Teatime: ritual and family togetherness

As John Gillis demonstrated, the increasing location of men's work away from home in the industrial revolution and after meant that fathers’ time at home and ‘homecoming’ adopted extra meaning.Footnote ¹⁸ Of course, in families where members returned home at differing times, men's evening meal might be taken alone and the ‘family meal’ substituted for breakfast or for Sunday lunch.Footnote ¹⁹ For many, however, men's return from work was marked by women's preparation of tea (the evening meal) and father's occupation of his chair. These spaces and goods denoted the priority invested in men's labour: their wage earning was reflected in their calorie consumption and the reservation of privileged seating. But these rites and spaces could also be invested with inter-personal significance and used to indicate how men occupied family space in relation to other family members.

Situated in the principal ‘living’ room, usually alongside the cooking range, teatime located men at the core of household space. Given that even affluent working-class families lived overwhelmingly in one room, this was also the locus of family space. Tables in working-class homes, whether circular or square, were modest in size, frequently multi-purpose and facilitated physical proximity between family members seated, chairs permitting, facing each other in convivial arrangement. Some tables collapsed when not in use, with retractable leaves that folded or slid, in order to save space. The moveable size and location meant that arranging the table could adopt the guise of a ritual centred on creating time and space for fathers and/or family togetherness. Even when men were unemployed, families who maintained routines of eating together, however paltry the food, affirmed their ‘family life’.Footnote ²⁰ Likewise, families who preferred to eat without the attendance of friends or visitors, regardless of food quality or quantity, cemented perceptions that teatime was family time.Footnote ²¹ Indeed, exclusion from such rites was recognized as a cruel form of exercising power over vulnerable members.Footnote ²²

In a context where twenty-first-century notions of family togetherness held little currency, the tea table offered an interface for the working father's return to the domestic.Footnote ²³ Elizabeth Bryson recalled her infant excitement when her father returned from work: ‘I ran to meet him when he came home, clung round his knees and swung on his hands and climbed up until he hoisted me on to his shoulder to enter the house in triumph. I was a great giant who had to stoop to get through the doors.’ Bryson's contrast between the quotidian and fantastic (the giant, heaven, triumph) and the emphasis on her father's manly attributes (height and strength) portrayed breadwinning masculinity as a victorious accomplishment; she was ‘enchanted’ by it. This underlined the sexual division of homes whereby fathers could be construed as exotic creatures in domestic settings. Towards the end of his life, Bryson's father did ad hoc work in a room (that doubled as Bryson's bedroom) at their Dundee home. The setting, a ‘house’ on the third floor of a building (a shop was on the ground level and offices on the first two floors) in the city centre, proffered a stark contrast to the language of girlish enthralment. Despite the decline in family fortunes that precipitated this shift, Bryson sought to maintain the ritual of homecoming as the threshold between domesticity and work, breadwinner and dependent blurred. Bryson linked her effort to preserve the rites of return to boosting her father's spirits: she sought to ‘catch his eye and to get back a little of the old twinkle’ as he emerged from the small room for his favourite tea; ‘no matter how cluttered’ the table, she ‘soon cleared it’.Footnote ²⁴ The accumulation of clutter in the daytime might underscore the extent to which the faltering provider had no rightful place at table but the emphasis on father's right to his favourite foods and the enthused insistence on making space for him enabled Bryson to reconstruct the homecoming ritual as a sign, to father and reader, that the aging man was loved and appreciated whatever the circumstance. Further, evidence of the emotive investment in her father supported Bryson's sunny claim that a family could be happy regardless of poverty or place.

External observers noted when families sat down together and usually identified such habits with kin who appeared fond of each other.Footnote ²⁵ Conversely, Robert Roberts knew that his father had an ‘Olympian contempt’ for his children because he never indulged them over the tea table as other ‘kindly’ fathers did, suggesting that fondness and ‘jollity’ between fathers and offspring at tea was the norm in the Salford ‘slum’ of his youth.Footnote ²⁶ Although some men ate in silence or read the newspaper, men's teatime offered a temporal and spatial interlude for family togetherness. As Lillian Slater's father sat for tea in his Manchester terrace, his children stood around him as he talked over their day and fired general knowledge and arithmetic questions at them.Footnote ²⁷ Slater used this ritual to signify her father's interest and delight in his children: it cemented her claim to a happy family life and confirmed that she mattered to her handsome, smiling father. Henry Watkins’ dad allowed his children to dip bread into his gravy or to smear some of his brown sauce onto bread. Seated at the kernel of the home with privileged foodstuffs, this Manchester manual worker became heroic as he dispensed edible gifts: ‘we thought dad was great’.Footnote ²⁸

