‘Methodism Alive’: Mass Observation's Worktown Perspective

With its Puritan tradition (it was often described as the ‘Geneva of the North’)

This reference, to the Swiss city that was the cradle of Calvinism, can be traced to the years of the First English Civil War in the early 1640s, when Bolton was a strongly Parliamentarian outpost in an otherwise staunchly Royalist region.

The Wesleyans eventually created five circuits, including the Bolton Mission, the local expression of the Forward Movement; this was initially based at the Ridgway Gates chapel, but subsequently replaced by the Victoria Hall (1900) and the Kings Hall (1907). Non-Wesleyan Methodist denominations likewise established a permanent presence in the town, successively the Methodist New Connexion, Independent Methodists, Primitive Methodists, and the several strands that ultimately came together as the United Methodist Free Churches. Even the West Country Bible Christians made a belated and fleeting appearance (from 1889, opening a chapel in 1891). By 1932, at the time of Methodist union, besides the five Wesleyan circuits, there were two Primitive Methodist and three United Methodist ones. The aggregate membership was 7,403, some of whom were in societies beyond the boundaries of the county borough of Bolton proper.

Regrettably, there is no modern history of Methodism in Bolton. However, there are some older titles as well as histories of individual churches, the principal ones being listed in Clive D. Field, Methodism in Great Britain and Ireland: A Select Bibliography of Published Local Histories (Oxford: Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History, 2022), 145–8.

As in the connexion at large, the process of administrative rationalisation following the 1932 union was slow. For the first three years, there appear to have been no changes in the town's ten circuits. Then, in 1935, the ex-Wesleyan Park Street circuit was expanded to incorporate several ex-Primitive Methodist and ex-United Methodist churches, and two ex United Methodist circuits (Hanover and St George's Road) were dissolved. Three years later, the final ex-United Methodist circuit (Albert Place) was dissolved, leaving Bolton with seven circuits, one amalgamated (Park Street), four ex-Wesleyan (Bridge Street, Wesley, Bolton Mission, and Farnworth), and two ex-Primitive Methodist (Higher Bridge Street and Moor Lane). These seven circuits had a combined membership of 6,906 in 1937, 7 per cent less than in 1932. Membership in the county borough alone must have been just over 6,000.

The year 1937 is significant in that it witnessed the birth of the social research organisation Mass Observation (MO) and the opening in March that year of one of its two research units, at 85 Davenport Street, Bolton. The latter was under the direction of Tom Harrisson, MO's co-founder (the other co-founder was Charles Madge, who headed up the sister centre in London). Using primarily qualitative methods, Harrisson set out to investigate the anthropology of everyday life in Bolton (disguised in MO's publicity as ‘Northtown’ and later as ‘Worktown’), with particular reference to the public house, leisure, politics, and religion. Books were planned on each of these themes, but only The Pub and the People (1943) was eventually published. Nevertheless, a vast treasure-trove of raw material, manuscript and typescript, was assembled and eventually deposited at the University of Sussex special collections in 1975. This Mass Observation Archive (MOA) is now accessible at The Keep, Brighton, with a significant proportion (including the entire Worktown Collection) also available through subscribing academic libraries as Mass Observation Online.

The standard history of MO is James Hinton, The Mass Observers: A History, 1937–1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), and the standard biography of Harrisson is Judith M. Heimann, The Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrisson and his Remarkable Life (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999). There are accounts of MO's religion research in Bolton in Clive D. Field, ‘Religion in Worktown: Anatomy of a Mass-Observation Sub-project’, Northern History, 53, no. 1 (2016): 116–37 and David Hall, Worktown: The Astonishing Story of the Birth of Mass-Observation (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2015), 189–203.

MO's Bolton unit was staffed by a mixture of ‘paid’ observers (they mostly received board, lodging, and living expenses rather than wages) and volunteers (especially over the summer). The 42-year-old Joseph L. Wilcock (‘Brother Joe’) was recruited to co-ordinate the team working on the religion sub-project, which contained individuals from academic and creative backgrounds, with varying degrees of religious commitment and understanding. Wilcock's own credentials comprised Lancashire working-class roots and an ability to engage with Bolton's local religious leaders and win their confidence, ‘both as a social worker and as a Christian’. His previous career had included spells as a ‘tramp preacher’ and warden of St Christopher's hostel for destitute young boys in the East End of London, but, leaving his wife behind in Hornsea, he had moved to Bolton in search of employment. He had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the non-believer Harrisson, whom he feared might ‘make some blasphemous use of the material’. For his part, Harrisson judged Wilcock ‘a far-out fundamentalist’ who was easily taken in by religious sentimentality.

For a fuller description of MO's religion team, see Field, ‘Religion in Worktown’, 117–19.

MO's research methods were not always very systematic and were sometimes, to modern eyes, idiosyncratic. However, it was readily understood that a logical first step in the religion sub-project was to prepare a list of all the places of worship in Bolton, which was lacking from contemporaneous local directories. Document A synthesises MO's findings in respect of Methodist churches in the county borough of Bolton in 1937–38. Including Independent Methodists, there were forty-four of them, equivalent to 28 per cent of all places of worship in the town, and more than the number belonging to the Church of England (thirty-eight). Total sittings in these Methodist churches were 22,000, sufficient to accommodate one in eight of Bolton's estimated population of 173,000 in 1937.

