming and prize fighting. In the same period the middle
classes began to seek the best of both town and country, to be domiciled in sylvan
suburbs, but within reach of the city for work. Here they built an alternative
social life, based on the belief that female virtue was best achieved through
domesticity, and on careful association with people of like mind and like status
in leisure activities – moulding and reinforcing respectable life styles in intimate
arenas such as soirées and dinner parties. Yet ‘club life’, and ‘night life’, attracted
both middle classes and landowners. There was interaction rather than total sep-
aration. Thus, cricket, hare coursing, race meetings and riding to hounds drew
upon large middle-class segments, as did ‘party excursion’ to aristocratic seats.
Similarly, the London ‘Season’ – and its focal points such as presentations at
Court, the Royal Academy Exhibition, riding on Rotten Row – represented a
climax of the hobnobbing, match-making, politicking lives of later nineteenth-
century plutocratic ‘Society’. Yet many of the houses in Mayfair and Belgravia,
Douglas A. Reid
51
Russell, ‘The pursuit of leisure’, pp. –; Russell, Popular Music in England,pp.–, ,
–, n. ; Ian Jones, Brass Bands in York, – (York, ); Gareth Williams, Valleys
of Song Music and Society in Wales, – (Cardiff, ); New Survey of London Life and Labour,
, pp. , –, , –; Jones, Workers at Play, pp. –, , –; Mass-Observation, The
Pub and the People, pp. –; Evans and Boyd, The Use of Leisure in Hull, pp. , ‒; Zweig,
Women’s Life and Labour, p. . See also McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, pp. –. Note also that
library borrowers rose from per cent to per cent of the urban population between and
: Lionel R. McColvin, The Public Library System of Great Britain (London, ), p. .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Kensington and Bayswater were rented for the three to five months of the
Season, and during much of that time ‘Society’ was taking trips out of town to
Ascot, Epsom and Henley. Aristocratic and high bourgeois leisure was defined
at least as much by country house parties, hunt balls and Cowes Week as it was
by metropolitan pleasures (although the decline of the country house after
altered the balance somewhat).
52
Much middle-class leisure was socially exclusive and ‘rational’ in aspiration.
Restricted-access Botanical Gardens notably exemplified both. They were
‘rational’ both in an educational or scientific sense, and in the sense of being
sedate, refined, ordered, morally safe, in contrast to the sensual gratifications and
brutality which were held to characterise both aristocratic and lower-class
recreation. This critique was shaped by decades of philosophical distinction
between ‘rationals’ and ‘brutes’, but most immediately by evangelical concepts
of the consequences for personal salvation of ‘worldliness’, which had come to
dominate most religious discourse by the s. Thus evangelicals believed the
theatre to be one of the broadest avenues to moral destruction, which, taken in
conjunction with the pronounced sensitivity to class characterising these eco-
nomically disturbed decades, depressed theatrical attendances: the often rowdy
and unrestrained behaviour of both gallery ‘gods’and ‘young bloods’in the boxes
was thoroughly distasteful to respectables. Changes in urban topography also
played a role as formerly eligible districts began to deteriorate: thus Bristol’s
Theatre Royal was left behind in King Street when its richer patrons migrated
from Queen Square to Clifton. Respectable ladies were loath to risk ‘contami-
nation’ from ‘women of the town’, or (in Leicester) to risk being ‘jostled by the
Playing and praying
52
F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (London, ), pp. ff;
G. R. Scott, The History of Cockfighting (London, ), esp. pp. –; John Angell James, The
Christian Father’s Present to his Children (London, ; rd edn, ), pp. –; Ian Bradley, The
Call to Seriousness:The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians (London, ), ch. ; Roger Munting,
An Economic and Social History of Gambling in Britain and the USA (Manchester, ), pp. , ,
–; John Timbs, Clubs and Club Life in London (London, ), pp. ‒, –; J. W.
Hudson, The History of Adult Education, vol. (London, ), pp. –, –, –; Alan
White, ‘Class, culture, and control: the Sheffield Athenaeum movement and the middle class’, in
Janet Wolff and John Seed, The Culture of Capital (Manchester, ), pp. –, n. ; S.
Nenadic, ‘The Victorian middle classes’, in Fraser and Maver, eds., Glasgow, , pp. –; A.
