Class, Industrialization and the Church of England: The Case of the Durham Diocese in the Nineteenth Century

I

I John Brown of 42 Mount Pleasant, Crook . . . miner aged about 45 years, do solemnly and sincerely declare that my Brother William Brown . . . was born on or about the 16th day of April 1888 and to the best of my knowledge information and belief was baptised at the Billy Row Primitive Chapel . . . I have made application to the Revd. Mr. Rutherford the Primitive Minister at Crook for a certificate of my Brother's baptism but was informed that the same had not been registered on account probably of the fee not having been paid.¹

John Brown's attempt to vouch for his brother William — and thus to support William's application for clerical ordination — is pregnant with secondary meaning. William was clearly emerging from a mining community, a social milieu in which the exact calculation of age was not always possible. His background had been in the Primitive Methodist church, his family so poor — or so indifferent — that the fee for his baptism had never been paid. William Brown seems, in short, an unlikely candidate for a career in the Church of England.

The fact that the brothers Brown, between them, managed to put together a successful application must lead us to consider the possibility that, by the early twentieth century, the diocese of Durham was beginning to open its doors to a very different class of clerical recruit. An institution that had once jealously guarded the education, provenance and pedigree of its clerical intake was now clearly casting its net much wider, and it is the business of this article to try to explain why. The article, therefore, describes how the Durham diocese embarked upon an 'internal mission' into the working-class hearts of darkness that its coalfield communities were becoming. At the centre of this strategy lay the University of Durham, founded in the 1830s to train a new generation of clergymen. It is argued here that the University was dovetailed into a programme of diocesan reform, intended to invigorate a new, tight-knit sense of local identity which brought to an end a series of Barchester-like ecclesiastical traditions.

Much of the discussion which follows is based upon the study of the diocesan clergy's social backgrounds. These can be determined from ordination records, which usually include the candidate's baptism certifiate and thus reveal both the father's occupation and the candidate's place of baptism. Over two thousand such ordination records, dating from between 1810 and 1920, have been examined.²

As with all studies based essentially on local material, the question may legitimately be asked: how typical was Durham? The answer, probably, is not at all. As a phenomenally wealthy diocese, and as a region undergoing extraordinarily rapid industrialization and population growth, Durham presents something of an extreme case. But that is not to say that lessons cannot be extrapolated from Durham's example. The central picture offered here, of a Church struggling to make connections with a dramatically changing world, is one that needs to be held up and examined in the light cast by other studies of industrial society and the reforming dioceses of the nineteenth century.³

II

There can be no doubt that the Durham diocese faced a particular and acute set of problems. County Durham in the nineteenth century was the UK's principal area of coal production, its peak years of output occurring between 1820 and 1930. During the same period the population of the area underwent a meteoric rise. While the general UK population was increasing by 330 per cent, County Durham's increased by 780 per cent. Most of this increase was generated by inward migration. Durham's ecclesiastical infrastructure, which had been designed to meet the needs of dispersed, thinly populated settlements, could not cope. Churches often lay empty, either because...