With its aversion to statistical techniques, rather paradoxical for an organisation that was driven after the Second World War into earning its living from quantitative market research, MO made no attempt to follow the lead of other British community studies of the period, such as Seebohm Rowntree's in York in 1935,

B. Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty and Progress: A Second Social Survey of York (London: Longmans, Green, 1941), 417–26, 531.

MO did not devote equal effort to investigating each of Methodism's forty-four places of worship in 1937–38. Examination of the MOA online catalogue and of the digitised content in Mass Observation Online suggests that, of 155 Methodist-related documents in the Worktown Collection,

This figure excludes Methodist printed ephemera, such as orders of service and circuit plans, some of which are preserved in the Worktown Collection. It should also be noted that, according to a list of services and events that were observed by MO during this period, at [Brighton, The Keep, Mass Observation Archive], SxMOA1/5/5/20/A/4, observations were also made at five additional events for which no reports are extant in the Worktown Collection.

It is easy to see why Wilcock was so impressed by the scale and range of the Victoria Hall's regular programme, and particularly by the large numbers of people drawn to the Saturday evening concerts (continued until 1941) and the Sunday evening services and, to a lesser extent, the women's meeting and Sunday school. Additionally, the hall hosted special events for local Methodism and the town, one example being the commemoration on 24 May 1938 of the bicentenary of John Wesley's ‘conversion’, which was chaired by Bolton's then mayor (who was a Methodist himself) and allegedly attended by 2,400 people.

Respectively, SxMOA1/5/5/21/B/1, SxMOA1/5/5/21/C/4.

All but four of the eighty-nine remaining Methodist-related documents in the Worktown Collection, and originated between March 1937 and June 1938, concerned thirty-one individual Methodist churches besides the Victoria Hall. Of these, thirteen were ex-Wesleyan Methodist, six ex-Primitive Methodist, four ex-United Methodist, seven Independent Methodist, and one uncertain. Wilcock compiled at least twenty-two of the eighty-nine reports,

Bolton Methodist examples can be found at SxMOA1/5/5/25/B/1, SxMOA1/5/5/25/B/4, and SxMOA1/5/5/25/B/9. For the development of the genre, see Hugh McLeod, Religion and the Rise of Sport in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 183–9.

Twenty-four of the thirty-one churches had three or fewer observations each, Bridge Street (ex-Wesleyan Methodist) and St George's Road (ex-United Methodist) having most, ten apiece. The subject matter of these documents was diverse. Although descriptions of ordinary services were numerous, there was good coverage of special services, including, as well as religious festivals such as Easter and Christmas, the annual Sunday school ‘sermons’ that were such a tradition of the North-West and the sportsmen's services which became a feature of the inter-war religious scene.

SxMOA1/5/5/21/B/1. Cf. Field, ‘Religion in Worktown’, 122.

The religion sub-project had begun to run out of steam by early summer 1938 and was disrupted by changes in personnel. Funding for Wilcock's post had ended by this stage, and he moved to London, working initially for the Labour Party in the capital and later with Norwegian sailors in Newcastle. Furthermore, in September and October 1938, Harrisson and Madge swapped roles, partly in consequence of a crisis in Madge's personal life, Harrisson relocating to London and Madge to Bolton to take charge of the Worktown study. However, Madge's preoccupation was with a new project on spending and saving, the intended subject of a fifth Worktown book, rather than with the four existing strands of Worktown research (among them religion), and following its completion in autumn 1939 he originally intended to close down the Davenport Street unit altogether. Then the war intervened, bringing new research priorities (not least in connection with MO's contracts with the Ministry of Information), so the Bolton operation was eventually kept open until August 1940, although conscription of its observers (and their non-replacement) impeded its work.

This temporary reprieve for the Worktown project facilitated a minor revival of the religion sub-project at the hands of Brian Allwood, with reference to the impact on the town's religious life of the first months of the Second World War,

SxMOA1/5/5/21/B/11, SxMOA1/5/5/21/B/15.

After mid-summer 1940, when this second phase of the Worktown study abruptly concluded, MO's fieldwork in Bolton was only carried out on an ad hoc basis. Twenty years were to pass before the threads of 1937–40 were briefly picked up in a restudy of Bolton undertaken by Harrisson (then on leave from his post as curator of the Sarawak Museum in Borneo) and some of his former MO associates during July and the first half of August 1960. Much of the spadework for the religious strand was carried out by Nell Umney, while Celia Fremlin and Harrisson were responsible for writing the religion chapter in the book arising from the restudy

Methodist Church Department for Chapel Affairs: Report for 1963 (Manchester: the Department, 1963), 41.

The 1960 restudy of Bolton religion generated only six significant Methodist-related manuscript/typescript documents. Two were observations of services, one in the morning at the Victoria Hall (which was led by a deaconess, and expertly reported upon by Julian Trevelyan) and the other in the evening at St Georges Road.

Respectively, SxMOA1/5/19/64/F/17 and SxMOA1/5/19/64/F/23.

The MOA is a rich source of information about one phase in the history of Methodism in Bolton, and an archive which, for that purpose, has been largely overlooked by Methodist and local historians. Although it is not a complete record of the evolution of Methodism in the town, and must be used in conjunction with the extant administrative records of Methodism in the area (many preserved by the Bolton Archives and Local Studies Service at Bolton Central Library), the MOA is useful for filling in gaps about the lived experience of Methodism, notably during the late 1930s as a second global war approached and the implications of Methodist union in 1932 began to play out. The current paper hopes to offer both a guide to its main components and how to access them, as well as impetus for other scholars to make use of its rich detail for further output.