OPEN ALL HOURS
The traditional British Sunday was a time for families to worship and to nurture. But the Lord’s Day has fallen victim to the unrelenting march of 24-hour living and a rapacious commercialism which eats at society’s heart
THE emphatic decision, two weeks back, by Western Isles councillors not to yield to an orchestrated campaign and open the Stornoway sports centre on Sundays won national attention out of all proportion to its importance.
There was no prospect of a seven-day operation. The centre is already open for eighty hours each week. Staff overwhelmingly oppose foregoing that day off for church and family.
There is no significant local demand for Sunday swimming and those insisting otherwise are a small group of obsessives who have waged war on our way of life for years.
They did in 2002 win – with considerable connivance from the Scottish Government – Sunday flights and, from 2006 and on successive routes, Sunday ferries. These have had, in fact, surprisingly little impact on island culture.
For the Lord’s Day on Lewis and Harris remains serene, quiet. Only one filling station and two Stornoway takeaways open on Sundays. No other shops open. People are reluctant to drive very much.
On fair afternoons, the Stornoway woods have many young families ambling about. But, by late Sunday evening, there is so little traffic and such unusual stillness that, depending which way the wind is blowing, I can stand in my garden and hear the wash of waves in Broad Bay or the more remote roar of the Atlantic beating on the cliffs at the other side of the island.
Certainly things have eased, to a degree, since I was a child in the 70s. Back then you were not allowed out of the house, save to go to church (children of the Church of Scotland, the most herbivorous denomination, might be allowed out for a quiet walk – but in their Sunday best).
Television was not watched; the radio went on only for the weekly Gaelic service. Church was at 11 and again at seven. Dinner was usually broth, lamb, Bisto-thick gravy and some sort of trifle. Sweets would mysteriously appear afterwards; about five, we would make toast at the peat fire.
MEANWHILE, ‘worldly’ books were set aside; you read gentle Christian ones, mostly about rugged missionaries with titles such as God Made Them Great and Jungle Doctor Wins Through. After the evening sermon, there was a simple supper of ham or salmon, tomatoes, cheese and biscuits.
One always felt very tired and slept well, bounding out in the morning to attack the wide world once more.
Such a Sabbath might sound the height of oppression for a typical small boy. But to us it was – and for me remains – part of the rhythm of life. I never resented it. It is good, once a week, to rest and be still.
Few care to remember how until really very recent years the Sabbath was still in many ways kept in Scotland generally – and kept more strictly, in all our great cities, around 1900 than it is in Stornoway today.
Born in 1883, a noted minister, Reverend Kenneth MacRae, never forgot: ‘...how both sides of Earl Grey Street and Lothian Road in Edinburgh, from 10.45 till 11 every Sabbath morning, were thronged with a double stream of worshippers, the one stream converging upon their respective places of worship.
‘Then, with the cessation of the church bells, a strange hush fell upon the city, and on the streets not a single person was to be seen except perchance a straggler hurriedly pursuing his way to the house of God.
‘Such an order of things may seem incredible to the city-dweller of today but it was literally true.’
Until 1976, Scottish pubs could not open on Sunday and hotels could serve liquor only to ‘bona fide travellers’ – and with a meal. Until the 80s, none of the great department stores opened on that day; nor were professional football matches or Wimbledon finals held.
Those of us old enough to remember can attest that Glasgow and Edinburgh, into the 80s, were quiet and scarcelypeopled cities as you drove in from the suburbs to church.
And how many churches there were: in Edinburgh’s Morningside district alone, 50 years ago, there were six congregations of the Church of Scotland. Today there is one. The disintegration of churchgoing is one of the biggest changes in our era; Iain MacWhirter made much of it in a recent book.
‘Church of Scotland membership peaked at 1.32million in 1956,’ he declares, ‘when attendance was as high as it had ever been in the previous hundred years. Then, suddenly, it collapsed in one of the most dramatic secularisations experienced by any country in the world. The Kirk lost 65 per cent of its communicants within 20 years. The divorce rate in Scotland increased by 400 per cent between 1960 and 1974.
‘Scotland has had a history of intense militant Christianity from the Covenanters to the Disruption, and had an education system largely shaped by the Kirk. It is hard to believe that all this could disappear, in historical terms, overnight. And yet it did…’
It was well into the 90s before you could buy drink off-sales on the Sabbath and, intriguingly, Scotland never had laws prohibiting Sunday shopping – because nobody did it.
In England, by contrast, there were rigid laws – supermarkets, garden centres and so on were forbidden to open.
Mrs Thatcher’s bid to abolish those restrictions, in the Shops Bill 1986, led to humiliating defeat in the Commons – the only Parliamentary vote she lost in her entire premiership.
Tory MPs had been shaken by the volume of public opposition to any change and the critical debate, on April 14, 1986, still makes good reading. Sharpest opposition came from the Left.
‘Honourable members listening to me may ask, “What is it to do with him?”,’ Gerald Kaufman declared. ‘It is undoubtedly true that Sunday is not my Sabbath but I know something about the Sabbath.
‘My father was a Jewish immigrant from Poland. He was a factory worker all of his life. He never earned much of a wage.