For one Bolton woman (born 1898), father's homecoming marked the children's teatime. As a family of nine, it was impossible to eat together. While the children's meal was served, father sat, in work clothes, in his chair drinking tea and reading aloud from the newspaper until the children were fed and it was his turn to eat.Footnote ²⁹ This was a father whose presence at teatime confirmed his authority but who also deferred his needs to those of his offspring while seeking to entertain them. As the agent from a different world, one of paid work and industry, engaged in a protracted interface with the domestic, it was entirely appropriate that father dispensed news from a national and regional sphere. Reading aloud could, of course, be a one-way activity but given the sheer amount of information and advertisements in newspapers, it seems probable that fathers edited and possibly ad-libbed, enabling children to gain insight into their values and ideas.Footnote ³⁰

Some men saw the tea table as a transitional space where they could offload the working day. Addressing an audience of working men in 1913, the (Labour) MP Frank Goldstone asked listeners to reflect how often they returned home to let the day's cares and woes spill over the tea table. Occupational worries often had implications for family members and men tended to prioritize their burdens, making wives reluctant to share seemingly trivial domestic problems. Likening families to pulleys, Goldstone suggested that when all family members’ troubles were shared, they brought relatives closer together to cement understandings of how the individuals made a single unit. That Goldstone chose a mechanical metaphor underscored the relationship between men's workplace, inter-personal dynamics and the domestic interior.Footnote ³¹ Goldstone was, perhaps, pessimistic about the negative effects of men's discussion of work with families. Talking over troubles implied a degree of companionship between husbands and wives while the prioritization of work worries signified the extent to which the family unit depended on men's labour. Walter Citrine's dad, a master rigger based at Liverpool docks, was a ‘big, burly and courageous man’ who ‘brought all his troubles home’. At the same time, Citrine claimed that his father never burdened his dependants with his working life. This suggests that, while the seaman's family undoubtedly feared for him, revelations about life at sea were related in the past tense as a form of melodramatic entertainment rather than anxiety about the future.Footnote ³²

Of course, running households on father time could be oppressive for wives, especially if men were cantankerous or abusive. Still, doing ‘killing work’ in the mines (or wherever) ‘for his children’ was hardly a breeze either.Footnote ³³ Nevertheless, as an authoritative figurehead of home, men's homecoming could be charged with anxiety. Nina Gorst's novel, The Thief on the Cross (1908), about a young unmarried mother, Ede Ridgefoote, portrayed the return of Ede and her baby to the ‘slum’ family home as a moment of hard-faced refusal to be ashamed before neighbours or her mother. Ede's only pulse of discomfort is in the anticipated confrontation with her father, Joe, on his return from work. Gorst played on negative conceptions of working men to create an expectation that the moment would be charged with violence and regret: Ede, the eldest, is Joe's favourite child, and Joe is an unskilled, inarticulate but powerful man. Ede's brassy confidence led up to this suspended moment, waiting at the kitchen hearth for the older man's return. Instead of anger, however, the confrontation is tender as Joe pulls up his chair and reads the scene before him. Reconciliation and resignation are equally subdued. Joe rises from his chair to stroke the cheek of the baby in Ede's lap before taking it from her to nurse. The expected antagonism dissolves as Joe laments ‘Poor little devil’ and asks Ede to get his tea.Footnote ³⁴ For Gorst, praised in one review for her ‘unflinching realism’, it is in the everyday routine and space of domesticity that battles between father and daughter are fought and resolved.Footnote ³⁵ The exchange of the baby from Ede to his grandfather and Ede's complicity in making tea for Joe signify acceptance of the daughter and her illegitimate child into the family, Ede's acknowledgment of paternal authority and the capacity of domestic practices to intimate inter-personal exchange.

