Until 1912, giving by parishes towards the expenses of diocesan administration was entirely random (or so it seems). The sums contributed were very widely varied depending in part, but in part only, on the size and affluence of the parish. In 1911, the smallest sum contributed, 19s 4d, came from Farnley Tyas. The parish of Dewsbury gave £58. At the 1911 Diocesan Conference the scheme for quota payments was introduced, with parishes being assessed against a variety of criteria and then informed of the size of contribution required in the following year ‘to meet the diocesan and central needs of the church’. Free-will offering schemes were strongly recommended. The system was, inevitably, widely resented albeit utterly essential. In 1930 a report was made to the parochial church council of Holy Trinity, Wakefield, observing that Holy Trinity had always considered the payment of the quota as its first duty. The note adds the wry observation that it was ‘almost alone’ in the diocese in taking this view initially.
In 1913, Phipps, who had private means, moved into Manygates House, Sandal, a substantial dwelling lying in some six acres of parkland and ‘pleasure grounds’. In the absence at the time of any other diocesan administrative base, the house became the centre for meetings of the Diocesan Board of Finance and other committees.
Diocesan conferences gained a place in the national administrative structure in 1920 when the Church Assembly was established after the seminal report of 1916, Church and State, had argued that Parliament had ‘neither the leisure, fitness nor inclination to perform efficiently the functions of ecclesiastical legislature’. The Assembly was made up of a House of Bishops, a House of Clergy and a House of Laity. Under the Church Assembly (Powers) Act of 1919 it could pass measures which, if approved by Parliament, received Royal assent, just as Acts of Parliament would do, and became part of the statute law of England. Effectively the state church gained a high degree of self-government. Diocesan conferences elected their representatives to serve for three-year periods in the House of Laity. Parochial Church Councils and the attendant Electoral Rolls became mandatory. The number of parochial representatives on the Diocesan Conference depended from 1921 on the size of the electoral roll rather than on the number of communicants.
The Diocesan Board of Patronage was established in 1920. The Diocesan Dilapidations Board came into being in November 1923 under the new Church Assembly’s Ecclesiastical Dilapidations Measure of that year. Its concern was with the state of repair and the maintenance of parsonage houses. It had to appoint surveyors, and any further alteration to the houses could be made only with the Board’s consent. It was accepted that the Board might itself have to instigate repairs and would then need to recover costs.
The diocese had perhaps no permanent office until 1923 when it made use of 5a South Parade, although certainly for a time in the 1890s its administrative headquarters was in Manor House Yard, close to the cathedral. Then, in 1925, through the gift of Miss Mary Thompson, it acquired 1 South Parade which was given the name of Church House. The house was both opened and dedicated, by Bishop Eden, on 4 November.
There were very few synods. The first since the time of Bishop How was held on 10 and 11 May 1921, when Bishop Eden expressed concern at the comparatively small number of candidates from the diocese coming forward for ordination, and went over the resolutions from the Lambeth Conference and York Convocation.
Church House
Other Diocesan Organizations
Bishop How established a Diocesan Lay Readers Association (for men only) in 1889. Anyone with a licence from Ripon would be granted his licence. Others could get one, it was announced, by passing a simple examination on the Bible and the prayer book and by satisfying the bishop as to his moral character and fitness for the office. All Lay Readers would get a licence which would hold good throughout the diocese and, if an incumbent requested it, would also be given a commission to exercise the office in a particular parish. Perhaps it should be noted that, although ‘Reader’ has always been the formal designation, until recent years ‘Lay Reader’ was much more commonly used within the diocese, even in issues of the Diocesan Gazette and the Wakefield Diocesan News. For the sake of consistency, ‘Reader’ has been adopted hereafter.
The Diocesan Council of Girls’ Friendly Societies was established in 1891 by Edith How, the bishop’s daughter-in-law, who came with her husband to live at Bishopgarth with the widowed bishop.
A Diocesan Board of Missions was formed in 1905. It was designed to promote the work within the diocese to support missionary work abroad and, to this end, to plan missionary exhibitions and festivals within the diocese.
The Diocesan Sunday School Teachers’ Association was founded on 27 June 1908, bringing together a number of smaller bodies.
Bishop Eden formed the Diocesan Board of Readers in 1921. At the time he explained, ‘In the increasing scarcity of clergy, we are convinced that a real call is coming, especially to our educated laymen, for all earnest and sincere church people to take an active part in the evangelistic work of the church.’ The aim of the Board was to raise standards and to arrange and supervise conferences. A first diocesan admission service for Readers was held at the cathedral on 6 May 1922. Sixty-six Readers were admitted into the new office. Each attended in the Chapter House to sign a new roll and make a declaration. They were presented by Archdeacon Harvey as the Warden of Readers. W. H. Coles served as the registrar for the new organization. Bishop Eden said that the service marked an epoch in the long and chequered history of the Readers’ movement which had been revived in the 1870s. Formerly it was only a diocesan office. Now Readers were admitted into a Corporate Body for the whole Church of England.
In 1930, Bishop Seaton formed a Diocesan Council of Youth.
New Churches, New Mission Rooms and New Parishes
The fundamental concerns of the diocese in its first fifty years were the provision of further churches to serve a growing population and the clergy to staff them, and the gathering of the flocks to attend them. Pressures for new churches came from the spread of housing into the suburbs, the emergence of council-housing estates, and the development of a new community serving a colliery. The churches might be built for new parishes, or in areas designated as conventional districts which might later become independent parishes, or chapels of ease (consecrated buildings in the same parish as, but at a distance from, a parish church) or as mission churches (licensed for worship but not consecrated). Where there was little hope of finance for a church building, Commissioners looking at the needs of the diocese advocated the opening of mission rooms.
Not infrequently, new congregations were brought together in these mission rooms, perhaps making use of an existing church school. A temporary mission chapel might follow. As funds slowly accumulated (or if a prosperous benefactor emerged) a permanent church might ensue. The lack of money, in particular, meant that the fulfilment of new-church schemes might take a long time, as much as twenty years or more.
While the landed classes had been generous in building and endowing churches in the area in the past, the new diocese now enjoyed relatively little of their support. Some still gave sites for new churches (Lord Dartmouth, for example, provided the site for St Andrew’s at Bruntcliffe) but these might come, too, from industrial concerns or from a local authority which had acquired land for housing.
The process of church building and of establishing new parishes had continued independently of the expectation of a new diocese so that Bishop How’s earliest act of consecration, on 27 May 1889, was of one of the churches planned before the see was created. St Luke’s, Heckmondwike, was on a site given by the Low Moor Iron Company. The parish had been formed in 1878. Services had taken place first at the National School and then in a temporary iron church. Typically for the period the church was designed (by Medland Taylor of Manchester) in a Gothic style, specified at the time as ‘geometrical decorated’. An endowment had been provided by Mrs Woodhead of Moor House.
Lack of funding meant that a church might be partially completed years before the overall design was accomplished. An example of the not unusual struggle