Briggs, Victorian Cities (London, ), pp. , ; Joyce, Work, Society and Politics, pp. –;
Katharine Chorley, Manchester Made Them (London, ), pp. –, –; Machray, The Night
Side of London, pp. , ; Walter Besant, London in the Nineteenth Century (London, ),
pp. ‒, ; Ralph Nevill, London Clubs (London, ), pp. –, ; Ritchie, Night Side,
pp. ff; J. Schlör, Nights in the Big City (London, ), p. ; Raymond Carr, English
Foxhunting: A History (London, ); David C. Itzkowitz, Peculiar Privilege: A Social History of
English Foxhunting (Hassocks, ); Beattie, Blackburn, pp. –; Mike Huggins, ‘Culture, class
and respectability: racing and the English middle classes in the nineteenth century’, International
Journal of the History of Sport, (), ‒, esp. –; William Hutton, History of Birmingham,
new edn (Birmingham, ), p. , for ‘party excursion’; Mandler, Rise and Fall of the Stately
Home,pp.–, ff; L. Davidoff, The Best Circles (London, ), pp. , , and plates ,
–; Simpson ‘The West End of Glasgow’, pp. , –; D. Cannadine, Lords and Landlords
(Leicester, ), pp. –ff.
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scum that eddies around the entrance of the theatres’. However, theatrical enter-
tainment enjoyed in morally unsullied venues like hotel assembly rooms, tem-
perance halls, town halls, or even the circus, was acceptable. In the upper ranks
behaviour was policed by high entrance prices. ‘At the opera’ – noted a railway
manager in – ‘All the men with stiff necks, drawling gentlemanly voices,
white kids, and an air which seemed to express their satiated familiarity with the
whole thing. The ladies all handsome . . . brilliants, bare necks, and teeth like
. . . sunbeam[s].’
53
If religion enjoined a restricted recreational regime at this stage the ubiqui-
tous churches nevertheless played a significant role in associational life as we shall
see; this was especially so for bourgeois women, for whom they provided an
important opportunity to transcend the limitations of domesticity via philan-
thropic and missionary charities, temperance organisations and fund-raising
bazaars. For many such women, however, music must have played as important
a role – building on the piano’s parlour popularity. Music was both enjoyable and
‘rational’ because it aroused the emotions but not the passions, so women could
safely participate and spectate, which they did in large numbers at festivals inher-
ited from the eighteenth century in Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester, and
established at Edinburgh in the s, Norwich in the s, Liverpool in the
s, Bradford and Leeds (again) in the s, Glasgow in the s and
Brighton and Bristol in the s. Metropolitan middle-class enthusiasm had
founded the Philharmonic Society in , and the Sacred Harmonic Society,
whose annual concerts – seen (not altogether convincingly) as worship rather
than entertainment – flourished at the home of the evangelicals, Exeter Hall,
from . Some cities had exclusive choirs such as Bristol’s Royal Orpheus Glee
Society, and private recitals formed a common feature of upper-class social life,
but what was most remarkable about choral singing in nineteenth-century towns
Douglas A. Reid
53
Simpson ‘The West End of Glasgow’, pp. –; J. N. Tarn, ‘Sheffield’, in Simpson and Lloyd, eds.,
Middle Class Housing in Britain,pp., ; Bailey, Leisure and Class,pp., , ; Cunningham,
Leisure in the Industrial Revolution,pp., , –, ‒; Reid, ‘Labour, leisure and politics’,
pp. –, –; L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes (London, ), p. ; Nenadic,
‘Victorian middle classes’, pp. , n.;PP () , Select Committee on Dramatic
Literature, –; Doreen M. Rosman, Evangelicals and Culture (London, ), pp. –, esp.
–; Reid, ‘Popular theatre in Victorian Birmingham’, pp. –, –, –; Kathleen Barker,
The Theatre Royal Bristol, – (London, ), pp. , –, , , , , , –,
–, –, –, , ‒; Ritchie, Night Side,pp.–; J. C. Trewin, Mr Macready
(London, ), pp. , ; Faucher, Manchester in ,p. n. ; Besant, London in the
Nineteenth Century,pp., ; Jeremy Crump, ‘Patronage, pleasure and profit: a study of the
Theatre Royal, Leicester –’, Theatre Notebook, (), –; Kathleen Barker, ‘Thirty
years of struggle. Entertainment in provincial towns between and ’, Theatre Notebook,
(), –, , –; Michael R. Booth, Theatre in theVictorian Age (Cambridge, ), pp.
–, , ; Jeremy Crump, ‘Provincial music hall: promoters and public in Leicester, –’,
in Bailey, ed., Music Hall,pp.–; Beattie, Blackburn,p.; Temperley, Music in Britain,pp.,
‒; Jackson, Middle Classes,p.; Leopold Turner, ed., Fifty Years on the London & North
Western Railway and Other Memoranda in the Life of David Stevenson (London, ), p. .
