Judith Raven was born in Derby in 1921. At eight, she moved to Upper Dale Road and began attending the church of St Giles, in whose parish she still lived in 2015. St Giles is the parish church of Normanton-by-Derby, a village that had long since been swallowed by the town. The parish stretched from some of Derby's principal industries, and the homes of migrant families who worked there, to middle-class suburbia. Judith Raven was thus well placed to observe some of the major social changes in England during her lifetime.
Raven remembers a happy childhood in a part of town that was working class and homogeneous. Even Catholics were thin on the ground. People were British and proud of it: Empire Day was a big occasion at school. The centre of Raven's social life was St Giles. Her parents did not attend, but sent her to Sunday school. She remembered the annual Sunday school outing, when the church hired a dray for the younger children and went to a field on the edge of the city for races and treats. Her mother was involved with the Mothers’ Union. Raven made her close friends at the church and became part of its thriving social scene, which included a badminton club, a dramatic society, and an orchestra.Footnote 1
In the 1950s, immigrants began arriving in Derby from the Caribbean and South Asia. By 1971, the city had 3,607 residents from India, 1,080 from Pakistan, and 2,205 from the West Indies. The majority lived either in or adjacent to the parish of St Giles in the streets around Normanton Road. They worked at the mile-long Leys foundry and at textile factories such as Celanese and Meridian.Footnote 2 They worked as bus conductors and as nurses in the National Health Service.Footnote 3 But aside from one West Indian man, Judith Raven and her husband, Eric, who arrived in Derby in 1950, had no memory of any of them attending St Giles, although some children from the West Indies came to Sunday school each week. When the Ravens moved to Sunnyhill Avenue in 1963 the area was all white. Fifty years later, many of the people on their street had roots in South Asia. St Giles continued to flourish, with congregations similar to if not larger than they had been in the 1950s.Footnote 4 Yet during the lifetime of Judith Raven, the parish had experienced very rapid social change.
This article is a study of religion and social change in England between 1930 and the end of the century. It uses Derby as a case-study, examining how its religious character changed in the face of two major shifts: the declining social significance of Christianity and the establishing of new religious communities in the city. The article will argue that the historic, Christian civil religion of Derby gave way to a new era of civil religion and civil religions, in which multiple religious communities committed to the health of society lived together and built a new, multi-faith form of civil religion. The result is a picture of English society at the end of the twentieth century in which religion continued to play a significant and constructive role.
Secularization has long been the dominant paradigm for understanding religion in modern Britain.Footnote 5 Its basic premise, that the social significance of religion has declined, is hard to resist, especially for the period after 1945. Debates have therefore centred on the nature and extent of the phenomenon. Perhaps the two most influential contributions have come from Grace Davie, who argued that popular religion was still alive and well in Britain, with most people retaining basic Christian beliefs even if they never went to church, and Callum Brown, who in a series of studies has argued that changes in gender discourse in the 1960s affected women's attitudes to everything from sex to family to religion, with one result being a decline in churchgoing in their own lives and those of their children.Footnote 6 Brown is one of many scholars who further the discussion of the causes, timing, and nature of secularization, while others such as Davie have argued either against simplistic notions of secularization or for some form of desecularization. There is a growing willingness, however, to acknowledge truth in both pictures. This is the position of Linda Woodhead and Paul Weller, for example, with Weller describing Britain as now Christian, secular, and religiously plural.Footnote 7 Davie's most recent work fits this category.Footnote 8
This article contributes to these debates through a local study of individual, conventional religion in multiple religious communities and its relationship to civic religion. All five of these characteristics are important. There are some excellent local studies of Christianity in England in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and even the early twentieth centuries, but few for the period after the Second World War.Footnote 9 As churchgoing declined, it became easy to assume that one could understand English religion through the single lens of secularization theory, and most debates on the subject take place at a high level of national abstraction. One exception is Ian Jones's The local church and generational change in Birmingham, 1945–2000, a study of six churches in Birmingham that gives a satisfyingly complex picture of the fortunes of Christianity in Birmingham after the Second World War. There is a need, however, for more case-studies of lived religion in modern Britain.Footnote 10 Second, there is a growing body of work on migrants in post-war Britain, but typically these studies are limited to one ethnic or religious group and they often pay only modest attention to religion. Moreover, they are more often the work of sociologists and geographers than historians, and even when there are local studies, these typically focus on the cities with the largest migrant populations, such as London, Birmingham, and Bradford, which are unlikely to be representative.Footnote 11 Matthew Grimley has provided a useful study of the Church of England and multi-culturalism, but his focus is on the institutional church at the national level.Footnote 12 The closest analogue to the current project is Chris Baker's study of religion in Manchester in the twenty-first century, but it does not describe or explain change over time.Footnote 13 Thirdly, much of the debate surrounding Christianity in twentieth-century Britain has focused on popular religion, or common religion: the religion of those who continue to believe in the supernatural and pray but do not go to church.Footnote 14 This has been a good argument against simple notions of secularization, but it has had the effect of marginalizing those whose actions suggested that they were the ones for whom religious belief was most important. This article is most interested in civil religion in Derby but it explores this in large part through studying the conventional religion of those who attended churches, gurdwaras, mosques, and temples, on people whose self-understanding was often highly religious in nature. Callum Brown has made a useful recent contribution by studying those who claim no religion at all, but it is not possible to understand religion in modern Britain if we see those who remained committed as deviants from the norms of secularism and popular religion.Footnote 15 This also explains, fourthly, why individuals are central to the story told here. Modern British religious history is usually portrayed with broad brush strokes. This is true for Davie's characterizations of the religious nature of British society, Hugh McLeod's history of the religious crisis of the 1960s, and Brown's depictions of the changing discourses that moulded people's lives. By contrast, this study follows James Hinton's call for a biographical turn in history, which would allow us to glimpse ‘those deeply personal processes from which history's vast impersonal forces are, in the end, constructed’.Footnote 16 This article will therefore privilege the stories of those who walked through and therefore helped to form the changing cultural and religious landscape of post-war England.