‘He had a large and growing family to house, clothe and feed, but whatever it meant to his employment and promotion prospects he would never accept a job which required him to work on his Sabbath.
‘For him, in his hard-working and often toilsome life, the Sabbath was held precious as a tranquil island in the stormy sea of the week.’
The late Donald Stewart, MP for the Western Isles, made mincemeat of it.
‘It is appalling that a party should be whipped on an issue of conscience. The real issue is the spiritual one. The Bill goes directly against God’s plan for living. The fourth Commandment is an integral part of the moral law of God and is therefore binding on all men. By denying this, a nation erodes its moral and social fabric.
‘The proposals in the Bill would be irreversible. If the Bill is carried, the House and the country will be crossing the
Rubicon, and the nation will suffer for it.’
John Major subsequently, in 1994, succeeded where Thatcher had failed; and with profound cultural impact.
ADAY when millions, however dull things might have been, contentedly relaxed at home, was recast by the politics of shopping. It changed shops themselves. There sprouted fast big malls and retail complexes with food courts and coffee bars; it made shopping – Sunday – a new social experience.
More than half the British population, a recent study found, now choose regularly to shop on the Lord’s Day – which forces hundreds of thousands of others to work.
The proliferation of huge sporting events on Sundays – televised football, cricket, rugby, horse racing and so on – is to a large degree devised to pull the public out of their homes and into pubs, now allowed to remain open all day Sunday; and tens of thousand more must work for that, too.
And at great social cost, says John Roberts, of the Lord’s Day Observance Society.
‘We’ve lost family life. One of the reasons we’ve lost it is that we have lost the principle that Sunday was for the family.
‘There’s a moral, social and economic element to this. I love sport but I reject the need for sport on a Sunday because people need a break.
‘There are six other days to watch football. If Mum is working and Dad is down the pub and the other members of the family are somewhere else, family life is sliced through.
‘The country will never get back to stability until it gets back to valuing the family.’
There has, too, been economic reckoning, as austerity bit from 2008. ‘Premium payments’ promised to workers who agreed to man tills and stack shelves on Sundays have largely gone.
The new retail parks have sucked retail life from Scottish town centres.
It is difficult to drive very far anywhere in rural Scotland, either, without noting derelict village shops and longabandoned filling stations – as, everywhere, a new adult generation has now bought into consumerism: that we are defined not by who we are but by the stuff we own.
In truth, the Sabbath was the original labour-protection legislation. In plump, sedentary modern lives, we forget how much it meant, especially in rural Scotland, to have one day of the week with minimal labour, save for preparing meals and feeding animals.
Nor was it any coincidence that, when the Free Church split in 1900 and only a hardcore full-fat remnant held on to its old paths, it included tough wee industrial congregations in the Vale of Leven and deepest Fife – Renton, Kinglassie, Kennoway – who held the King James Bible in one hand and voted Communist with the other. The lives of our greatgrandparents were more arduous than can be imagined – toiling in the fields, digging, ploughing, sowing, harvesting, driving cattle, folding sheep, running a household (without modern conveniences) and travelling almost everywhere, often far, on foot.
CHRIS Harbourne was born in a village near Stornoway in 1954 and remembers the last of that lifestyle. ‘Before I went to school – I was only four, but I would put out the village cows, walked them out on to the common grazing. ‘I well remember my mother milking – enamel buckets, white muslin to cover them. She would skim the milk, make butter. And she was always knitting – all the older ladies seemed to knit then, all the time; she would make socks to sell.
‘On Saturday night, you know, everything had to be prepared for the Sabbath. The house would be just gleaming. You never saw women then with idle hands.
‘They were hard-working, they were house-proud, and together they would discuss on a Saturday night what had been in the papers. It’s still on a Saturday night I prepare the Sunday dinner and we still say grace before meals.’
Mr Harbourne remembers not loveless legalism, rather a welded and caring neighbourhood.
‘It was such a close community. My mother would help lay out remains, she would help in childbed, and if you saw the doctor’s car you went to the house at once to see if you could help.
‘It was a different world. I preferred that world. Sunday here was Sunday. There was no nonsense about it. I still go to bed with a book on Sabbath afternoon. I still won’t do any housework on Sunday. I won’t put washing on or iron anything.’
‘As a child I was really bored on Sundays,’ mused one woman in 2009. ‘I now miss the fact that it is little different to other days in the week and the enforced slow-down and battery-recharge that the old Sundays had. ‘On my way home from church I drive past a shopping centre that is always busy. It makes me sad that so many people fill their day this way.
‘Sometimes we don’t appreciate what we had till it’s gone.’
Rev MacRae died in 1964 as Free Church minister of Stornoway, some years after he had won a last battle against, among others, the godless town Provost – ensuring that the island ferry departed not just before midnight on Sabbath, but a quarter-hour after it and on Monday.
In such early Monday minutes he once strode up the gangway; collided with his vanquished opponent.
‘Good evening, Mr MacRae,’ sneered the Provost.
The minister of Stornoway narrowed his eyes…
‘Good morning, Provost MacKenzie.’