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was its widespread nature and social inclusivity. Most towns of over , pop-
ulation had a choral society by , and per cent of the Glasgow Choral
Union were female, and only one third of the Leeds Philharmonic was middle
class in the s. Yet, subscription ticket holders made performances by such
city choirs into major events in the social calendar of the wealthy. Thus,
Manchester’s burghers basked in the prestige of Hallé’s Orchestra from . The
rentier population at spa and seaside resorts also encouraged the growth of
numerous concert orchestras in the later nineteenth century – notably Dan
Godfrey’s Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (). In London there were
some attempts to broaden out audiences but George Bernard Shaw noted that
s. d. for a standard concert was ‘absolutely prohibitive for four out of five’, and
the regular Crystal Palace and Queen’s Hall concerts were timed to coincide
with the Season, ceasing when ‘the moneyed classes’ left London, recommenc-
ing when they returned. However, choral and philharmonic societies in
Edgbaston, Dulwich, Ealing and Lewisham exemplify the flourishing of amateur
musical societies in select suburbs.
54
Evangelicals were key supporters of the temperance movement, which,
together with greater status consciousness, was a prime factor bringing inns and
taverns into disrepute – leading to confident assertions in the s that ‘no
person above the rank of a labouring man or artisan would venture . . . into a
public house’. This considerably oversimplified the situation because it meant
‘no person’ who could not afford to lose, or was not prepared to risk, a reputa-
tion with ‘respectable society’, and thus, in London, omitted sporting aristocrats,
professional ‘men about town’, Bohemians, Freemasons in pub-based lodges and
Playing and praying
54
Harrison and Trinder, Drink and Sobriety in an Early Victorian Country Town, p. ; G. Best, Mid-
Victorian Britain –, rev. edn (St Albans, ), pp. –; Frank Prochaska, Women and
Philanthropy in Nineteenth Century England (Oxford, ), pp. –, –, –; L. L. Shiman,
‘“Changes are dangerous”: women and temperance in Victorian England’, in Gail Malmgreen,
ed., Religion in the Lives of English Women, – (London, ), pp. –; Brown, Social
History of Religion in Scotland, pp. –; Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, pp. –; Davidoff
and Hall, Family Fortunes, pp. –; Cyril Ehrlich, Social Emulation and Industrial Progress:The
Victorian Piano (Belfast, ); Cyril Ehrlich, The Piano: A History (London, ); Russell, Popular
Music in England, pp. –, –; Walter Showell, Dictionary of Birmingham (Birmingham,
; repr., East Ardsley, ), p. ; Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (London, ; repr.,
London, ), pp. –; E. D. Mackerness, A Social History of English Music (London, ), pp.
–, , , –, –, ; Percy A. Scholes, The Mirror of Music, – (London,
), pp. –; William Weber, Music and the Middle Classes (London, ), pp. –, ;
William Weber, ‘Artisans in the concert life of mid-nineteenth-century London and Paris’, Journal
of Contemporary History, (), ; Temperley, Music in Britain,pp., ; Briggs, Victorian
Cities,pp.–, , ; Joyce, Work, Society and Politics, p. ; M. Kennedy, ed., The
Autobiography of Charles Hallé (London, ), pp. –, –; Chorley, Manchester Made Them,
p. ; Fraser, ‘Developments in leisure’, p. ; Russell, Popular Music in England, pp. , ,
–; Barker, ‘Entertainment in provincial towns’, –; Richard Roberts, ‘The corporation as
impresario: the municipal provision of entertainment in Victorian and Edwardian Bournemouth’,
in Walton and Walvin, eds., Leisure in Britain, pp. –; Musgrave, Musical Life of the Crystal
Palace, pp. – (for quotations from Shaw).
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a large category of small and large business men who treated ‘respectable’ tavern
‘smoke rooms’ as their clubs. The constituency of men able and willing to flout
religious and social respectability was joined by provincials taking advantage of
the anonymity bestowed by the capital’s size. Hence large audiences for risqué,
well-lubricated entertainment in the Covent Garden area, as at Evans’s Song and
Supper Rooms, where:
You find yourself in a room holding perhaps , gentlemen . . . heavy swells,
moustached, and with white kids – officers in the army – scions of noble houses
– country gentlemen, and merchants, and lawyers in town on business – literary
men, medical students, and old fogies . . . rakes and men about town . . . [And] of
course the majority . . . clerks, and commercial gents, and fellows in Government
situations.
55
The London pleasure map stretched westwards from Covent Garden across to
Leicester Square and the Haymarket, and incorporated hotels, French restau-
rants, oyster shops, coffee-houses, Turkish divans and cafés, ‘casinos’ devoted to
drinking and dancing, billiard rooms, gambling dens and brothels. Other cities
also developed an unrespectable night life, in defiance of suburban norms and
evangelicals’ strictures – sometimes exposed in the press as ‘fast young
Birmingham’ or ‘The dark side of Glasgow.’