This article is interested in more than people's private religious lives, however. It is also a study of the changing place of religion in Derby's civic life. At the end of the Second World War, Christianity was still a significant part of the city's culture. It was Derby's civil religion. People saw their city as part of a national society with a semi-sacred quality.Footnote 17 This civil religion was expressed in what David Martin and Rebecca Catto have described as ‘a contingent union of selected aspects of Christianity, neighbourliness, proverbial wisdom, Stoic courage, and loyalty to country, realm and polity’.Footnote 18 The article will argue that this civil religion faded in the years after the war, but it was to return in a new form. Over time, members of Derby's new religious communities wanted to make a contribution to the civic good of their adopted city, and Christians too reimagined and reconfigured their social role to the same end. The result was a new civil religion, more concerned with local society than national identity and tied to religion in general and not only Christianity. It was also an era of civil religions, in which religious groups worked together for the good of the city and resisted extremism. Here, the article challenges Callum Brown's characterization of religion in late twentieth-century Britain as militant. Brown supports his position by focusing on the Christian charismatic movement, the controversy over Salman Rushdie's Satanic verses, Orthodox Judaism in north London, Presbyterianism in the Scottish Highlands, Roman Catholic social thought, and Ulster Unionism.Footnote 19 These phenomena grabbed headlines but they reflect only part of British religious life in the closing years of the twentieth century.Footnote 20 Looking at the breadth of religious experience in Derby suggests that Brown's sample is unrepresentative and his characterization of religion in late twentieth-century Britain therefore misleading.
The broader applicability of any local study is always questionable, but Derby has advantages for a study of religion in modern England. Its greatest attraction may be just how unremarkable it is. Twentieth-century Derby is famous only for its 1970s football teams and its engineering, notably its railway works and Rolls Royce's nuclear and aero engine divisions. Historians have ignored it.Footnote 21 It is a small city, with a population of 141,267 according to the 1951 census and 248,752 in 2001. Politically, Derby has leaned left but not exclusively so: both of the city's constituencies, Derby North and Derby South, voted Labour for more than sixty years after their creation in 1950, with the exception of a spell of support for the Conservative party in Derby South between 1983 and 1987. Derby experienced significant immigration after the Second World War, but the city did not become a major centre for West Indian or South Asian settlement in the way that others in the English Midlands did, notably Birmingham and Leicester. By the time of the 2001 census, Derby was home to 19,006 Muslims, 8,891 Sikhs, and 2,198 Hindus; Buddhists, Jews, and all others claiming a religion other than Christianity amounted to fewer than 2,000 people. For all these reasons, Derby is more likely to provide a representative picture of the impact of immigration on English society than London, Birmingham, or Chichester.
Part I of the article chronicles the decline of civil religion in Derby after 1950. This was a major change for a society where Christianity had long been a dominant social force. Part II looks at the arrival of citizens from the West Indies and South Asia from the 1950s and the initial responses to this change from long-term residents up to the mid-1970s. It is possible to see the emerging characteristics of a different society during these decades, but this part of the article will emphasize the uncertainties and a range of different possible trajectories by privileging the stories of the migrants. This section and the following one make use of a series of interviews conducted in Derby in 2014–15.Footnote 22 Part III studies the development of the major faith communities in Derby after 1975 and the way this changed the religious culture of the town. The article concludes that Derby entered an era of civil religions and renewed civil religion.
I
Popular religion, civil religion, and conventional religion were all prominent in Derby in the 1930s and 1940s. Judith Raven remembers her friends all going to Sunday school, most of them assuming the rightness of Christian morals even if they did not practise them; the newspapers regularly reflected all three.Footnote 23 The principal local daily newspaper, the Derby Evening Telegraph, often linked religion, civic life, and moral values. As it did so, Christianity was usually explicit. It was not always clear whether civil, popular, or conventional religion was in view, but it is clear that the newspaper nurtured a discourse that made Christian beliefs and practices appear normal and normative. Civil religion, which included religious observance, moral rectitude, and commitment to civic involvement, was the goal. Over time, however, this vision atrophied and the attendant discourse lost its position of influence in the pages of the local paper. This section describes civil religion in Derby and its decline after the Second World War.
Prior to 1960, the Derby Evening Telegraph regularly gave space to clergymen's positions on a contemporary social or moral issue. The bishop of Derby explained and advocated a biblical view of sex.Footnote 24 Rev. Douglas R. Jones provided a biblical rationale for opposition to flogging.Footnote 25 A Methodist minister argued that ‘traffic in intoxicants and the Christian religion are utterly irreconcilable’.Footnote 26 R. Motson Thomson, a Congregational minister, wrote a regular Saturday column that provided conservative comment on subjects including divorce, greed, and swearing.Footnote 27 The paper even reported on a speech by the bishop of Oxford, who expressed the fear that ‘moral paralysis’ was ‘spreading over the nation’.Footnote 28 Clergy writing or quoted in the paper were often critical of the status quo but assumed a set of shared values consistent with Christianity's special place in Britain's history and society.
