The Open University
Yorkshire Region

Cultural Studies Research Forum
Reports and Abstracts 1995 -2000

introduction | contents

The Church at Sea: Nineteenth Century Maritime Missions - A Neglected Aspect of Working Class Religion

Stephen Friend

Given that seafarers and their dependants made up over 5% of the working population in the late 1800s, it is surprising that the work of the Church among this significant working-class group, especially during the Victorian era, has been almost totally ignored by the academic community - including theologians. My paper was an attempt to inform people about the debate and to discuss some of the issues here. I had already helped to establish an organisation to explore this subject: the 'International Association for the Study of Maritime Mission'. And subsequent to the Open Universities Cultural Studies Conference, IASMM, was able to publish a journal in 1998 under the title of "Maritime Mission Studies".

Over the past summer (1999) the Winston Churchill Memorial Fund kindly acknowledged the importance of this work by providing me with a travelling fellowship to explore contemporary developments and archive preservation in Christian maritime missions on the seaboards of Canada and the USA. One outcome of this visit is a possible joint piece of research with staff at Victoria University in British Columbia. The aim here is to video-tape the memories of those people (chaplains, doctors, nurses, etc.) who worked on church ships along the British Columbia coast earlier this century. We are also currently in process of developing a project which is aimed primarily at preserving the many documents, photographs, etc., which have been produced in over 200 years of the church's work amongst seafarers. And in doing this we aim t make these documents more accessible in order that future researchers will find their task a little bit easier.