Father's chair: space, time and intimacy

That Gorst situated the encounter at the hearth with Joe seated in his chair is significant. For middle- and working-class commentators, the hearth was the metaphorical heart of the home while armchairs were overwhelmingly associated with the privileges and authority of masculine breadwinners. As Doolittle demonstrates, domestic chair design was sexed with women's armless chairs enabling tasks such as sewing and men's armchairs facilitating sleep, reading or relaxation.Footnote ³⁶ Lillian Slater's parents probably represented many couples on most nights of the week: father sat reading the newspaper to mother who sat darning socks.Footnote ³⁷ That the best chair was reserved for breadwinner use indicates the status and privilege accorded to male providers; as a costly item of furniture, the armchair was a tangible embodiment of the wages men earned. As Doolittle argues, transgression of the chair's privileged use tested and reinforced the male authority embedded within it: ‘if you were in me dad's chair when he came home he would tell us to get out’.Footnote ³⁸ The spatial arrangement around father's armchair could reinforce the authority associated with it. In Alice Foley's house, a copy of Racing Handicap hung above father's armchair denoted his pleasure and expenditure on betting; a leather strap on the same hook signified his disciplinary role.Footnote ³⁹

As a symbol of authority and privilege, the chair could also function as a metaphor for men's right to work. A visual depiction (c. 1905) of a homeless family by a large Liverpool charity that operated, amongst other things, a homeless shelter pictured the father stood tall behind his wife and children. The burdens of the man were manifested by the bundle of goods and tub-shaped armchair carried over his shoulder. As a literal and symbolic weight, the chair reminded viewers that provision had a yoke as well as a prize.Footnote ⁴⁰ Rowntree and Lasker's study of unemployed families in York (1911) noted the case of a man, Archer, who walked miles daily in search of work. His refuge was his armchair; his wife noted that he ‘sank’ into it, a phrase that evoked soft comfort rather than the hard wooden seat. Yet, positioned in the ‘remotest corner of the room’, the chair reprimanded Archer in that it afforded a view of his three listless children crying with hunger.Footnote ⁴¹

In households with multiple chairs, a hierarchy of seating was in operation. In one house, father had first claim on chairs, followed by older children in work while children still in school stood.Footnote ⁴² Hierarchies of seating confirmed breadwinner privileges but men did not necessarily extract demands in return for their labour. Instead, families appear to have been complicit in reserving seating specifically for men's use when men were at home, not least because rituals associated with father's chair enabled men to engage with family life in ways that underlined and extended beyond financial provision. Walter Southgate recalled that his father's mass-produced Windsor chair, acquired on HP, was ‘sacred to my father's use’; he liked to sit and pontificate on politics from it. When a debt collection firm sent threatening letters for payments due, Southgate's mother turned the demands into firelighter papers. His father, ‘blissfully’ unaware of the looming financial crisis, lit the fire with them before taking up residence in his chair to put the world to rights.Footnote ⁴³ There is a wonderful irony at work in this story. That his mother found the money to keep the bailiffs at bay testified to her resourcefulness and the extent to which this breadwinner was oblivious to the finer financial detail of domestic life. But the story intimates other things about family dynamics: Southgate's mother wanted to avert an economic crisis over the chair without her husband's knowledge because she did not want him to worry but, equally Southgate suggests, she did not want his enjoyment of the chair to pall. In this sense, retention of the chair for father's comfort in a crowded East London house with four children (a further three died young) was an unknown burden on a man whose breadwinning as a quill-pen maker fell short of requirements but whose perceived right to enjoy his chair outweighed other demands.

The privilege associated with father's chair could invest it with physical intimacy too. A jobbing plumber, with three children, surveyed in a study of working-class budgets (1891–94), was dogged by ill health, irregular employment and debt. The family lived in a two-room, second-floor dwelling in a densely populated area of south-east London, their furniture was ‘trifling’ and each member suffered from hunger. The surveyor described the father as ‘devoted’ to his wife and children. In evidence, the report noted that he was grief stricken over the death of an infant but, more particularly, his children were the father's ‘chief pleasure’. Eschewing the view from the living room window over a relatively wide, bustling street or, indeed, participation in street life, the family turned inwards for their entertainments. Although hungry, anxious and exhausted by the search for work, the man spent early evenings seated, coatless, by the fire with his younger children, aged three and five, on his knee singing, whistling, playing a flute and having ‘a game with ‘em in my way’. The man was proud of his family life, stating that he had no need for commercial entertainments because he had ‘pantomime enough’ at home. The chair, then, was the stage for the performance of pleasure and security in family life against a backdrop of adult apprehension. To the external observer, the tactile and touching dynamic between father in his chair and the children on his knee was the embodiment of the man's attachment. The observation that the man sat coatless related to other comments on the poor quality of the family's clothing and bedding but also highlighted the informality and physical, sensory intimacy of the seating arrangement.Footnote ⁴⁴