Political and civic leaders also appealed to religious beliefs and values. A local councillor protested against cemetery inspections taking place on Sundays.Footnote 29 The mayor alluded to heaven and encouraged people to read the Bible.Footnote 30 An alderman's wife blamed people outside the church for many of the world's wrongs.Footnote 31 Allan Reid, local Conservative MP between 1931 and 1945, urged people to support the church, arguing that ‘the only remedy’ for the world's ills lay in ‘a return to God’.Footnote 32 At the opening of a new Sunday school in Derby in 1937, Labour MP Philip Noel-Baker declared: ‘We need in our national life to-day greater strength for what we sometimes call the spiritual forces.’Footnote 33
Christianity was especially prominent in the pages of the Telegraph at Easter and Christmas. In 1930, it noted large congregations on both Good Friday and Easter Sunday, and the same was true at the end of the decade.Footnote 34 There were articles by clergymen and reports on the bishop's Easter address.Footnote 35 At Christmas, there were often messages from the mayor, the bishop, and the editors of the paper, all of whom used the occasion to encourage peace and goodwill in Derby. For example, in December 1930 an editorial commented on growing unemployment and privation, but said there were ‘signs that a better time is coming, and they can be deepened by the co-operation of all classes. The old message of peace on earth and good will towards men still rings true.’Footnote 36 The following year, the mayor wrote that the message of peace and goodwill that came with the birth of Christ ‘was meant to be applied at all times and seasons of the year’.Footnote 37 In 1939, the bishop used the occasion to encourage all Christians in Derbyshire to attend church, so that Christmas day might find everyone ‘assembled in church for an act of corporate worship at the feet of the Redeemer whose coming into the world is on that day commemorated’.Footnote 38 In 1947, the paper published a doctrinally rich Christmas poem by a local writer.Footnote 39
Civil religion could be seen in more indirect ways, too. Adverts frequently mentioned religious festivals and holidays as an enticement to buy. Writers assumed that people would know terms such as incarnation and canon law.Footnote 40 In 1950, the Telegraph took notice of a local campaign to ban the selling of ice cream on Sundays.Footnote 41 It reported on the ringing of church bells that were part of the 1951 Festival of Britain celebrations.Footnote 42
None of this is to say that the people of Derby were especially devout. Indeed, those who wrote in the Derby Evening Telegraph often remarked on the gap between public pronouncements of faith and the lack of faithful practice. One example comes from as early as 1932, when a correspondent contrasted the presence at Easter services among ‘even the most indifferent’, which showed that ‘the religious spirit is still deep-rooted in the masses of our countrymen’, with ‘the apathy which is shown during the remainder of the year’.Footnote 43 The columns of R. Morton Thompson reveal his own struggle to make sense of a country that seemed so Christian and non-Christian at the same time. In 1948, he bemoaned how many ignored Easter: ‘the day on which the Lord of All Good Life was crucified becomes a holiday with men and women bent on the pursuit of their own pleasures’.Footnote 44 Two years later, he wrote: ‘for the great majority of people in this country, Easter is just a holiday. It bears no religious significance at all for them…[T]his country…is now largely pagan.’Footnote 45
By the mid-1950s, Christianity was fading in the pages of the Derby Evening Telegraph. Those who took the paper read less and less about what had previously been the religious foundation of their city's public life. The discourse that undergirded civil religion was disappearing. Easter saw fewer comments on churches and more on holidaying by the sea.Footnote 46 Articles at Christmas focused more on shopping and the royal family and less on the Christ child.Footnote 47 Addresses from the bishop and Christian encouragement from the mayor all but disappeared.
Indicative of the change was the way the paper dealt with two public disagreements over football matches during this period. In 1952, the Milford British Legion planned a parade and a game of football for Good Friday. The local vicar protested, saying that ‘the anniversary of Our Lord's crucifixion should not be held in such contempt’. ‘On national occasions, such as days of prayer, the Milford branch of the Legion sends representatives to the parish church and I am always glad to receive them. As recently as last year there was a special service for the dedication of the branch banner.’ To the vicar, this all looked ‘illogical’ and ‘inconsistent’, but evidently not to those running the local branch of the British Legion, who were quite happy to make use of the church for civic purposes even though they had no intention of going there on Good Friday.Footnote 48 Two years later, there were objections to a Good Friday match in Duffield, but the local council was on the side of the organizers. In its reporting of the argument, this time the Telegraph dispatched its correspondent not to the vicarage but, it seems, to the pub. One Mr E. S. Hansbury did not think that anyone should ‘force their faith down other people's throats’, while Mr Penington did not think that those who would go to the football match would have attended church anyway.Footnote 49 By 1972, the paper's ‘Cute Easter chick’ had a bikini, not feathers.Footnote 50 Derby saw a transition from an era in which Christian cultural norms were respected even if people did not go to church to one in which people felt free neither to attend nor respect the norms.
More local studies would provide a more precise chronology of religious change in post-war Britain. Reading the Derby Evening Telegraph suggests that Christianity as civil religion faded before what Callum Brown, Hugh McLeod, and others have identified as the religious crisis of the 1960s.Footnote 51 There is a contrast here to the national press and parliament, where protestations of national religion were more consistent into the early 1960s.Footnote 52 This is unsurprising: national leaders who saw themselves as in some way guardians of the nation's soul would be more likely than journalists in Derby to continue to speak of England as a Christian country and thereby uphold a central plank of civil religion. The evidence from Derby's press does not support Brown's picture of a mild religious revival in the 1950s followed by a sudden decline in the discourses that undergirded Christian faith and practice in the 1960s.Footnote 53
There is one part of the experience of Derby that appears to fit Brown's chronology, but even that serves to underline the point being made here. Empire Youth Sunday, later Commonwealth Youth Sunday, began at the time of George VI's coronation in 1937. A variety of worthies formed this organization, which encouraged young people throughout the empire to imitate their sovereign in dedicating their lives to God and the service of the realm. The heart of the movement was uniformed youth organizations joining local dignitaries at a Christian service.Footnote 54 It became popular in many English parishes and colonies after the Second Word War, and the Derby Evening Telegraph reported on the annual celebrations. In 1950, the mayor received the salute on the steps of the council house before 300 youth from the scouts, the guides, the St John's Ambulance, the Derby Arts Club Brass Band, the Girls’ Life Brigade, and the army, sea, and air cadets, who then marched on to the cathedral for a service.Footnote 55 In 1958, 700 took part. The preacher stressed the importance of ‘allegiance to Queen and God’ and ‘pride for our country and what is has done’.Footnote 56 By 1962, 1,000 were in the parade.Footnote 57 Two years later, numbers were still high, yet the paper noted that this would be the final Commonwealth Youth Sunday.Footnote 58 The national leaders of the movement were disbanding it. Records from the central office reveal some of the reasons for their decisions. Participation was down in many English parishes, and the newly independent states of Africa and Asia had lost their enthusiasm. Its leaders were now also able to see the anomaly of a movement that centred on a Christian act of worship in a commonwealth where the ‘great majority’ were not Christians.Footnote 59 Conservatives from London with a robust vision of Britain and its Christian mission in the world organized Commonwealth Youth Sunday and for a while it seemed to be going from strength to strength in Derby.Footnote 60 But when the national leadership saw in the mid-1960s that Christian Britain and the commonwealth were not what they once were, they abruptly killed the movement. Civil religion was not what it had been. Readers of the Derby Evening Telegraph could have seen, or perhaps admitted, that before the elites in London. For a decade, Commonwealth Youth Sunday stood out in the paper's pages as a vestige of a time when Christianity was the city's public religion, attendance ensured by leaders of youth organizations for which it had become part of the calendar.
The change did not take place overnight and it was not total. Civil religion reappeared, as when the bishop of Derby made public comment on road safety in 1966, and the Telegraph still reported on Good Friday processions through the city.Footnote 61 But that the paper now published an edition on Good Friday was the telling sign.
