holidays

holidays in their modern secular sense of days free from the demands of paid labour, but not necessarily channelled or confined by the demands of religious observance, are in many ways a product of industrial society, and the concomitant precise demarcation between work time and leisure time. Many older calendar customs survived into urban and industrial society, especially where craft industries persisted for a long time alongside the factories in the 19th cent. and migration flows were predominantly short-distance, as in the textile-manufacturing districts of Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire. Thus the Lancashire Wakes and the Yorkshire Tides and Feasts, along with similar customary holidays in the Black Country and the Potteries, survived through into the second half of the 20th cent., although increasingly removed from their origins as celebrations of the saint's day or anniversary of the foundation of the local parish church. National religious festivals, especially Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide, also survived erosion from the apostles of economic rationality, order, and propriety between the late 18th and mid-19th cents. Christmas was remade in more secular and commercial form, with an array of imported and invented traditions such as the Christmas tree, greeting cards, robins, and Father Christmas, while many northern towns introduced the Whit walks at which religious congregations paraded the streets in competitive finery. The more political festival of Bonfire Night (5 November), part of the politico-religious calendar since the 17th cent., also continued as a widely observed red-letter day, although aspects of its celebration were toned down by local authorities anxious to uphold public order in the mid-Victorian years. Meanwhile, the secular and unofficial holiday of ‘St Monday’, abstention from work on the day following the weekend, was particularly popular among the better-paid craft workers and miners, and although it was systematically attacked by employers and moral reformers, playing havoc as it did with work schedules and family budgets, it proved difficult to extirpate, especially among workers in heavy, hot industries who were paid well by the shift, and it survived strongly in coal-mining in the late 20th cent.

Holidays in the sense of extended periods away from home in pursuit of health and pleasure in enjoyably different surroundings were emerging as a regular practice among the better-off by the later 17th cent. Bath led the way among the spa towns, and the emergence of seaside resorts from the 1730s encouraged an opening-out of the market, as London shopkeepers flocked to Margate cheaply by sailing vessel and also found their way to Brighton. Fashions for cultural and scenic tourism emerged in the late 18th cent. and began to percolate down the social scale. But the holiday away from home as a popular and commercial phenomenon (as opposed to such activities as returning to one's home village to help with the harvest) was mainly a product of the railway age. At working-class level such holidays were almost always unpaid, and they emerged first as a genuinely popular phenomenon in northern England, where the customary Wakes holidays (especially in the Lancashire cotton towns) were adapted for extended seaside visits from the 1850s and especially the 1870s, and families saved through the year in special clubs to be able to afford them. The Bank Holiday Acts of 1871 and 1875, which came to guarantee four free Mondays in the year including the first Monday in August, were of no importance here, although they did help to open out summer holiday opportunities in parts of the country where the older holidays had not survived. Paid holidays for manual workers before the First World War were offered by only a few paternalistic or enlightened employers, and although they spread gradually through the inter-war years a compulsory Holidays with Pay Act was not passed until 1938, and did not become effective until after the Second World War, when English seaside resorts had a particularly prosperous couple of decades, before generally failing to meet the challenge of new opportunities and new destinations.

John K. Walton