Even chairs that looked uncomfortable to external observers could provide a sort of retreat. When the surveyor for Rowntree and Lasker's study of unemployment called at the Lovell household, a ‘disconsolate and squalid’ court dwelling, they found the unemployed, haggard and under-nourished father at home minding his four children while his wife had gone to work. Invited inside, the surveyor noted that the concentration of four children in a small kitchen gave the appearance of many more offspring but these children appeared to have been encouraged to remain indoors and had some old, broken toys to occupy them. Lovell picked a rosy faced child, aged two, in his arms and sat in his ‘hard’ looking chair with her on his lap. The survey reported that he looked too ill to work, was depressed and half-hoped for death as a contingency plan. Lovell's greatest and ‘legitimate’ fear was that if the family sought parish relief they would be told to ‘come inside’. If Lovell died, his wife and children would probably get outdoor relief. The detail about the child and the chair bore no relation to the financial circumstance or respectability of the family. The surveyor observed that Lovell probably sat down because the child was heavy but, even seated, the task of holding the child looked burdensome to the weak man. That he continued to hold her suggested a desire to secure her quiet but, also, possibly, because in relating a story of bitter poverty, his occupation of a chair confirmed a notion of masculinity while the tactile act of holding his small child embodied the pity of the father who wished for better things.Footnote ⁴⁵

Chairs associated with routines underpinned the family calendar, responsibilities and tangible relationships. Bryson's mother sat in a low chair to perform everyday tasks. Her father was ‘installed’ in his chair mostly on Sundays when his daughters climbed on him, ‘one of us on each knee’, and family members would ‘sing our favourite Hymns’. The elevation of father's knee as special space and time did not diminish the girls’ affection for their mother but demonstrated that Sundays were exceptional in that father was at home at all.Footnote ⁴⁶ That his chair rocked and had arms facilitated a nurturing embrace for the working man to enfold children within his position as head of the household. It is possible to argue that men's occupation of their chair symbolized the ‘performance’ of breadwinning paternity. But in contexts like this, such approaches can seem counterintuitive. Bryson certainly invested her father's chair with masculine authority but her memory privileged the chair as a shared space for affection and attachment.

For Elsie Pettigrew, growing up in one of the most deprived cities in Britain, her father's chair was associated with shared moments of history and intimacy that set her father's role as provider against his boyhood experiences of hardship. Her father sat the child Elsie on his knee to ‘tell me about the hard life he had had’. This seemingly maudlin ritual involved her father sharing stories of his mother's death, his escape from a cruel uncle, privation and the death of his first wife. The routine nature of the encounter, likened to a ‘sad fairy story’ that made them both weep, suggests that Pettigrew and her dad had expectations about the role and function of father's chair for their particular father–daughter intimacy.Footnote ⁴⁷ In repeatedly relating a story of loss, poverty and heartbreak, Pettigrew's father was possibly expressing how much his little girl meant to him. Certainly, despite the melancholic content of the story, Pettigrew used it to emphasize her affection and sympathy for her long-suffering father. There was also, potentially, a moral lesson implanted within a story that, while undoubtedly sad, ended with survival.

Recollections of father could fix him in his chair to indicate the ways in which seating facilitated father–child intimacy. Emma Smith's miserable childhood was split between the workhouse, charitable institutions and work with an abusive, itinerant couple interspersed by happy interludes at the rural home of her grandparents. In later life, she imagined her ‘beloved’ grandfather as ‘always sat in a polished armchair’ situated by the fire. Smith's happiest memories (there were not many) of childhood featured her grandfather in his chair: she and her brother were either sat upon his knee as he sang folk songs or she was stood with her hands on his knees, watching him. When her grandfather left his chair in her recollection, it was to wind the clock that ticked solemnly in the corner of the living room.Footnote ⁴⁸ That memories of ‘home’ were anchored by grandfather's chair suggest Smith's longing for stability and affection: the chair was a constant in a world that involved perpetual upheaval and disruption. That the clock representing the passage of time also featured in this memory, alongside Smith's stasis as she stood watching her grandfather and his fondness for folk tradition, further emphasized Smith's sense of the old man's faithfulness. The adult Smith's yearning for her grandfather's chair could denote nostalgia for cottage life but the chair moved with her grandfather to a Plymouth tenement. Further, the evocation of simplicity and security in a rural context also said more about Smith's traumatic and restless experiences in urban centres and adulthood; even at the end of her life story, she remained deeply unhappy and unsettled.Footnote ⁴⁹