This is not to say that Derby's churches were emptying during this period, nor that they had given up on the idea of social influence. In the future, however, the churches would have to forge a social role without the support provided by a widely shared Christian cultural consensus.
Civil religion was thus already on the way out before non-Christian immigrants started to arrive in Derby in the 1950s. One can argue that this was good timing, for it made it much less likely that English whites would base antagonism towards newcomers on religion, as had been the case with Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century. It certainly made for a cleaner slate on which to build what would have to be a new public religious culture. Religion would again find an important social role. That was not clear, however, when immigrants from the Caribbean and South Asia began to arrive in Derby. It is to their experience, and that of the long-term residents who received them, that we now turn.
II
There have been four major phases of immigration to Derby. The first, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was Irish Catholics. The second took place during the 1940s, when Poles and other people displaced by the Second World War came to the city. The third wave came from the West Indies and South Asia between the 1950s and 1980s. The fourth has occurred during the twenty-first century and is associated with the expansion of the European Union and Derby's designation as a refugee dispersal centre in 2001. This article focuses on the third of these, but it is important to note that there were immigrants in Derby before people started to arrive from Jamaica, India, and Pakistan. The Irish had by and large assimilated, but the East Europeans were still new in the 1950s. In 1950, the Derby Evening Telegraph reported that there were 2,000 ‘aliens’ in the city.Footnote 62 In 1953, the paper provided Christmas greetings ‘to our readers from other lands’ in Polish, French, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, German, Lithuanian, Italian, Dutch, Ukrainian, Spanish, Rumanian, Latvian, Estonian, and Czech.Footnote 63 Reports of ethnic tension were rare, one exception being the banning of Polish, Latvian, and Czech men from a Derby ballroom because of rowdy behaviour.Footnote 64
By 1961, Derby had 880 residents from India, 232 from Pakistan, and 1,077 from the West Indies. On rare occasions, they came as professional people with university training, for example Subrata Dasgupta who arrived in Derby in 1953 as a doctor.Footnote 65 In the main, however, they came in search of a good education for their children and work – in factories, textiles, or the National Health Service.Footnote 66 This section recounts the experiences of people in this wave of immigration. It does not emphasize religion, for that was not typically central to their initial encounter with British life. Over time, however, many developed a growing sense of religious difference, the beginnings of which will be covered in this section.
For adults who came, early memories centred on the industrial nature of Derby, the climate of England, and the difficulty of finding work. Edna Williamson (neé Lilly) arrived from Jamaica as a twenty-six-year-old in 1962. She struggled to find work, but found it difficult to believe that there were no jobs as she watched factories belch smoke. She had been a teacher in Jamaica, but a receptionist at the doctor's told her that she would never be able to do that in England. When she applied to train as a nurse, she was initially rebuffed by someone who told her that they already had their full complement of colonial nurses.Footnote 67 Vida Johnson, also from Jamaica, saw all the chimney pots on houses and thought they were factories. On especially foggy days, her sister would listen for Johnson's bus and then call to her from the front stoop so she could find her way home.Footnote 68 Soshain Bali, an Indian who arrived from Kenya in 1974, remembered the transition being especially difficult for his mother, who found it hard to find employment. On one occasion, a company told her of a job by phone, only to tell her that there was no vacancy when she turned up in her sari.Footnote 69 Gloria Newell, an arrival from Jamaica in 1956, recalled a similar experience.Footnote 70
Those who came as children tell a complex story of their experience at schools in Derby. Those who arrived in the 1950s and 1960s recalled incidences of racism, but also interethnic friendship and kindness. Subrata Dasgupta came to Derby as a nine-year-old in 1953. For most of the time, he was the only non-white at his school, and on occasion his classmates called him brownie. There was also a stern female teacher at a Catholic school he attended briefly who insisted, to his dismay, that all the pupils learn the catechism. But alongside painful stories of dislocation, Dasgupta spoke of friendships built through playing and watching football with local white boys.Footnote 71 Mohammad Riasat came as a nine-year-old to join his father in Derby in 1961. He was the youngest Pakistani in the city, and the first at all the schools he attended. He remembered his teachers as kind and patient as he struggled to pick up English (there was no specialized instruction at the time). Others welcomed him in part because he was very good at sports, eventually playing football for the Derby Boys team.Footnote 72 Hardial Singh Dhillon came to join his father at thirteen in 1966. His Sikh father had been attracted to Derby by the prospect of work, and had found a job at a local foundry. Neither had much English, and school was a difficult transition for Hardial. On his father's orders, he cut his hair before his first day (although the English barber he approached refused to do it, saying that he did not want sin on his hands). Most teachers were kind, but when his French teacher caught him speaking Punjabi to a neighbour as he tried to make sense of the lesson, the teacher made him stand up, put a pencil between his outstretched fingers and twisted hard.Footnote 73 By the time that Soshain Bali arrived in 1974, there were more South Asian students in his school. Racial slurs were more developed than in Dasgupta's time, if still inexact: while Dasgupta's friends thought he was perhaps African, Bali's called him a Paki as well as Sambo.Footnote 74 Over time, however, Bali, Riasat, and Singh settled in their schools and all succeeded.
Religion was not as important as ethnicity in the experience of these early migrants from South Asia. Most migrants to Derby came from rural areas of Punjab and Kashmir (many of the Sikhs were Jats, or farmers), areas with large numbers of Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs, yet religion was often more assumed than articulated in these families.Footnote 75 The children went to schools that had a daily service of Christian worship, but this seemed to have bothered few of them. Their sense of difference rested on their ethnicity. Mohammed Riasat was not aware at first that the assembly at his school was Christian, but his understanding of Islam at the time was limited. He knew that he was not allowed to eat pork but, with no mosque in Derby when he arrived, there was little opportunity to learn more.Footnote 76 Hardial Singh Dhillon's father had little education and his understanding of the Sikh faith was modest. Hardial made friends at school with Muslims who spoke his language, and at the time felt there were few differences between them. Eventually, however, one Muslim boy began to encourage others not to say the prayers in assembly (receiving a caning as a result). Soshain Bali came from a Brahmin family that understood their Hindu faith better. He had already encountered greater religious diversity in Kenya, and so the Christian assemblies did not bother him.Footnote 77 Over time, migrants founded their own houses of worship, a process that featured heavily in people's recollections and contributed to a process of growing confidence that will be discussed in the next part of this article.
