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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
The Sunday school was an art form. Its classical age has been explored by T. W. Laqueur and its totality by P. B. Cliff. Like those of great art, its creative moments were the simultaneous issue of evolution, system, and individual genius. Those moments were intensest in their Nonconformist aspect, for Nonconformists, though often thwarted, were born educationists. Their buildings reflected this: theological colleges, for instance, which grew from overgrown houses to imitations of Oxford, and eventually to Oxford itself; or proprietory schools, strait-jacketed between the financial constraints and social aspirations of an enlarged middle class trying to reconcile Manchester’s values with those of Thomas Arnold. And there were the Sunday schools themselves, complexes of hall, parlour, and classroom, enfolding the chapel, reflecting the activity, mentality, and spirituality of a particular society, encompassing therefore a concept of the Church, and designed with considerable ingenuity to meet the needs of a rounded yet carefully graduated community. By the turn of the twentieth century they housed daily activities for all ages. Their influence reached far. Fuelled by the Word proclaimed from the pulpit, and empowered by the decisions of representative meetings taken in hall or vestry, the Sunday school broke chapel bounds to teach more people than could be met with in chapel pews.
1 See Laqueur, T. W., Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture 1780-1850 (Yale, 1976)Google Scholar; Cliff, P. B., The Rise and Development of the Sunday School Movement in England, 1780-1080 (Redhill, 1986)Google Scholar.
2 For Archibald, see Cliff, Sunday School Movement, pp. 205-8; Johnston, Ethel A., George Hamilton Archibald: Crusader for Youth, 1858-1938 (London, 1945)Google Scholar. His ideas were promoted within Anglican circles from 1908, especially by Hetty Lee (Mrs Richard Holland), and led to St Christopher’s College, Blackheath: see Margaret M. B. Bolton, ‘Anglican Sunday Schools, 1880-1914’ (University of Kent at Canterbury, M. A. thesis, 1988), esp. pp. 44-6, 54-7.
3 Archibald, G. H., The Power of Play in Child Culture (London, 1905).Google Scholar
4 The pungent smell of the children of Woodberry Down Baptist Church’s Sunday school, off Seven Sisters Road, and the frequency with which they were suddenly and unavoidably sick, is a memory of the 1940s recalled by one whose sister taught there. Yet even if Woodberry Down had slipped since its Edwardian peak, it had retained a socially respectable congregation, instituting a children’s church for its morning children in the 1930s; but chronic poverty, poor diet, and the habit of sewing children into their winter clothes were still normal urban facts in the 1940s.
5 For aspects of this, with particular reference to Vivian and Dorothy Pomeroy at Greenfield Congregational Church, Bradford, from 1911 to 1923, and to Wilton E. Rix at Ealing Green Congregational Church from 1922 to 1939, see C. Binfìeld, ‘True to Stereotype? Vivian and Dorothy Pomeroy and the Rebels in Lumb Lane’, in Mews, S., ed., Modem Religious Rebeb (London, 1993), pp. 185–205 Google Scholar, esp. pp. 198-201, and ‘Freedom Through Discipline: the concept of Little Church’, in Sheils, W.J., ed., Monks, Hermits and the Ascetic Tradition, SCH, 22 (1985), PP. 405–50.Google Scholar
6 I am particularly grateful for permission to use the records of Purley United Reformed Church, and for help and recollections extending from the 1920s from Mr and Mrs J. Artingstall, Ms Rosemary Green, Mr and Mrs Charles Kersley, Mr D.B. Pascall, Mr. R. Pye-Smith and Miss Lois Watson. The church’s records are generously contexted. This section is particularly based on Mary Rose Jenkins, ‘An Inquiry into the Growth of the Congregational Church at Purley’, unpublished thesis, Caloma College, West Wickham, Kent, 1975 [hereafter Jenkins]; Vera Kersley, ‘Purley United Reformed Church Diary’, typescript 1984; Pinnell, G.M., Pringle of Purley: 10 May 1866-22 January 1933 (Purley, 1966) [hereafter Pinnell]Google Scholar; Purley Congregational Church 1895-1954 (Purley, 1954).
7 Purley Congregational Church, Manual (1914), p. 1.
8 As Purley Congregational Church, ‘Membership, Marriage and Baptismal Register, c. 1905-46’ and a bound volume of Manuals, Reports and Statements of Accounts, 1908-33, demonstrate, they include names which betray superior ministerial descent (Jukes, Newth, Creak, Pye-Smith, Campbell-Finlayson); the Silcocks made cement and the Pascalls made sweets; the Beaumont Shepheards were solicitors in the City; there were Surrey county councillors and Croydon borough councillors; there were also a Harrod of Harrods, a meat-importing Vestey (Sir Edmund, his first wife, a son and a daughter) and the widow, daughters and a lay-preaching son of J.M. Dent the publisher; and there was a gratifying mix of men from Whitehall, home and colonial knights and titled wives and widows. Their doyen was Henry Sell (1851-1910) of Sell’s World Press.
9 Epigraph to Pinnell from a speech given by F. H. Elliott, 23 September 1929, MS in church archives.
10 For Pringle see Pinnell, and Congregational Year Book (1934), pp. 273—4.Google Scholar
11 Congregational Year Book (1925), pp. 84-109.
12 A bronze cross was given for the table in 1946.
13 Bound Volume of Orders of Service, 1933.
14 The black robes were replaced by blue, and the mortar-boards by caps, in 1961.
15 Jenkins, pp. 55, 31.
16 pinnell, p. 5.
17 This section is particularly based on ‘Purley Congregational Children’s Church 1918-1939’, an album presented to Miss W.M. Silcock in 1939 [hereafter Album], and W.M. Silcock, ‘Some Experiments in The Religious Training of Children as applied (1) In a Children’s Church, (2) In a Nursery School’, MS October 1932 (hereafter ‘Experiments’).
18 Album; Pinnell, pp. 7-8; Jenkins, pp. 57–8.
19 Album, passim. The obveree side of the halfpenny coin had a sailing ship on it, hence its appeal to missionary-minded Congregationalists. The London Missionary Society’s collecting box was no less suggestive: it was in the form of a native hut.
20 Bound Church Manuals; ‘Experiments’, pp. 73-4.
21 Album, passim.
22 May Silcock, ‘The Children’s Church’, Teachers and Taught (May, 1930), cutting in ‘Experiments’, p. 78.
23 ‘Experiments’, p. 4.
24 Ibid., pp. 4-6.
25 Ibid., pp. 8-13.
26 Ibid., p. 15.
27 Ibid., p. 19.
28 Ibid., pp. 22-4.
29 Ibid., pp. 25-9, 35.
30 Ibid., letter of 3 August 1928.
31 Ibid., pp. 40-2. She used as illustration a plate of’Apparatus suggested by Messrs. Mowbray and Co. Margaret St. W.I.’
32 Ibid., pp. 52, 58.
33 Ibid., pp. 60-1.
34 Ibid., pp. 64-5.
35 Ibid., pp. 66-9.
36 Ibid., ‘Symbols and Ornaments’, p. 70.
37 They are listed in ibid., p. 79.
38 Speech delivered 28 September 1925: MS.
