Map of the diocese in 1888
Map of the diocese in 1926
Part I: The First Fifty Years, 1888–1938
The Origin of the Diocese
The Diocese of Wakefield was established in 1888, taking in a substantial area from the southern end of the Diocese of Ripon. It had been a long time coming!
Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, no new bishoprics had been established in the Church of England. Then came the Dioceses of Ripon (1836) and Manchester (1845). By 1875, the population of the Ripon Diocese had doubled, from 800,000 at its inception to 1,600,000. With a vast distance to cover and with so many parishes to visit, the health of the second Bishop of Ripon, Robert Bickersteth, was under strain. Moreover, Nonconformity was flourishing. It was later said that the immense success of early Methodism in the Calder valley owed something to the deadness and dullness of church life in the area, but it must have owed considerably more to the influence of the ‘wealthy capitalists and employers of labour’ who, Francis Pigou, Vicar of Halifax in 1875–88, observed, were a strong influence on the spread of Nonconformity in the area. Evidence suggesting that smaller diocesan units resulted in greater numbers of men coming forward for ordination and in more candidates for confirmation was a further incentive to create additional dioceses.
The genesis of the Diocese of Wakefield falls into two distinct phases: the first culminating in the Act of Parliament of 1878 which authorized the establishment of a Wakefield see; the second, dating from 1884, bringing the Diocese into being by the Order in Council of 17 May 1888.
For any new diocese to be created a very substantial capital sum was needed to endow the bishopric. The Bishoprics Act of 1878 specified a minimum income of £3,500 a year.
Although there had been earlier suggestions that a new see should be created with Halifax as its cathedral city, it was the death of Charles Musgrave, Vicar of Halifax and Archdeacon of Craven, in April 1875 that prompted moves to create a further bishopric in southern Yorkshire with Halifax parish church as the cathedral. It was thought that some £100,000 would be required. The Halifax living was a substantial one. There seemed a possibility that some of the endowments of the benefice could be appropriated, by means of an Act of Parliament, towards financing the bishopric. A leading advocate of a Halifax diocese, industrialist Sir Henry Edwards (1812–86), who had represented Halifax in Parliament in 1847–52, suggested that, rather than appropriating funds from the living, the diocesan of the new see should also be the Vicar of Halifax. The idea was canvassed at a meeting in London attended by several Members of Parliament, but the scheme came to nothing and later in 1875 Francis Pigou was appointed to the Halifax benefice. However, when the Ecclesiastical Commissioners set up a committee to define the boundaries of the proposed bishoprics of Truro and St Albans, it was asked to look at the need nationally for other new bishoprics. The committee included the Conservative West Riding Member of Parliament, Lieutenant Colonel Walter Spencer Stanhope. Its initial recommendations were for sees centred on Liverpool, Newcastle and Southwell. When, following its deliberations, the Bill was first drafted in 1877, a diocese of South Yorkshire had been added which would have included Sheffield (not part of the Diocese of Ripon) as well as Halifax and Wakefield and places between. The prospect of being severed from York did not appeal to the church people of Sheffield and, when the bill finally came before Parliament, Sheffield had been dropped from it but the South Yorkshire scheme remained. The Government’s first intention was to identify Wakefield as the cathedral city. Following an intervention from Sir Henry Edwards, the Bill proposed either Wakefield or Halifax as the cathedral city, leaving the final decision to the Queen in Council.
There was what the Wakefield Herald described as a ‘monster meeting’ in Wakefield on 23 May 1877, with leading civic as well as church figures there, to seek formal support for ‘the superior claims of the town’. The Mayor of Wakefield, Alderman W. H. Gill, took the chair. The Vicar of Wakefield, Norman J. D. Straton, and Wakefield’s Conservative Member of Parliament, Thomas Kemp Sanderson, were on the platform together with Lieutenant Colonel Stanhope. Alderman Gill referred to his meeting with the Home Secretary to press the claims of Wakefield. Stanhope expressed concern that, if the see were centred on Halifax, the bishop would have a lower status than the vicar as the latter had some thirty livings in his gift and the new bishop would certainly have far fewer. Wakefield people had already undertaken a major restoration of the parish church. There had been no comparable work at Halifax. Sanderson, pointed out than in 1836 there had been the possibility of Wakefield being the cathedral city rather than Ripon. Moreover, Wakefield was not, like Halifax, merely ‘on a railway branch line’. A sum of £100,000 was again identified as necessary to endow the bishopric. A number of Wakefield people promised individual donations of £1,000. Sanderson proposed, ‘Inasmuch as the Bill empowers Her Majesty by Order of Council to make choice between Wakefield and Halifax as the cathedral city for the proposed new diocese, this meeting desires to express its sense of the superior claims of Wakefield and hereby prays Her Majesty to select the former place.’ It was, of course, carried.
A similar meeting in the New Assembly Rooms in Halifax on 25 May, convened by Sir Henry Edwards, was less well attended. Edwards explained how he had lobbied successfully to have the option of Halifax added to a bill that originally referred only to Wakefield. The meeting secured unanimous support for a motion urging that Halifax be chosen as the cathedral city, citing the possibility of an easy adaptation of the parish church and the strategic situation of Halifax geographically and in terms of railway communication within the projected diocese. But the Halifax Courier noted ‘something like mutiny in the Halifax Camp’ because a number of the poorer vicars in the Halifax area thought that any surplus money that might still be appropriated from the vicar’s endowments should be directed to improving their livings rather than financing a bishop. The paper foresaw that the cathedral would as a consequence be in Wakefield. A committee was appointed, with Edwards among its members, to promote the claims of Halifax. Edward Balme Wheatley-Balme (1819–96) however, who was not at the meeting, sent a message that he would give £5,000 towards the bishopric fund whichever town was chosen.
Wheatley-Balme, who lived at Cote Wall, Mirfield, was ultimately the single most significant donor to the bishopric, giving some £10,000. When, before the diocese could be founded, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners required four guarantors to ensure that a house would be provided for the bishop, he was one of these. When the Wakefield Diocesan Conference was first set up, Bishop How chose him as one of his personally nominated ten members.
Huddersfield was never in serious contention as the cathedral city, and a meeting of Huddersfield clergy, again in May 1877, accepted that the honours would go to Wakefield.
The persistent advocacy of Wakefield’s MP, Thomas Kemp Sanderson, went a long way to furthering Wakefield’s cause where the two Radical Halifax members (James Stansfeld, a radical protestant dissenter, and John Dyson Hutchinson) remained detached. Pigou noted that they were more interested in pursuing the disestablishment of the church than in creating a new diocese. Pigou was asked by the then Home Secretary, Richard Assheton Cross, to give his opinion on the relative merits of the two towns for the see. At their meeting he was told by Cross that the petition of the clergy against Halifax, fearing that money that might have been used to improve their benefices would be diverted to the bishopric fund, sealed its fate. The claims of Wakefield were preferred. When Sanderson was given the Freedom of the City of Wakfield in 1895, the citation referred to its being ‘in great measure’ due to him that Wakefield had been chosen for the cathedral.
The Bishoprics Act, passed in 1878, provided specifically for a Bishop of Wakefield as well as for the anticipated sees of Liverpool, Newcastle, and Southwell. The cathedral would be, ‘Such church at Wakefield as may be determined by order of Her Majesty in Council subject to the rights of the patron and incumbent.’ The new bishopric was to have such a part of the endowment of the Bishopric of Ripon as