By contrast, Jamaican adults came to England planning to go to church, and some have memories of cold shoulders when they went.Footnote 78 Life was a little easier for Vida Johnson, a Seventh Day Adventist, who found a place in that denomination's congregation in Derby.Footnote 79 West Indians who went to Pear Tree Baptist Church found that the church had little idea of how to integrate them into the membership and ministry of the church.Footnote 80 It was not long, therefore, before West Indians began to form their own churches.
Most migrants came to the Pear Tree or Normanton Road area of Derby where housing was cheap and factories close. For the local schools, the question of how to integrate and educate a growing number of children, many of whom came with little or no English, was pressing. The minutes of the Derby Borough Teachers’ Association reveal a group of people who, while sharing some of the prejudices of those long-time residents who feared that the presence of immigrant children would harm their own children, were working hard to serve the newcomers.Footnote 81 In the early 1960s, they asked for and got additional teachers, extra classroom space, greater administrative help, and improved welfare assistance, but they saw little improvement in the situation because of the rapid rise in the numbers of children coming from West Indian and South Asian families.Footnote 82 These numbers increased by 30 per cent in 1965 alone.Footnote 83 In 1966, they determined that of the 1,236 total immigrant pupils, only 359 had no problems with basic spoken and written English.Footnote 84 The records of one secondary modern school detail the struggles and kindnesses of these early years, telling of everything from girls assaulted by South Asian boys to teachers taking recent arrivals on a tour of Derbyshire and to a local clinic.Footnote 85
Especially relevant for this article is the question of what schools did about their Christian assemblies. One of the buttresses of civil religion in Britain was the 1944 Butler Education Act, which had specified that each school day should include an act of corporate Christian worship. This became problematic as religious pluralism increased. One Derby school that addressed the question was Homelands School, a secondary modern school that by the 1980s had a majority of non-white children. In 1976, the staff held a meeting on ‘Assembly in a Multi-cultural School’. In preparation for the meeting, teachers had been asked to submit their thoughts on paper. One teacher summarized one aspect of English civil religion: ‘The folk-lore content of Christianity can be defended as relevant in its own right; i.e. it contains reference to moral ends desired in our society.’ This teacher went on to ask whether it was possible to divide what he or she called the religious from the moral content of this type of Christianity, and whether the moral dimension, which the school wanted to keep as a way of forming good citizens, could be ‘incorporated into other value systems such as that of the Sikh, the Moslem or the Buddhist cults’. She or he wanted to split the ethical dimension of civil religion from its Christian roots. This teacher stated that part of what it meant for England to be a ‘Christian society’ was to bring into their religious services ‘material…which can be found in the literature of other cultures’.Footnote 86 Another teacher, S. M. Wabe, raised the question of whether Christianity should retain its privileged place given the religious diversity of the school. Readings should now include ‘items from other religions and cultures’. Wabe also raised the question of whether the point of assemblies was religious or social. She or he suggested the possibility of ‘other religions having a separate assembly once a week’, but was not sure whether having non-Christian assemblies might contravene the 1944 Education Act and worried that ‘this might cause more problems by emphasizing divisions and differences’.Footnote 87 The vision of multi-culturalism at this school was integrationist, meaning that it recognized a majority group.Footnote 88 But it was clear to all the teachers that even the society serving, doctrinally light Christianity of the Homelands assembly was no longer going to work as the numbers of non-Christian pupils at the school grew. This became an issue at more schools in Derby as non-Christian families moved out of the areas in which they had initially settled and spread throughout the city.Footnote 89
For all the stories of unwelcoming churches, many Christians were thinking about how to serve migrant families. Indeed, this was a way for the church to assert its civic usefulness at a time when, in the face of the declining social prominence of Christianity, some were calling for the church to re-engage social affairs.Footnote 90 Welcoming newcomers, helping them to settle, and fostering racial toleration were the important goals in these early years. The Derby and South Derbyshire Committee for Social Welfare Association reported on the efforts made by Mrs Gate at St James's church to start a playgroup to help South Asian children learn English before starting school.Footnote 91 The vicar of St Thomas's Anglican church on Pear Tree Road spoke of the Christians in the area who were helping with language tuition and called for the building of non-sectarian community centres to reduce ethnic tensions.Footnote 92 The Anglican diocese's missionary and ecumenical council wanted to draw up a list of people who could act as interpreters for Pakistanis, and people to whom they could turn for advice.Footnote 93
The primary desire of the churches, however, was to see the immigrants come to church, so that they might become Christians or at least imbibe some of the ethical and cultural norms of Christianity. The churches were relatively successful with children. One quarter of the children at St Thomas's Church of England Sunday school were from immigrant families in 1966.Footnote 94 Across the street from St Thomas's, more than half of the 130 children at the Pear Tree Road Baptist Sunday school in 1968 were listed as ‘coloured’.Footnote 95 West Indian children went on Sunday afternoons to St Augustine's Anglican church; the problem was that the parents did not ‘follow their children to church’.Footnote 96 This was a common experience. Another church in the Pear Tree area, Dairy House Road Methodist, had an evening service attended by West Indians in 1955, but they soon moved on.Footnote 97 By 1960, the church was considering asking them whether they wanted to use the church for services of their own.Footnote 98 The church dwindled as the congregation aged and the local white population declined, but still in 1964 they resisted an invitation to amalgamate with another church because they felt they had ‘a mission to the immigrant population in the neighbourhood’.Footnote 99 Within six years, the decision was made to close the church.Footnote 100 Pear Tree Road Baptist Church started an Indian Women's Group with tea once a week, but it does not seem to have taken off.Footnote 101 Personal relationships could be strong, as they were for Tony and Helen Lyon, a couple who went to a Pentecostal church on Whiston Street and then to St Giles Anglican church. Helen established a friendship with a Jamaican family who came to the Pentecostal church (the husband becoming one of the church's leaders), and the Lyons were good friends with a Sikh family that lived next door. But although the Lyons ferried West Indian children to Sunday school and Helen had South Asian children involved in a playgroup at St Giles (she delighted in having Asian wise men in the nativity play one year), the adults had little interest in the church.Footnote 102
Derby changed a great deal between 1955 and 1975 as it became home to several thousand people who looked different and believed differently. How this would shape the city's culture was unclear, however. To what extent would the newcomers assimilate? Would language, ethnicity, or religion become determinative for their identities? Would racial antipathy ebb or rise? Would different ethnic and religious groups become politicized? Would they become enclaves or seek to serve society? How would the churches’ attempts to reassert their civil role fare? That there would be a new Derby was obvious, but what would it be like? The next section offers a picture of some of its principal characteristics, with particular attention to the growing importance of religions for Derby's civil society.
