If St Peter’s, Barnsley, took many years to complete, the church of St Edward the Confessor, serving the Kingstone area at the western end of the town, was, as it were, handed to the diocese on a plate. It came quite independently of any recommendation by How’s Commission. It was surely the most sumptuous of the new churches in the diocese, and was built and endowed by Edward Lancaster of Keresforth Hall in memory of his parents. Early English in style, it was modelled on a church in Southport designed by same architect, Goodwin S. Packer. The memorial stone was laid by Lancaster’s daughter, Mrs Fanny Jane Shaw, on 5 October 1900, and the completed building was dedicated and consecrated by Bishop Eden on 13 November 1902. The church, which had a clerestory, side aisles and a mosaic-floored chancel, was designed to seat 400, with a large crypt containing a meeting room with stage, and a vestry with a robing room. Another ground-floor vestry was converted into a Lady Chapel in 1910. No expense was spared on the materials. It had granite columns, pews of pitch pine, choir stalls of oak, an octagonal alabaster pulpit and matching octagonal font by Norbury, Paterson and Co. of Liverpool. There was a reredos in English alabaster and Italian marble by Harry Henry and Son, Exeter. Lancaster also provided a seven-bedroom vicarage. A good deal of house-building was taking place in the area and a new parish was formed from parts of St George’s and St John’s.
Neither of the new parishes proposed at Purlwell and the Queen’s Road area of Halifax had come into being when, after nine years as its bishop, Eden commissioned a new report in 1907 on the needs of the diocese. In the period since Bishop How’s Commission had reported, the diocese had gained three ‘fully equipped’ parishes, five chapels of ease, and twenty-one mission churches and mission rooms. There had also been an increase in the number of curates and Readers. Among the mission churches was St Hilda’s, King Cross, which had been opened in 1898 as a memorial to Bishop How. In 1909 Eden’s Commissioners recommended this as the church for the previously suggested parish in the Queen’s Road area. The need for a parish at Purlwell was also reiterated. But otherwise, rather than proposing further new parishes, the Report advised that ‘at least’ three conventional districts – lying within an existing parish but with their own Curates in Charge – should be formed. These were needed where a colliery or mill had developed its own population. In due course they might become separate parishes. The Report looked for the completion of three partially built churches and the provision of nine parsonage houses, including one for each of the two new parishes and others for parishes where no parsonage had yet been built or to replace an existing but insanitary house. It urged that steps should be taken towards the erection of four more chapels of ease, ten mission churches (six of them taking the place of existing mission rooms) and twenty-three new mission rooms. One parish was to be taken back into the parish from which it had been divided. Three existing parish churches, which were now too small for an expanding population, should be replaced by new churches. The report also recommended some rearrangement of parish boundaries and some rearrangement of parishes within rural deaneries. It noted that the present supply of clergy was totally inadequate and that fifty-seven parishes needed further staff. A body of special-service clergy was needed, too, for hospitals and other public institutions. The Report was of course followed by an appeal for the money, this time with a rather greater fanfare!
How’s appeal for funds to meet the recommendations of his Report had been launched quietly. Not so Bishop Eden’s! Randall Davidson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, came to Wakefield in the summer of 1910 to initiate it. He stayed at Bishopgarth overnight before being given a civic welcome in the Council Chamber of Wakefield Town Hall on the morning of 25 June. A public lunch for 500 people, with a menu described by the Wakefield Herald as ‘recherché’, took place on the ground floor of the Corn Exchange before the company moved upstairs to the assembly room for the formal speeches. The event, possibly the last such occasion in the diocese, was attended by many of the leading aristocracy and gentry from the county. They included Earl Fitzwilliam, the Earls of Dartmouth, Harewood and Scarborough, Lord Allendale, Lord Savile, Lord St Oswald, Sir George Armytage, Sir Edward Green, Sir Thomas Pilkington, Sir John Ramsden, Sir Walter Stanhope, and the Right Honourable Charles George Milnes Gaskell. Davidson referred to a link between himself and Wakefield when he spoke of a predecessor, Archbishop Potter, who had been a Wakefield man, and remarked that he had a portrait at Lambeth Palace of Potter as a boy of eight evidently reading from a Greek Testament. Bishop Eden spoke of the need to raise some £6,500 a year – more than twice the current level of donations – to provide a further £3,000 for the Spiritual Aid Fund, £1,500 for the Church Extension Fund, and £2,000 towards Education.
