The book is informed by one simple idea: that there may be a common situation or context for voluntary and other organisations in different phases of capitalist development, rather than a series of discrete situations for different subject-areas for organisation such as religion, production, sport, education, welfare or politics. By emphasising the context of which religious organisations were themselves a part and in which they had to work, the intention is to grope towards an equivalent for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of ‘the Rise of Capitalism’ part of R.H. Tawney’s great work on religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. ‘Religion and …what?’ is the question. An answer would be enormously helpful, indeed essential, for any organisations which aspire to a prophetic rather than a merely diverting role. The main elements towards an answer which this book arrives at are as follows: religion and the consequences of what religious organisations chose, or were constrained, to be; religion and absolute and relative deprivation for most people; religion and changing patterns of local middle-class and working-class presence; religion and changing modes of capitalist organisation, in production, distribution and leisure; and religion and the altering presence of the State and centre in relation to the life of a locality.

This book covers a wide territory, from Congregational chapels to the Social Democratic Federation, from Hospital Sunday Parades to Literary and Scientific Societies, from the Reading Football Club to Huntley and Palmers’ biscuit factory. The study is located in Reading, a town which is taken by modern market-researchers and psephologists as an average town, but which, like every town, has its own peculiar history. It may therefore help to nail down immediately some assertions which inform what is to follow. At this stage bones will be presented without flesh.

My focus was originally on trying to understand the situation of ‘religion’, and hence the situation of forms of religion characteristic of modern Britain—churches and chapels. There was comfort in the fact that such a focus seemed commonly shared during the course of the research. From ecclesiastical sources there was continual evidence of an obsessive, but potentially creative, introspection on ‘the future of the church’. In the case of Anglicanism, in the decade of the Paul Report on The Deployment and Payment of the Clergy (1964), this introspection reached massive proportions. Each effort at understanding from the inside, from E.R. Wickham’s Church and People in an Industrial City (1957) to David Edwards’ Religion and Change (1971), as well as the work of sociologist outsiders like Bryan Wilson, found its way on to the desks of concerned clergymen and other activists. This is not a turn of phrase: I kept seeing such books as I went around Reading looking for less elevated material like Parish Magazines. The press added its own ‘in-depth surveys’ of the crisis in religious organisations and the stories of those who were trying to face up to them. No matter if the colour-magazine coverage of the responses, and the responses themselves, seemed to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution, the concern was there. As was said in 1916, ‘of all the distinctions that place ministers and clergymen apart from the members of other trades and professions, their humble criticism of themselves and their work is the most remarkable’.³

The work of research in the local press, in the records of scattered local organisations and in the local reference library was not pleasant. But there were happy times, when relevant structures began to emerge from plain information, or when meeting activists in a church, a Friendly Society, a Recreation Club, or a political grouping who wanted to do more than reminisce. Blank incomprehension sometimes greeted my requests for records. Some Ministers or Honorary Secretaries said at first that they had none, when it later turned out that they had, simply because they could not conceive of any possible relation to contemporary concerns that the records might have. But others seemed to understand quickly what the research was about, and to feel that it might be relevant to them in their daily work.

While doing the early research I was involved in constituency politics as a candidate in two general elections. This was a relevant, if distracting, experience. It involved doing what many of the people or organisations studied in subsequent chapters were doing. The surrounding circumstances had, of course, altered. The degree of national intervention in the conduct of a mid-twentieth-century political party, even though in this case strenuously resisted by an unusually alive local Labour party in North London (Hornsey), was qualitatively different. But the same effort was being made to project, ‘sell’, provide for a public an organisation which would involve the maximum number of that public in the greatest degree of commitment. Hopefully, the organisation would become genuinely of that public. Political activists in Reading in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would have recognised an activity similar to their own, even though some of them would have despised many of the modern manifestations. So would ministers of religion, Pleasant Sunday Afternoon propagandists, Reading Working Men’s Regatta enthusiasts, and the founders of the first branch of the Association for the Promotion of the Higher Education of the Working Classes (later the WEA). The feelings of a canvasser in London suburban streets—the massiveness of the mountain which had to be moved—the shared experience of the effort, traps and difficulties involved in sustaining effective voluntary organisation, political or otherwise, were encouraging to have had because they gave a direction and urgency to the research, and clarified its central subject matter.⁴