III
When Hardial Singh Dhillon arrived in Derby in 1966, his family told him to keep his head down, fit in, and study hard. He was there to take advantage of English schools, and his parents did not want his Sikh background to get in the way: hence the order to cut his hair.Footnote 103 A similar picture emerges from the story of Mohammed Riasat, a Muslim who played football with white friends and did not grow a beard.Footnote 104 Both Singh and Riasat arrived, however, at a time when immigration and race were becoming major political issues in Britain. The first restriction on the free entry of commonwealth citizens had been in 1962; 1965 had the first race relations act, and 1968 witnessed both a new immigration act and Enoch Powell's ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. One result was the politicization of the immigrant communities along ethnic lines, and one could see evidence of this in Derby. The Derby West Indian Association was formed as early as 1961, the Derby Indian Association later in the decade. In 1971, the chairman of the Indian Association, Ajmer Singh Khakh, wrote a letter to the Derby Evening Telegraph protesting against the immigration bill then before parliament, which he dubbed ‘blatantly racialist’ and ‘more or less a surrender to Powellism’.Footnote 105 Khakh had come from India in 1964, where he had served in the British army and gained a degree in politics. At the time of the letter, he was a Liberal candidate in the municipal elections. Indian migrants also wrote in support of the East African Asians then stranded in Kenya and Uganda.Footnote 106 There was also evidence of increasing antipathy towards South Asians and West Indians in the city, with letters calling for an end to immigration that accused the newcomers of everything from disease to drugs.Footnote 107
Yet over time, religion assumed greater and greater importance as a focus for immigrant identities. Building places of worship bolstered the new communities’ confidence, a factor given little attention in a standard work on the changing experience of immigrants.Footnote 108 The first mosque opened in 1963. The first Hindu temple opened in a house on Normanton Road. By the 1990s, there was a variety of mosques and several Sikh gurdwaras. Jamaicans had started a church in someone's home as early as 1957. Before long, there were numerous black churches representing a variety of denominations.Footnote 109 There was resistance to the building of some of these religious sites, including a Muslim garage-owner's three-year-long refusal to sell a piece of land that was necessary for the building of the Hindu temple, but the fights did not leave deep scars on intercommunal relations.Footnote 110
By the 1980s, it was obvious to Derby residents that their city was not just multi-ethnic but also multi-religious.Footnote 111 Sikhs encouraged their children to wear patkas and more Muslim men grew beards. This change made a difference for the first generation of immigrants and not just, as Goodhart has argued, for the British-born second generation.Footnote 112 Hardial Singh Dhillon's father had told him that if he met people at school from India or Pakistan who spoke his language he should hug them and make allies, regardless of religion. But as Singh experienced persecution at school he began to visit the local Indian Workers’ Association library to read books about the Sikh faith. As more South Asians went to university, they became more articulate about their faith. Nationally, religious communities began to argue for their rights as British citizens, galvanizing the local religious communities in Derby. For Sikhs, the two crucial moments were the Motor-Cycle Crash Helmets (Religious Exemption) Act of 1976, by which men with turbans won the right to use a motorcycle without a helmet, and the 1983 Mandla-Dowell Lee case in which the House of Lords upheld the right of a Sikh boy to wear a turban to school. It was integration into the educated middle classes that allowed Sikhs to win the case for their distinctiveness. When Hardial Singh Dhillon and his wife, Rupinder Dhillon, sent their son to school in Derby, he went with a patka. Singh himself began wearing a turban in 1989.Footnote 113 Mohammad Riasat, who in his youth had been a clean-shaven powerlifter and a champion arm-wrestler, decided to make the hajj and grew a beard. Riasat was part of a group of Muslims who successfully argued for sex-segregated physical education in local schools. That campaign was evidence of the impact on Derby of the growing numbers of wives and children who were arriving to join husbands and fathers, a phenomenon which contributed to a sense of rootedness and a desire to build their own religious communities. Islam, the Sikh faith, and Hinduism subtly morphed as the communities’ leaders negotiated their place in English society.
By the 1980s, religion was thus trumping ethnicity as the primary defining identity of South Asians in Derby.Footnote 114 This could lead to tension between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, as it did at one point in the 1980s but it was leaders of these three religious communities, plus Christians, who met in the gurdwara and diffused the situation, much to the relief of the local police.Footnote 115 In 1992, a petrol bomb ignited Derby's Hindu temple on the day that Hindus in Ayodha, India, demolished the Babri mosque, but local Hindu and Muslim leaders stood shoulder to shoulder. ‘I was surprised that it happened…in Derby’, a Muslim councillor said; ‘We've had excellent relations between ethnic groups in the city.’Footnote 116 The chair of the Indian Community Centre said that Muslims and Hindus had ‘lived in harmony in Derby for years’.Footnote 117 There was a candlelit vigil at the Pakistan Community Centre that gathered representatives from all religious communities for prayer.Footnote 118 The crisis quickly passed.
As it became clear that the migrants were going to stay and that they were becoming more not less attached to their own religious traditions, white Christians had to adjust their response. This was made more difficult by the fact that Derby's churches were not immune from the national trend of declining attendances. Especially in areas of immigrant settlement, churches struggled to keep the doors open. In 1980, the vicar of St Augustine's told a gathering of local Anglican clergy that it was not easy, ‘to minister to a declining congregation. The white people were leaving steadily, and being replaced by immigrant families, bringing with them their own religions and culture.’Footnote 119 The vicar of the neighbouring church of St Chad's told a similar story.Footnote 120 One can read the minutes of the Dairy House Road Methodist Church and the Normanton Road Congregational Church and watch as they expire.Footnote 121 Daljit Singh Ahluwahlia commented that the Derby where there was a pub or church on every corner had disappeared since his arrival.Footnote 122
This was not the whole story, however, or even the dominant one. Many churches survived and even flourished, and they wanted to renegotiate and thereby reclaim a role in society. As they did so, they sometimes faced a tension between their belief that Jesus Christ was the saviour for all, and the need to respect other religions, the latter being essential if they wished to fight racial injustice. One can see this clearly in the records of local Anglican committees. The Derby Deanery Synod helped to organize a vigil for racial harmony in 1978.Footnote 123 Anglican leaders wanted to build relationships with the growing number of local black churches.Footnote 124 The missionary and ecumenical council talked about the need to help the white population treat immigrants with warmth and respect.Footnote 125 They organized multi-faith services, a departure influenced in part by Roman Catholicism's growing openness to other religions after the Second Vatican Council.Footnote 126 But the council also spent a lot of time discussing the need to share the Christian faith with others, including immigrants.Footnote 127 Several Anglican parishes banded together to bring a priest from the Church of North India to Derby to minister to the few Indian Christians and share Christianity with other South Asians in the city.Footnote 128 A long discussion at a meeting in 1981 focused on the potential tension ‘between the desire to welcome people of others faiths and not to appear patronizing and superior, and our Christian conviction of the uniqueness of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ’.Footnote 129 The evidence suggests that they were able to combine civic concern and their convictions, which was vital for their claim that Christianity could continue to serve a useful, if attenuated, role in society.
