Bleak Sabbath

The rise and fall of Boring English Sundays

‘You wake up in the morning, you’ve got to read all the Sunday papers, the kids are running round, you’ve got to mow the lawn, wash the car, and you think “Sunday, bloody Sunday!”’ – Alan Partridge

I have a particular memory from childhood which still sticks with me. It’s a late autumn Sunday, it’s raining outside. Nothing is open. Dad has fallen asleep following a boozy lunch and Elton Welsby is presenting Coventry City v Everton on ITV. It’s 0-0.

The Morrissey song ‘Everyday is Like Sunday’, about the ennui of a teenager in a seaside town, captured the general spirit of boredom the English associated with the Sabbath, but you didn’t need to go provincial England to experience it – I grew up on the edge of Zone 1, and even here the sense of tedium was palpable.

The day began with church, which we found punishingly boring, being that flavour of Irish Catholicism which was as austere as the most Protestant of services but without any decent singing. There was no pub lunch afterwards, because gastropubs hadn’t been invented yet and children weren’t allowed in pubs anyway; even if we had been, the pubs all had to shut at 3 o’clock.

Cinemas were open, but not much else, while Sunday evening television – just four channels – offered the prospect of Antiques Roadshow and Songs of Praise. In my memory, the sheer sense of boredom was overpowering, to the extent that I almost looked forward to school.

Nietzsche thought that this was the whole idea, that the English designed Sundays that way in order to encourage people to appreciate the working week. In Beyond Good and Evil, he described how ‘The industrious races complain a great deal about having to tolerate idleness: it was a masterpiece of the English instinct to make Sunday so holy and so tedious, a form of cleverly invented and shrewdly introduced fasting, that the Englishman, without being aware of the fact, became eager again for weekdays and workdays.’

There may be some truth in this, so that before the Industrial Revolution there was the ‘Industriousness Revolution’, with a new emphasis on work rather than leisure. This is something which Joseph Henrich noted from studying reports from the Old Bailey between 1748 to 1803, and ‘spot-checks’ observations about what Londoners were doing at a particular moment:

‘The data suggest that the workweek lengthened by 40 percent over the second half of the 18th century. This occurred as people stretched their working time by about 30 minutes per day, stopped taking “Saint Mondays” off (working every day except Sunday), and started working on some of the 46 holy days found on the annual calendar. The upshot was that by the start of the 19th century, people were working about 1,000 hours more per year, or about an extra 19 hours per week.’

Before the Industriousness Revolution it was common for people to enjoy a number of saints’ days as holidays, including the three-day weekends offered by these ‘Saint Mondays’. That all changed with the arrival of Protestantism, with its scepticism towards saints’ days, William Tyndale arguing that these were only celebrated by convention and that there wasn’t anything special about them.

While they were keen to abolish holidays, the reformers also believed in making the Sabbath more godly, and so the Boring English Sunday was invented. This followed from a growing sense that leisure time was wasted time, but it was also the case that many of the Protestant reformers just didn’t like people having fun. In God is an Englishman, Bijan Omrani noted how ‘From the end of the 1500s, Puritan preachers condemned the way people generally spent their Sundays: “full heathenishly, in taverning, tippling, gaming, playing and beholding bear-baitings and stage-plays, to the utter dishonour of God”’.

Theologian William Perkins believed that Sunday ’should be a day set apart for the worship of God and the increase in duties of religion’. Lincolnshire cleric John Cotton said in 1614 that it should be unlawful to pass Sunday without hearing at least two sermons; the idea of going to church twice would have filled my ten-year-old self with intense horror.

Hugh Latimer asked: ‘What doth the people do on these holidays? Do they give themselves to godliness, or else ungodliness… God seeth all the whole holidays to be spent miserably in drunkenness, in glossing, in strife, in envy, in dancing, dicing, idleness, and gluttony.’

Latimer also disliked holidays for quite modern-sounding reasons related to social inequality, noting that ‘in so many holidays rich and wealthy persons… flow in delicates, and men that live by their travail, poor men… lack necessary meat and drink for their wives and their children, and… they cannot labour upon the holidays, except they will be cited, and brought before our officials.’

The reverse argument is now made against allowing supermarkets to drop Sunday trading hours - that it pressures working people into excessive toil so that Waitrose shoppers don’t suffer any inconvenience. Although, reading Latimer, I can’t help but suspect that his real objection was to people having fun.

The reformers won, and English Sundays became notably dull. Banjani quoted children’s writer Alison Uttley, who said of Sundays that ‘Nobody ever read a newspaper or whistled a tune except hymns’.

That was only true in very strict households, and most people did read papers. In fact, a 1957 BBC report on ‘London on a Sunday’, noted that ‘We buy more Sunday newspapers than any nation in the world. Some would say it’s because we haven’t got anything else to do.’

The image it projects is one of sheer, unrelenting dullness, noting that ‘Today almost all shops and restaurants are closed’, a result of the Sunday Observance Act of 1624, ‘parts of which are still in force’. This law had been a reaction to the excesses of Merrie England, and its authors had denounced ‘a disorderly sort of people, exercising and frequenting in bear-baiting and bull-baiting’.

By the time the BBC made their black and white portrait of English Sundays, there was no sport, although ‘museums can stay open, a fairly recent concession, carried against great opposition. But theatres must stay closed, dancing is forbidden.’ This boredom was captured in John Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back in Anger, with Act Open opening on a miserable, wet Sunday afternoon in a cramped flat.

This state of affairs continued until relatively recently. It wasn’t until 1974 that Football League games were played on the Lord’s day. Frank Skinner once joked about going to a game and being berated by religious campaigners scolding him for indulging in ‘pleasure’ by watching West Bromwich Albion. Pleasure?

Boring English Sundays began to disappear only in the 1990s with the liberalisation of trading laws, downstream of the decline of Protestantism, and while I feel a sense of sadness about the fading of religion, I can’t help but feel that this form of Christianity got Sundays wrong (and we didn’t even have the Presbyterian habit, found in Scotland and Ulster, of locking up playgrounds and swings). Today I’m probably at my most Whiggish when walking through Spitalfields Market on a Sunday, where the sheer buzz and colour contrasts with my childhood memories; there are a million things to do, the football is way better and I can contently read Janan Ganesh’s latest in the Financial Times, nodding my head in approval at the advancements of global capitalism.

On the other hand, it’s clear that the decline of boredom is intimately tied to the decline of reading. Literacy sharply increased in the century after the production of the Tyndale Bible, Protestantism helping to spur this progress by encouraging people to read scripture - but so did its strategy of making Sundays deliberately, agonisingly dull. Maybe there’s something to be said for one day of boredom a week.