Witches Look Up: My Suspicion of Bank Holidays

Today is a 'bank' holiday in Britain, an excuse for all sorts of 'traditional' eccentric goings-on (See http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-27205244). In fact so many of the apparently old traditions of Britain take place on Bank Holidays that it's easy to be taken in by the Merrie England lure of this ridiculous fantasy.

The reality is that up until the Bank Holidays Act of 1871 there weren't any. None. Of course I'm probably over-egging the cake, by referring solely to the holidays on Mondays. Good Friday & Christmas day were common law holidays on which any business could legally be deferred to the next day, from before records begin. There is also the way in which the Christians have messed up the Day of the Sun permanently. Even from 1871 there were only four. The act was passed by the Liberal Sir John Lubbock, & a grateful populace called these four days 'St Lubbock's days' for some time after 1871.

The historical rat that you can smell here is of course the date at which the act was passed & the fact the populace was so grateful: what marks these holidays as permanently modern & totally not ancient is twofold: the Act was after the seachange to working life that was the Industrial Revolution, & the simple fact that in a traditional agricultural economy you simply don't get days off.

In terms of modern economics, being a purely city person who can't sleep in the country because it's too quiet & as a child got spooked on a road without traffic lights, I really don't have a dog in this fight. I have *no* aspiration to return to, or even interest in, the way of life before the Industrial Revolution (the contentious historical question of the nature of the change in the Industrial Revolution is waaaay beyond the scope of this post). I am a city person.

I do question the motives of those who are taken in by the pseudo-traditions that go on on Bank Holidays. I suppose it's the whole thing of the 'imagined village' - life at the time of the Industrial Revolution was horrific for the workers, leading to a rosy view of the pastoral idyll that had gone before. We humans really like to have an imagined cosiness to retreat into. And I suppose this is my real problem with the bank holiday revels - the *reason* people were grateful for them was that their lives were horrendous the rest of the year.

Strangely one of the revels in the above link - the sweeps' festival in Rochester - would not have been protected by law as a holiday because its original incarnation died off after the Climbing Boys Act of 1868, so it actually predates the Bank Holidays Act. It took something like forty years for it to die off before being revived in the 1980s.

Surely I can't be the only person this whole thing leaves with a nasty taste? I'm actually quite fortunate - since I work shifts I work many bank holidays but get them off in lieu at other times, so I actually wind up with more days that I can take when I ask for them, than I ever would if I worked in an actual bank. So I suppose I actually have as close to the ideal for me personally as I'm ever going to get.

However Bank Holidays remain for me the memorial of how work has taken over people's lives since the Industrial Revolution. Nothing wrong with work, it is one of the ways to self-respect & the establishment of a willed life. What devalues modern work is its disconnect with our actual lives & values - work for someone else is always tied to money, & as such is devalued, compared to working for the thing you're doing. Nor am I inpressed with self-sufficiency, or a back to the land philosophy. I am impressed by the Moneyless Man (pictured - even if he isn't a witch, he at least dresses like one) for his commitment to doing his will & his frankness about having to make some purchases before he started. I am aware that I'm both trying to have my cake & eat it by my uneasiness at the Industrial Revolution & the modern monetary economy it spawned, & also my dislike of the genuinely traditional life that preceded it. I think my real discomfort is the idea that people were *allowed* to have Bank Holidays off (by the people in power), & pathetically grateful because of their awful working conditions (gifted to them by probably the same people, ultimately) rather than any possibility of choice over work & leisure. Nor do I buy the idea, frequently repeated by second-wave feminists, that life used to be one long holiday or festival, which to me is a pseudohistory. My discomfort at this remains, & I think will not go away.

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