56
The temporal rhythms of mid-century middle-class leisure are revealing. On
Sundays the gay rich went riding on Rotten Row, but wet days were dull, for
the zealous churchgoing and quiet seriousness of the pious rich and the respect-
able middle classes completely set the tone. (French visitors found Edinburgh
Sundays even less agreeable.) Suburban religiosity was almost de rigueur, although
the spirit of ‘rational recreation’ was honoured there in the breach as well as the
observance. ‘Very jolly’ dances and dinner parties ‘went on nearly every night in
the week’ in Edgbaston’s grand houses, and Quadrille Parties at the Assembly
Rooms on Wednesday and Friday evenings. Notwithstanding criticism of
workers’ Saint Mondays, some of these ‘principal citizens of Birmingham’ met
on summer Monday afternoons at the Quoits and Bowls Club for ‘a good plain
Douglas A. Reid
55
PP , Report of the Select Committee on Wine Duties, q. ; Ritchie, Night Side,
pp. , –, , ff; Eliezer Edwards, The Old Taverns of Birmingham: A Series of Familiar
Sketches (Birmingham, ); Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, pp. –; Harrison, ‘Pubs’, in
Dyos and Wolff, eds., The Victorian City, , pp. –; Girouard, Victorian Pubs, pp. –, , ;
Fraser, ‘Developments in leisure’, pp. , ; Ronald Pearsall, The Worm in the Bud
(Harmondsworth, ), pp. , n. ; Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality
(Oxford, ), p. .
56
Ritchie, Night Side, pp. –, , –; Derek Hudson, Munby: Man of Two Worlds (London,
), pp. –, –; William H. Morton, Sixty Years Stage Service, Being a Record of the Life of
Charles Morton, the Father of the Halls (London, ), p. ; W. H. Holden, They Startled
Grandfather: Gay Ladies and Merry Mashers of Victorian Times (London, ), pp. –;
Birmingham Daily Mail, May ; North British Daily Mail, Dec. , cited in Nenadic
‘Victorian middle classes’, p. n. .
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dinner with the best of champagne’, followed by sports, or ‘a quiet rubber or a
game of loo’ for cash stakes.
57
Social dancing was too deeply enjoyable as a physical recreation, too service-
able as a courtship ritual, too flexible with regard to venue, to be repressed.
Almack’s – the leading London assembly – still attracted ‘the élite of the land’
and ‘all the leaders of bon ton’ in the s. In the s charity balls and ‘high
class’ assemblies were held at leading hotels, while the expanding lower middle
class was catered for by ‘Teachers’ Assemblies’, or ‘shilling hops’ in places like the
Kilburn Athenaeum or Holborn Town Hall – some of whom were drawn ‘from
the big drapery houses of Oxford Street, such as Peter Robinson, Marshall and
Snelgrove, Jay’s and John Lewis’.
58
By the s, middle-class women in London were considerably freer to take
advantage of city-centre leisure independently (assisted by the development of
department stores and restaurants, and their toilet facilities); in Glasgow and
Edinburgh tea rooms played a similar role. Late Victorian cities also saw a move-
ment for women’s clubs, although most were for bridge-playing ‘ladies’ rather
than independent ‘women’; by there were twenty-four in London, two
each in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and one each in Bath, Leeds, Liverpool and
Manchester. But the First World War halted this trend to separate clubs. A shift
in ‘Society’ from gender segregation and wartime seriousness was seen in the
‘night clubs’ of the twenties where ‘bright young things’could shimmy the night
away. In the thirties jazz and cabaret were enjoyed by ‘the sort of businessmen
who preferred bank-rolls to cheque-books – bookmakers, pools promoters,
Soho vice kings, manufacturers from the provinces making whoopee away from
their families . . . prostitutes, and . . . adventurers . . . including [military] officers
and Colonial officials on leave’ – illustrating a basic continuity of city night life
across many previous decades.
59
Meanwhile, as suburbia had expanded in the second half of the nineteenth
century so too had the scope of suburban extra-domestic recreation, particu-
larly as regards drama and sport. Amateur theatricals constitute an under-
explored aspect of suburban social life from the s, really taking off as ‘a
Playing and praying
57
Wigley, Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday, pp. –; Taine, Notes on England, pp. , ;
Birmingham Journal, Nov. ; quotations from Tom Collins, School and Sport: Recollections of a
Busy Life (London, ), pp. , . See also discussion of religious census below.
58
Francis Rust, Dance in Society (London, ), chs. –; Holden, They Startled Grandfather, pp.
, –; Chorley, Manchester Made Them, p. ; Winifred Holtby, The Crowded Street (London,
; London, ), pp. –, –; Philip J. S. Richardson, The Social Dances of the Nineteenth
Century in England (London, ), pp. , –, –; Machray, The Night Side of London,
pp. –.
59
David Rubinstein, Before the Suffragettes:Women’s Emancipation in the s (Brighton, ), pp.
–; Jackson, Middle Classes,pp., ; Collier and Lang, Just the Other Day, pp. –; Graves
and Hodge, The Long Week-End, pp. –, –; Robert Murphy, Smash and Grab: Gangsters
in the London Underworld (London, ), pp. –.
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