Among the parish churches that Eden’s Commissioners identified as too small was St Paul’s at King Cross, Halifax. The parish had been taken from the parish of Halifax in 1846 and the church had been consecrated in 1847. Although parts of the parish had been taken into St Hilda’s and St Jude’s, it still had some 15,000 or 16,000 inhabitants. The original church seated 450. Its replacement, on a nearby site, was designed by Sir Charles Nicholson and was his first major commission in the diocese. The new St Paul’s was consecrated on 26 October 1912.
When Bishop Eden consecrated St Matthew’s, Northowram, on 31 May 1913, he noted that it was the third church in the Borough of Halifax that he had consecrated in three years. Hitherto, the old school had served as a mission church. The church was the gift of George Watkinson (d.1961) who had been the curate at Coley but who became the first vicar of the new parish. The cost of the tower was defrayed by his brother, S. L. Watkinson. The architects were Walsh and Nicholson of Halifax and the style was described as ‘Halifax vernacular’ or fifteenth-century English Gothic, and subsequently as ‘Arts and Crafts Gothic’. The nave and aisles were lined with diamond-shaped brown quarry tiles from Nostell. The site had been a quarry.
The war and the ensuing depression led to a period of stagnation before further churches were built. By 1924, shortly before its major expansion, the diocese had 177 parishes (those worked in plurality counting as one). Ten had a population of over 10,000 while, at the other end of the scale, fourteen had a population of under 1,000, Wilshaw being the smallest at 232.
New house-building programmes prompted the building of St Cuthbert’s, Birkby, in 1925, with the intention of creating the first new parish in the diocese for many years. The architect was A. H. Hoare who, more than a decade earlier, had designed St Andrew’s, Purlwell. The foundation stone was laid by Lord Halifax on 2 May of a church which would initially have just a chancel, a part of the nave, and part of the south aisle. The partially built church, with a temporary west end, was consecrated on 23 August 1926 and the area, until then a conventional district, became a separate parish in 1933. (The west end was completed in 1956.)
Local authority building schemes, providing substantial housing estates, brought a new challenge to the diocese. Wakefield Corporation embarked on its great Lupset estate in the early 1920s. A three-acre site was given by the vendors of the Snapethorpe estate, the Old Roundwood Colliery Company, and earmarked in 1926 for an Anglican church (Methodist and Roman Catholic churches were also built to serve the estate) and an appeal was launched for funds in May 1928 when the area had 1,400 new houses and a population of over 7,000. Initially only a parish hall-cum-mission room was built. The church itself, in a modern style breaking away from the Gothic, was built from stone from a demolished woollen mill and from the old Wakefield Registry of Deeds building in Kirkgate. When it was consecrated, in October 1936, it was the first church to be consecrated in the Borough of Wakefield for sixty years. The new parish was formed from parts of Alverthorpe, St Michael’s and Thornes.
Meanwhile, Bishop Eden retired in October 1928. He had consecrated two last churches in the preceding June, St John the Divine, Rishworth, and St John the Evangelist, Staincross. The latter, which then gained its own parish, had been built as a chapel of ease for Darton, and Bishop How had dedicated its chancel on 27 April 1897.
The first consecration by Eden’s successor, Bishop James Seaton, on 20 March 1929, was of St Michael’s Castleford, in the area which had come into the diocese only in 1926.
When Seaton set up a Commission, on 9 August 1929, to inquire into the needs of the diocese, the emphasis was different from the two earlier ones, reflecting the changed times. In addition to looking at further church extension, it was to report on cases where existing churches