‘The Morphine Velvet, Lavender-Kid-Glove School of Theology’: Private Pew-Letting

Today, doing what amounts to ‘scalping’ tickets to Anglican churches would be unprofitable. But it went on when church-going was popular; where privately controlled church sittings existed, the practice of renting them to others appears to have been unremarkable until the inter-war period and was usually regarded as legal, although it was just as usually illegal. Pews were privately rented, that is let by individuals or groups other than conventional churches, in either of two ways: first, by those who controlled pews or sittings in churches and chapels of ease—by owning, leasing or renting them, or holding prescriptions or faculties—they did not themselves use, and let or sub-let them to others by speculators. The other type was done by speculators who invested in proprietary chapels, which were usually extra-parochial enterprises whose revenue depended solely or almost solely on pew-renting, whose prices were virtually always higher than formal pew-renting conventional churches, and consequently which appealed to and therefore catered to the affluent.