One of the key questions pertaining to chair memories is whether such intimacy could occur around any other furniture or domestic space? Other spaces of physical and emotional intimacy could be the bedroom but working-class writers were probably mindful of a sense of propriety while bedrooms were, like sofas, usually shared spaces. In contrast, father's chair was an advocate for father's qualities both in terms of his absence from home but also the specialness of his time within it. It is notable that women's autobiographies pay particular attention to the intimacy of father's chair. This might illustrate arguments that fathers invested more affection in daughters in expectation that these offspring would dutifully care for them in men's dotage.Footnote ⁵⁰ Even if this was the case, the detailed attention to father's chair in autobiography suggests that women attached less cynical meanings to the dynamic, emphasizing instead that working men could be nurturing and demonstrative. The dominance of feminine memories is not to suggest that boys did not climb on father's knee or enjoy friendly contact with dads in their chairs. Rather, as district nurse M.E. Loane suggested, men became more self-conscious about open displays of affection as boys left childhood.Footnote ⁵¹ Male autobiographers tended to locate intimacy with dads in accompanying him in ‘man’ tasks or, eventually, joining him at work.Footnote ⁵²

Men's chairs supported the spine and arms to suggest comfort, even without cushions or rockers. Made of wood, chairs were smooth with a warm materiality. Designs that included arms were sturdy to maximize the inherent strength of wood. Chairs that rocked enabled men to engage in a motion more commonly associated with the nursing mother. The structure of father's chair might have been intended to encourage relaxation and reading but it also lent itself to tactility: with a high back, fathers sat upright, resting their elbows on the arms of the chair. In doing so, fathers mimicked a chair to be sat or climbed upon. If they were tall men, they became physically accessible seated at a height where children could engage their attention. Paternal authority probably looked less imposing too when men sat down. Loane related visiting a family where the father was a ‘morose, surly-looking man’ whom she sought to avoid, partly from consideration that his home represented a restful contrast to the relentless world outside. Sat unobtrusively in a dark corner one evening, however, Loane observed the man return from work and sit on the ‘only easy-chair with a heavy sigh’. His youngest child, a boy of ten, ‘went up to him, and, resting a hand on each knee, swung himself to and fro silently, but with evident satisfaction’. The father and son shared a short, straight-faced joke, whereupon the ‘boy shouted with laughter, jumping himself up and down faster than ever, and a smile twitched one corner of the man's mouth’. For Loane, this was evidence that despite the man's surliness he was, ‘after all’, a father. The ‘easy chair’ was pivotal to the intimacy of this exchange for it was not the joke that brought a smile but, rather, ‘the pressure of those grimy little hands, and the boy's weight on his tired knees’.Footnote ⁵³ As a space that facilitated physical proximity and multi-sensory intimacy, chairs were instrumental in the non-verbal navigation of feeling.

Family spaces, father time

Historical studies of middle-class housing have indicated how rooms designated for specific purposes were gendered in decor and furnishing.Footnote ⁵⁴ Father's chair is an example of how this gendering operated in working-class homes where space was at a premium. Of course, the emotional economy of father's chair was not universal. Some men were simply unapproachable. Others returned home from work exhausted, craved only sleep and had little time or patience for domestic travails.Footnote ⁵⁵ Grace Foakes recalled her father as a stern and unloving man but, with hindsight, realized that he must have been extremely tired given the hours he worked (sometimes two days and one night with no break).Footnote ⁵⁶ Here, father's time at home was remembered not for the conviviality of his presence but, rather, the implications of his absence. Similarly, male space in working-class households was not limited to chairs and tables but could be rooted in father's things (reading materials, musical instruments or family mementos) or sheds and gardens where accommodation allowed.Footnote ⁵⁷ Indeed, some men sought space that appeared to remove them from the kernel of family life. Although gardens and sheds often separated men from the domestic interior, time spent in such spaces could contribute to the household economy thereby rendering boundaries between masculine and family space permeable, especially when children were included in such pastimes. One man went so far as to build a covered passageway between the living room and his shed to enlarge domestic space and facilitate easy traffic between the two.Footnote ⁵⁸

