Reconstructing the Rural Community: Village Halls and the National Council of Social Service, 1919 to 1939

Abstract

Although rural leisure in the half-century before the First World War is an under-researched subject, its most striking features seem to have been (at least according to the existing historiography) that it was dominated by the gentry and clergy, and restricted both in scope and quantity. The robust rural popular culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had come under increasing pressure from gentry and clerical attempts to reform and sanitise it, initially through evangelical organisations such as the Society for the Suppression of Vice in the 1790s, but by the 1840s on a broad front due to the middle-class vogue for promoting ‘rational recreation’. Partly as a result of this, many popular pastimes either fell into disuse or became emptied of much of their former spontaneity in the second half of the century, a commonly cited example of the former being cock-fighting and of the latter maypole-dancing. In their place came carefully marshalled dinners and prize-givings sponsored by the gentry and clergy. On these occasions the labourers (and sometimes their families too) were sat down at trestle tables in some appropriate venue, often the squire's park, and edifying speeches were made by representatives of local landed society. The role of the rural workforce in all this was entirely passive, except for one or two labourers who might be singled out to give a speech of gratitude to the presiding landowner for his beneficence, and the ritual ‘loyal toasts’.