Before starting the work I also had some experience of Reading. Familiarity with its appearance and geography made the continuous reading of the local press less deadening, and was one of the reasons for selecting Reading in the first instance. Having been brought up in a village eight miles away, Reading was a place visited not for entertainment but out of occasional necessity—for opticians, dentists and department stores. Crowded on shopping days and with few ‘places of interest’ immediately obvious to the outsider, it had little to recommend it. Then, later on, came an Easter march in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, when Reading was a stopping place on the Aldermaston-London route. At this time, the contradictory experiences of such a campaign were fully felt—euphoria sometimes at the degree of public acceptance in the streets, depression at other times at the enormity of the task of persuasion in such a large, rambling area of bricks and mortar—so many homes, with people so firmly shut inside. Such experiences would have been familiar to many of the people and organisations studied in subsequent chapters.

Early in the research, I felt the necessity of moving beyond the walls of churches and chapels into a wider range of organisations, and into society more generally. So much so that a reader of an earlier draft felt that ‘for a book about religious organisations in context, religion does not get its fair share of the wordage or the limelight’. Some preliminary description of the directions of the move may clarify the reasons for this imbalance.

The move outwards was not made in order to hang churches and chapels cleanly, as variables dependent upon ‘basic’ factors like the occupational structure of the town, population movements or economic fluctuations. Such a death might be useful for sociologists, and historians of religion interested in comparative anatomy; but it would not be the most useful outcome for organisations themselves. Nor was the move made in order to locate religious organisations neatly in the cultures of different class or status groups.⁵ Nor was the purpose to isolate and define ‘religion’, so that ‘its’ special role and function could be identified, for example as a cause or consequence of social and economic change or as a stimulant or sedative to political activism.⁶ Nor did the move aim to get at the view from below. Any social history of popular religion which breaks out of an institutional framework will need patient collation of material on a national, or at least a regional scale. The sources used here do not permit writing about the majority of Reading’s inhabitants from the inside. So much of the material about the majority was refracted through the lens of a particular minority. It is none the less interesting for that, but ‘the difficult problem’ remains a problem: ‘to discover some method for observing and recording what the French call the etat d’ame, i.e. the thoughts and emotions, the habit of mind and life of persons in their interior and intimate relations with one another and with surroundings …How can we decipher and record people’s ideals, their characteristic ideas and culture, and the images and symbols which habitually occupy their minds?’⁷

On one level the move into as many subject-areas for organisation as possible was dictated by the simple fact that religious organisations in the late nineteenth century were already organised in those areas, or had ambitions to be, or felt themselves being superseded by other organisations which were. More importantly, it was to explore the notion of an ecology, or common and changing context for organisations, rather than discrete situations for different subject-areas for organisation or different types of organisation (church, sect, party, union, etc.).⁸ This book is only a first stab at such an idea: in this case the academic cliche is appropriate, much more work remains to be done. The idea to be explored is that during any single phase in the development of capitalism there are hegemonic types of organisation and dominant directions of change for organisations. These types and directions are different in and between different periods. In other words, the question of what happens to an organisation unless deliberate steps are taken is different in different periods. Prevalent types of organisation, and characteristic directions in which they are being pushed in any one period may be resisted, modified, or reversed through the work of organisations. But only if they are first mapped.

One of the best ways of mapping the contours of a social context and prevailing directions of change is to chart the changing experience of organisations in relation to each other. By placing the experience of organisations engaged in economic production alongside the experience of religious and other organisations, it may become possible to get a sense of dominant aspirations and organisational styles in a particular context. It may also be possible to avoid flattening out the tensions involved in trying to realise the dominant aspirations or to resist hegemonic styles. The major forces making for contextual change, dissolving the cement of an earlier configuration and laying the foundations of the new, may become more visible as they impinge on a range of organisations. Again, the growing strains and contradictions experienced at a time of transition can be fully exposed.

For organisations concerned with change as well as understanding, an honest articulation of their changing experience is a necessary first step. The view from within the organisation will be more helpful than the vista from any social scientific Olympus. Context and organisation cannot be separated, since what organisa...