To return to local congregations, some white congregations paid only modest attention to Derby's other religious communities but nevertheless found ways to play a part in civil society very much along the lines of what the churches had done earlier in the century, even if the Derby Evening Telegraph did not pay much attention. As they did so, they found that their congregations were slowly becoming more diverse. St Giles fitted this category. As noted above, the church continued to attract good congregations and was a thriving community, even if it no longer had an orchestra.Footnote 130 Several people of West Indian heritage now went to St Giles; Edna Williamson, who was so hurt by the rejection she found in Derby churches in the 1960s that she stopped attending church for almost two decades, began to visit the church, which was just down the road from the one she typically went to, the Pentecostal Church of God of Prophecy.Footnote 131 Another example was Woodlands Chapel. Woodlands was started in 1966 in Allestree, a suburb that was largely white. Numbers grew such that they had to extend their building in 1978, which they had outgrown again by the 1990s. The congregation was conscious of immigration, and helped fund the South Asian pastor in the city.Footnote 132 There were always people in the congregation who had not been born in Britain, including several from India; typically, they were firmly middle class. The women's group on Thursday mornings had a strong international flavour.Footnote 133 The Acorns toddler group drew dozens of women and children from the community to the church several mornings each week. St Joseph's Roman Catholic Church was very close to Normanton Road, but saw few immigrants come to the church. Congregations declined, but there were still several hundred regularly attending mass at the end of the century, including a number of immigrants from the Philippines.Footnote 134 The fact that thousands of people in Derby continued to go to churches enabled them to claim and play a continued role as a religious foundation for society, even in the absence of the old discourse of civil religion.
Some churches made a concerted and successful effort to reach out across ethnic and religious lines. Pear Tree Road Baptist is one example. Its struggle to integrate the West Indians who started coming to the church has already been mentioned. By 1970, attendance was falling and the future looked bleak. Over time, however, congregants from different ethnicities began to work together in the church, which grew again in the 1990s. The continued vitality of the church owed much to the immigrants who made it their home.Footnote 135 Another example was one of Derby's Assemblies of God Pentecostal congregations. Originally meeting on Whiston Street, in 1976 it moved into the old Congregational Church on Normanton Road and became Normanton Road Assembly of God. At that time, the youth work at the church began to grow under the leadership of Geoff Pickup, who became the church's senior minister in 1982. When Pickup arrived, he sought to reach out to the young people in the streets around the church, many of whom were Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim. Sikhs and Hindus began to come, and over the years approximately sixty were baptized. Into the twenty-first century, most of the children who came to the Sunday school were of South Asian descent, and for the annual trips the church filled half a dozen double-decker buses with these children and their mothers. In 1972, members of the church went to Derby station to help South Asians who had been expelled from Uganda and were being resettled in Derby. When Pickup came to Derby, he only worked part time for the church, his regular job being education advisor for ethnic minorities for the Derby borough council. This made it easy to build relationships in the local community, and he enjoyed meals with Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus who became friends through this work. He helped set up language centres to teach immigrant children English. He was vice chair of the Community Relations Council, the local expression of the Race Relations Board, and was targeted by the British Nationalist Party, who smashed his window and carried placards saying ‘Pickup is a black lover.’ Today the church is known as New Life Centre. On a typical Sunday morning, 600 adults attend and although they come from a wide geographical area, approximately one third walk to church.Footnote 136 In 2002, Pickup bought twenty flags to represent the home countries of those who worshipped there.Footnote 137
Pickup is one example of the care that Christians in Derby continued to feel for their city, even if Christianity was no longer its civil religion in the way it had been before it lost its public pre-eminence in print and before the establishment of multiple new religious communities in the city. Pickup and others like him continued to be motivated by a concern for society; there is not much evidence of the subcultural militancy that Callum Brown has said was characteristic of British religion in the late twentieth century.Footnote 138 Brown's primary example of militancy among British Christians is the charismatic movement, but Pickup, who was a charismatic pastor, would say to his Hindu and Muslim friends: ‘I am not going to change, so let's take it you're not going to change. So let's not argue about whether we've got three gods or whether our Bible has been tampered with. Let's not go down there. But let's go and eat together.’Footnote 139 Christians continued to find that their faith caused them to care about their city.
