Twice on Sundays: Sizing Up Wigan Sunday School Prizes Without the Sermon

Every third house clearance in the borough coughs up one: a small cloth-bound book with the gilt lettering worn down to a ghost, a presentation plate inside in careful copperplate, and a name belonging to somebody who once sat on a hard bench in a schoolroom in Scholes or Ince for fifty-two Sundays without fidgeting more than average.

Sunday school prizes are the quiet backbone of the Wigan second-hand trade. They are almost never expensive, they are rarely beautiful, and they arrive with an emotional invoice attached. That is precisely why they reward a bit of learning.

The cupboard is never empty

Between roughly 1870 and 1930, nearly every chapel and parish in the district ran a Sunday school with an annual prize-giving. Multiply Wesleyan, Primitive Methodist, United Methodist, Congregational, Baptist and Catholic congregations across Wigan, Pemberton, Hindley, Abram, Aspull, Standish, Orrell and the villages between, and you are looking at tens of thousands of books, medals and cards handed out for attendance, conduct, recitation and the occasional fiercely contested handwriting class. Most were kept out of respect. Very few were binned. Hence the overflow that lands on trestle tables every weekend.

Three objects, three sets of rules

Newcomers lump the whole category together. In practice you are buying one of three things, and each behaves differently at the till.

The reward book. Typically a gilt pictorial cloth binding from the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the Religious Tract Society, Nelson, Blackie or Routledge. The story inside is irrelevant to value; the binding and the inscription are everything. Expect titles about missionaries, shipwrecks and pious boys who make good.

The medal. A white-metal or silver pendant on a ribbon, often a shield or cross, engraved on the reverse with a name, a school and a year. Issued by the Sunday School Union or struck locally for a single chapel. Temperance medals also creep into the same boxes and are often mistaken for them.

The certificate. A printed card, usually folded twice and foxed along the creases. Least valuable financially, often most informative, because certificates tend to carry the class number, the superintendent's signature and occasionally a street address.

Read the plate before the title page

The presentation label is the whole ballgame. A good one gives you the scholar's name, the school, sometimes the village, the year, and what the prize was actually for. 'Presented to A. Fairhurst for regular attendance, Ince, 1904' is a different object from a printed slip saying 'A Reward'. The first has a person attached; the second is wallpaper.

Watch for the usual tells. Blank plates are common and worth less, however pretty the book. Plates that have been lifted and re-glued show a tide-line of old glue. Names scratched out or inked over knock a third off the price. And if a book dated 1925 carries a plate dated 1903, one of them is lying to you.

Provenance: sorting Wigan from generic

A reward book with no place name is a nice object. One naming a chapel two streets from where you are standing is a piece of local record. Look for school names tied to closed or demolished buildings, and check them against the chapel and school records held at the Wigan Archives and Local Studies service at Leigh Town Hall. Local newspapers printed Sunday school anniversary reports and prize lists with names, which makes tracing a recipient genuinely possible with an afternoon and a microfilm reader.

Do not expect every name to resolve. Plenty of scholars vanish from the record after 1911, and a good number of plates carry only initials. But a legible full name plus a chapel plus a date is the sweet spot, and local buyers will pay for it.

Condition, without the fuss

Foxing is normal and shouldn't frighten you; heavy damp staining is a different matter. A rebacked spine is a knock. Loose plates and detached boards mean a reading copy, not a collectable. On medals, the original ribbon rarely survives and a replaced one is fine if it is declared, but a modern nylon ribbon on an 1890s piece should be reflected in the price.

Resist the urge to polish white metal. You will strip what is left of the plating and soften the engraving in one cheerful afternoon with a cloth.

What to pay in 2026

• Common, foxed, undated reward books: £2 to £6
• Clean 1890s to 1910s gilt pictorial cloth, sound spine: £8 to £20
• A book with a clear Wigan chapel plate, name and date: £10 to £25
• White-metal attendance medals on a serviceable ribbon: £6 to £18
• Hallmarked silver medals: £25 to £60
• Certificates: £3 to £10 loose, a little more framed
• Anything tied to a well-documented closed chapel or a notable local family: £30 to £60 plus

The guilt clause

There is a particular sort of guilt in owning a medal awarded to a child for turning up forty-two Sundays running in 1907. You feel obliged to keep it dusted. Ignore that instinct at the point of sale and you will buy badly.

Buy the name, not the story. Then, once it is home, write the name in pencil on the sleeve and keep it. In fifty years the inscription will be the only part of the object anyone still wants.