saint monday

In his article, 'Brothers of the Angle: Coarse Fishing and Working Class Culture 1850-1914', John Lowerson provides a genuinely fascinating insight into the practice and meaning of fishing in the later nineteenth century. He has a lot to say about Sheffield, which 'was widely regarded as the key coarse fishing centre in terms of numbers, style and organization', and I'll post bits and pieces over the next week or two. One really interesting point is to do with the day on which working men typically went fishing:

In Sheffield and its areas, the sacrosanct day for fishing until 1914 was Monday, and the rapid spread of clubs and their affiliation actually reinforced pre-industrial work patterns rather than, as in such sports as football, tailoring an inherited popular form to fit changing disciplinary modes. While Saint Monday [a tradition of absenteeism at the start of the week] declined sharply in much of England after the 1870s, it stayed healthy in Sheffield. 'Of course Monday is the great day of the week, Sheffielders being great patrons of Saint Monday', the Fishing Gazette claimed in 1878 and this still held true 30 years later, despite the fact that the town had partly recognized new circumstances in naming one of its principal football clubs, Sheffield Wednesday, after its commercial half-day.

Isn't that interesting? Fishing became a site of resistance to industrial discipline, not on an atomised, individual level, but as a mass phenomenon. Because working-class fishing was so highly organised - the reason for this  originally being the need for collective negotiation over 'access to waters and travel concessions' - it was difficult for employers to press their claims to workers' time and 'even many of the larger works appear to have had to accept a compromise on this issue'.

Lowerson died in 2009 and you can read an obituary in The Independent. He was clearly an interesting man and a very significant figure in the social and cultural history of sport.