Likewise, while father's chair and tea table routines were common features of working-class homes, it would be wrong to assume that these were the only times and spaces for an affective economy. Men's space could link with family life in more abstract terms too. Jack Jones, son of a miner, grew up in industrial South Wales. Jones identified the coalface and the pub as the locus of his father Dai's selfhood. Prior to joining his dad in the mine, Jones depicted his father almost entirely through his pervasive presence at home: through the artefacts of his labour (pit clothes hung to dry, a tin bath on the wall), the consumer goods furnishing the home (Dai's chair) and description of the house that used the miner for scale (the stairs were low because Dai stooped to ascend them; upstairs rooms were cramped because Dai did not straighten up; windows were the size of Dai's handkerchief). Everyday home life was managed by mother but father occupied particular space within it: notably his chair and the smoking shanty outside the house. The spatial organization of home mirrored the sexual and emotive division of labour: Jones’ mother was the nucleus of emotional strength and support. The chair and smoking shanty provided spatial refuge for Dai from the hubbub of family life where, he later complained, his wife seemingly had first claim on his offspring's affection. Yet, in securing his own space within the home, Dai's children knew exactly where to find him. His chair and shed provided liminal space between maternal domesticity and masculine workplace (or public house) where family or personal matters could be broached on father's terms. Likewise, Dai's movement beyond ‘his’ spaces at home could be invested with significance. For Jones, a highpoint in his childhood was his father's visit to the sick boy's bedroom to read to him. Not only did the act of his father reading aloud, with some difficulty, signify paternal solicitude and a child's delight in special attention, Dai's unusual inhabitation of child-space lent the event a particular intimacy. Later, when Dai was dangerously ill and his sons sat by his bed during the night, Jones again invested the unorthodox occupation of domestic space, in this case, the parental bedroom, with intimate significance: inhabiting such space with their dad prompted his sons to reflect on the sick man as father and their mother's husband.Footnote ⁵⁹

Further, the negotiation of specific home space could be invested with affective consequence. For many, Sunday use of front rooms was not only about sequestered space, but, also, segregated time.Footnote ⁶⁰ Edwin Muir recalled that his Sunday nights in their rural home were among his ‘happiest’. His father read the Bible to his family and led prayers from his chair which gave Muir a feeling of ‘complete security and union’.Footnote ⁶¹ Set against the upheaval of his father's subsequent unemployment and the family's removal to a Glasgow slum, the memory testified to all that was lost when, alienated by inner-city life, his father died and Muir's sense of security collapsed. One Bolton woman (born 1898) recalled that the front room of her childhood home was her father's domain: a silent space in which he could rest after work. As she and her siblings grew older and began courting, this privileged space became contested: they wanted to sit in the front room with paramours. Her father complained that as with ‘everything’, the house used to be his but ‘wasn't anymore’. The front room became the site over which this father's anxiety about the burgeoning womanhood of his daughters was played out; the parlour was a symbol of his waning authority over, and potentially diminishing significance to, these young women. For all this father's complaints about access to the front room, he was complicit in his daughters’ use of it. Described as very strict, he preferred his daughters to sit there with male friends rather than go out where he had no means of surveillance. This was a gesture towards authority perhaps, but, also, a sign of his sustained protectiveness of his daughters, regardless of their age. His principal irritation was that the young people made a ‘hullabaloo’ by playing and singing in the room yet he did not stop them singing or using the room. Indeed, his daughter linked her use of the front room to memories of family gatherings in there: as a family of singers, the front parlour had been a special space for family entertainment. The key difference here was that father had been excluded from these gatherings in spatial and emotional terms: he was no longer the hero of the scene or the man his daughters were singing for or with. That his daughters took him supper in his bedroom at ten o'clock in return for use of the front room suggests a degree of negotiation over the parlour but, also, the possibility of some acknowledgment that the room was charged with memories of relationships and identities that were changing.Footnote ⁶²