Moral and Social Responsibility
The principal social concern in the early years of the diocese was intemperance. The Church of England Temperance Society had been founded in 1862. Branches were formed in many parishes. Some churches had Bands of Hope or ran a Church Lads’ Brigade, which was an offshoot of the Temperance Society. The Wakefield Diocesan branch of the Temperance Society was founded in 1892, and in 1896 offered a salary of £50 a year for a two-year appointment of an organizing secretary. In May 1899, a provisional committee was formed in the Wakefield Deanery, with Archdeacon Donne as its chairman, to work towards employing a Police Court Missioner who would support people brought before the Petty Sessions or leaving prison, to try to restore them to a wholesome and sober life. The first Missioner, Thomas Way, appointed towards the end of 1899, visited the West Riding magistrates’ courts in Wakefield and Dewsbury and the borough courts in Batley, Dewsbury, Morley, Ossett and Wakefield. In his first three months, he worked with seventeen ‘cases’, primarily people charged with drunkenness, but also those charged with assault, theft or vagrancy. In the next few years, two further Missioners were appointed, one of whom, Thomas Grundy, was also charged with supervising the newly established Labour Home in Ramsden Street, Huddersfield. This catered for twelve male residents. It was replaced in July 1908 by a much larger purpose-built home in The Shore, where twenty-four men could be accommodated in second-floor cubicle bedrooms. There was also modest accommodation for women. Grundy can have been only in his very early twenties when he was first brought to Huddersfield. When he died in 1919 at the age of forty-five, he was still the superintendent of the Labour Home.
The success of the Police Court Missioners nationally in drawing offenders away from a life of crime led to the founding of the Probation Service under the 1907 Probation of Offenders Act. Each of the Wakefield diocesan Missioners gained appointment as a Probation Officer in their existing areas. Their new position gave them both a right and a duty to attend the courts where before they had been admitted only with a magistrate’s permission. However, they retained their role, with some additional payment, as Police Court Missioners since the work was deemed to be more extensive than that of a Probation Officer. The Mission work was strictly undenominational, Missioners making no distinction among their offenders in terms of their creed, sex or crime. Their work was varied: one report in 1906 showed one of the diocesan Missioners visiting an employer to save an offender from dismissal, and finding work for a girl who had fled the blandishments of a brothel-keeper.
The other pressing problem, at least in the eyes of the Church, was prostitution. Police Court Missioners reported numbers of girls who were seen as ‘rescue cases’. In 1917, Bishop Eden set up a provisional committee to enquire into the rescue work already in progress in the diocese and to draw up a constitution for a Diocesan Council for Preventive and Rescue Work. Its report noted that the diocese already had within its borders penitentiaries and ‘rescue’ homes in the form of the House of Mercy at Horbury, founded in 1858 and run by the Community of St Peter, the St John’s Industrial Training Home for Discharged Female Prisoners, in Wakefield, and St Margaret’s House, Halifax. St John’s Home, purpose-built in 1872, was the successor to a Refuge for Women which had been opened in 1842. At the House of Mercy some seventy or eighty girls and young women, who might come from anywhere in the country, were kept on average for two years. St Margaret’s, which had three permanent beds and two emergency beds, provided a shelter and temporary home for women and girls under the age of thirty. It was managed by a committee of church people together with representatives of the Halifax Board of Guardians. The Worker there routinely visited the workhouse hospital and gave help to girls leaving its Lock Ward. Maternity cases were sent to St Faith’s in Leeds, provided that the necessary fees were available. At Barnsley, where an organization had been formed in 1881, there were two strands to the care of vulnerable girls, one preventive and the other rescue work. There was a small Home, run on undenominational lines, for girls aged twelve to sixteen taken from ‘undesirable’ surroundings and then trained for domestic service. It could take only six or so at a time. The Shelter was run by a Church Army Sister and took in anyone homeless or in difficulties. It ran a Bible class and a club for needlework and gymnastics. It cost some £300 a year to run and received substantial support from local people including some who were not members of the Established Church. In 1917 it was, additionally, providing a club for soldiers’ wives (some of whom, albeit not necessarily in Barnsley, were tempted into adultery or prostitution while their husbands were on active service). The Church Army Sister visited police courts and lodging houses on the lookout for the vulnerable.
Meeting in July 1917, the provisional committee, whose members included the Mother Superior of St Peter’s Convent and a Miss Arnold of Barnsley Rescue House, agreed that no further penitentiaries were required but noted the need for small shelters in Wakefield and Dewsbury, that Barnsley wanted a small maternity home and that Dewsbury needed a trained rescue worker. There was seen to be a demand for the systematic visiting of churchwomen who were in prison, and of patients in Poor Law hospitals. The committee also recommended a rescue house and trained worker at Huddersfield. The new Council for Rescue and Preventive Work first met in March 1918. Its objects were ‘to promote a healthy public opinion on all moral questions and to assist all institutions which exist for preventive, rescue and penitentiary work on church lines within the diocese by advice and grants’. It had eighteen members, eight of whom were female. These included Miss Arnold and Mrs Jaeger of the Barnsley Rescue House, Mrs Marchetti of St Margaret’s House, the Mother Superior of St Peter’s Convent, and four who were wives, daughters or unmarried sisters of diocesan clergy.
The Council held an overview of developments within the diocese and at times took action itself. Soon after it was formed and following an initiative by one of the Council’s members, Mrs Tupper-Carey, who was the wife of the Vicar of Huddersfield, it launched an appeal for £2,000 to lease Woodhouse Hall, Almondbury, Huddersfield. This could be rented at £70 a year, to care for up to twenty illegitimate babies born to girls who had been taken into the rescue homes within the diocese. It became St Katharine’s Hostel. Again in 1918, the Council agreed to contribute £5 a year towards what became Hope Hospital in Chapeltown and was to be supported financially primarily by local authorities.
From 1921, St John’s Home came under the direct care of the Council. An article in the Wakefield Diocesan Gazette in 1923 reported that it was the only Home of its kind in the north of England and there were forty girls in training, learning cooking, housework, knitting and laundry work. Many girls went on to domestic service, sometimes abroad. Some voluntary teaching was undertaken by staff (all of whom were female) from Wakefield Girls High School. In 1937, its status changed. The number of girls entering the Home had fallen because girls in trouble were now being taken before children’s courts and then sent to Approved Schools which had been introduced nationally in 1933 as a replacement for Reformatories. St John’s therefore sought and gained recognition as an Approved School itself but, although now serving the Home Office, it remained under the care of the Diocesan Council. A new rescue house in King’s Mill Lane, Huddersfield, named Springfield, was opened on 7 December 1923 by Archdeacon Harvey. The extension in 1926 brought Pontefract into the diocese. A rescue house, the Haven, had been founded there in 1915 by the Pontefract Centre for Preventive and Rescue Work and had been run, at least from 1917, by Church Army Sisters. In 1925, at the time that the Church Army Sisters were withdrawn, a new house was acquired in Linden Terrace. It was dedicated as St Giles’s Haven, on 8 February 1926, and was managed until 1930 by members of the Community of St Peter, Horbury. Subsequently a lay supervisor was appointed.
In 1932, the Council for Rescue and Preventive