Socialist Sunday Schools in Britain, 1892–1939

Abstract

Recent interest in the social conditions which underlay the emergence in Britain of independent labour politics in the last decade of the nineteenth century has thrown a good deal of light on the Labour Church movement. Dr. E. J. Hobsbawm, in a characteristically stimulating chapter of his Primitive Rebels, set the Labour Churches within the context of the “labour sects” which he isolates as a phenomenon of nineteenth century Britain and defines as “proletarian organisations and aspirations of a sort expressed through traditional religious ideology”. The concentration of academic attention on the Labour Church has given rise to the mention of a little known phenomenon of the British working-class movement, Socialist Sunday Schools which, it is usually suggested, were little more than a fringe activity of the Labour Churches. It is the object of this paper to give some account of the history of Socialist Sunday Schools in Britain until 1939 and to suggest that they too constitute a “labour sect” cognate with the Labour Church but organisationally and geographically distinct from it and therefore representing an extension of the working-class sectarian tradition beyond the limits of the nineteenth century within which Hobsbawn seems to confine it.