This was certainly true for Anglicans. To give only a few examples: at the diocesan level, a 1981 report on inter-faith worship said that Christians could ‘help those of others faiths to find their own identity in an alien and sometimes hostile land’.Footnote 140 When they saw a non-Anglican church moving in what they deemed a racist direction, they got involved.Footnote 141 Centrally, Derby cathedral sustained a civic role through special annual services for AIDS, animal welfare, and the legal profession and overfull carol services whose number was limited only by the endurance of the choir's voices.Footnote 142 One member of the clergy approvingly quoted a leader of one of the South Asian communities as saying ‘This is our cathedral, too.’Footnote 143 Senior Anglican clergy were vital figures in the development of the city's inter-faith movement.Footnote 144 Matthew Grimley has argued that Anglicans were often hampered in their attempts to address racism by the old idea of a single national community, but the evidence from Derby suggests that the latter was not as much of a millstone as it may have been at the national level.Footnote 145 At the parish level, churches such as St Alkmund's, a charismatic congregation, provided basic social services such as meals.Footnote 146 This was part of a wider trend of Christians seeking to fill gaps left by the retreat of the welfare state from the 1980s; Margaret Thatcher's policies did much to encourage churches to renew their commitments to social involvement.Footnote 147 Racial prejudice existed in Derby, but churchgoers at least heard countless sermons which made it clear that welcoming strangers was the Christian thing to do.Footnote 148 As one teacher at Homelands School argued, openness to other cultures was what it meant to be a Christian society.Footnote 149
Derby's Christians remained committed to the importance of Christian faith, morality, and social action for a pluralist civil society. And the attitudes of Christians mattered. One of the most frequently quoted statistics about religion in modern Britain is that 73·5 per cent of Muslims surveyed in 2005 said they were actively practising their religion, compared to 30·9 per cent of Christians. But given that 10,885 of the 11,927 of those surveyed in this Home Office Citizenship Survey were Christians and only 355 Muslim, that meant 3,363 active Christians and 260 Muslims.Footnote 150 Applying the percentages to Derby's 2001 census figures on religion, one could conclude that there were approximately 40,520 practising Christians in the city, and 14,000 Muslims. Local Christians were less worried about numerical decline because on their view those who had stopped coming could not have been deeply Christian in the first place.Footnote 151 Conventional religion not popular religion was what mattered to them, even if the government was more interested in how religious groups could be a resource on social projects.Footnote 152 Christianity's social significance had declined in Derby, but it was still an important social force in the late twentieth century.
It was certainly not only white Christians that felt responsibility for the city. Raj Bali was a trustee in the Hindu temple, a governor at a local school, and a leader of the multi-faith movement in Derby. Born in the Punjab in 1934, he remembers Sikhs attacking Muslims and vice versa at the partition of India in 1947. He moved to Kenya in 1958, then to Derby in 1974, where he worked in the finance department of a local small business. For him, the multi-faith movement was a means to social peace in a diverse society. He worked with leaders of other religious communities at moments of tension, and the Muslim owner of the large Pak Foods on Normanton Road became a grateful friend as a result. Bali also attended Derby cathedral regularly.Footnote 153 Mohammed Riasat was the manager of the Pakistan Community Centre and he was adamant that there was a reason it was not called the Pakistanis’ Community Centre: it was there for people of all faiths or none. He had become a more observant Muslim by the 1990s, but maintained good relationships with his Sikh powerlifting friends. Praveena and Kanty Patel, doctors who came to Derby in 1978, gave conscientiously to the community, taking a leading role in the local medical society as well as the Hindu temple and reaching out to sick Muslim women.Footnote 154 Edna Williamson, a member of the black Pentecostal Church of God of Prophecy, served for many years as a justice of the peace.Footnote 155 It would be incorrect and uncharitable to characterize these people's religion simply as a militant means of cultural defence. It stood in a tradition of civil religion that stretched back to the 1930s and beyond. The nature of civil religion had changed: secularization, immigration, and the decline of British power all meant that it was less tied to national identity than it had been. The links that some had to global communities of faith meant that the new civil religion was not a monolith. But people of faith continued to believe that local society needed moral foundations and that they had a responsibility to help provide those, through words and deeds.
Part of the explanation for the healthy relationships between Derby's different religious communities is that none were so large that they could realistically avoid engagement with others. This also made it possible for Christians to maintain some degree of mild cultural pre-eminence. The situation at St James's Anglican primary school illustrates the situation. In 1982, it had 400 pupils, 220 of which were Muslim, 100 Sikh, and half a dozen Hindu. The school produced its brochure in Punjabi and Urdu and included readings from non-Christian religious texts in its assembly. But the assembly was still basically Christian.Footnote 156 Derby was a multi-cultural society in which one religion retained a historically and numerically rooted precedence. Will Kymlicka, a leading theorist of multi-culturalism, has argued that states committed to multi-culturalism cannot be neutral: they necessarily promote certain cultural identities.Footnote 157 In this local study, however, the evidence points not so much to the state favouring certain identities as society embodying them.Footnote 158
For all its official popularity, the term multi-culturalism was not always the one that people in Derby used to describe their city.Footnote 159 Among the religiously observant, more common was the term multi-faith, in part due to the establishing of a multi-faith centre at the University of Derby between 1992 and 2004, yet the term was current long before then. This points to the potentially secular implications of the term multi-culturalism – culture not religion is what is most important, even though culture includes religion. Privileging the self-understanding of people in Derby, however, means taking seriously that for many, religious conviction became increasingly central to their identity. Moreover, they developed the ability to hold convictions about the truthfulness of what they believed while remaining civil to those with whom they disagreed. Their religions provided resources not just for tolerance but for respect. Hindu leaders in particular had much to contribute in this regard. Indeed, the secularization seen in the decline of Christianity as the city's unquestioned civil religion may have encouraged believers of all sorts to see each other as allies. Derby had its fair share of prejudice and discrimination, as examples here have shown. But it was also a city of civil religions, whose presence did much to foster interethnic respect and therefore civil society.
Since 2000, Derby has become home to many new immigrants, primarily from Eastern Europe. On the Normanton Road, alongside the shops selling abayas and curries there are now Polish supermarkets and Latvian newsagents. Many resent the newcomers, accusing them of indolence and immodesty in terms very similar to those used of West Indians and South Asians in the 1960s. Now, however, West Indians and South Asians are among the critics, not the criticized. They fear that recent migrants are here to drain society rather than contribute to it, and see that in stark contrast to their own families who came with sleeves rolled up, willing to take whatever jobs they could.Footnote 160 One can disagree with the characterization of those who have arrived in the twenty-first century, one can question the seemingly uncritical acceptance of certain stereotypes, but the critique assumes a shared set of values of what is good for Derby: hard work, education, the English language, and sobriety. The language of integration risks being inadequate and patronizing here, for people like Kamal Manan, Gloria Newell, and Avtar Singh did not need England to teach them the value of hard work.Footnote 161 The language of multi-culturalism, with its emphasis on pluralism and diversity, does not capture the reality either, for the shared moral sense is striking.Footnote 162 Religion was central to how these people saw the world, and therefore merits a prominent part in describing the multi-ethnic society they helped to shape. Whether religion, especially Islam, has become a more divisive force in the twenty-first century is an important question.Footnote 163 But for the twentieth century, the reconfiguration of civil religion and the advent of civil religions was a major development in the social history of Derby, and likely of many other parts of England, too.
