a campaign to persuade people to come forward for confirmation and to recall lapsed communicants. A committee was set up to promote the Call. Preparatory retreats for clergy were arranged, two of the three being at the House of the Resurrection in Mirfield. Retreats for Women Workers were provided at the House of Mercy in Horbury. Canon How (son of Wakefield’s first bishop), who chaired the Committee, explained the need for repentance: for the sins of intemperance, unchastity, injustice, worldliness, love of pleasure, lack of zeal, selfishness, and essentially the failure to heed Christ’s call. In September 1916, a team of Bishop’s Messengers was commissioned at a service in Huddersfield Parish Church. As well as speaking in churches and church halls, some of them visited working men’s clubs.
The Diocese in the First World War
The years of the First World War were, inevitably, difficult for the diocese. It was reported in January 1918 that thirty-six parochial clergy from the diocese had been appointed as chaplains to the Forces. The number rose to fifty after the 1918 Military Service Act raised the age for conscription to fifty-one. Four were killed. In addition fourteen members of the Community of the Resurrection also served as chaplains. Guidelines were formulated for the lay administration of consecrated buildings where there were no ordained clergy available. Vast military training camps were established by the War Office at Ripon, Richmond and Masham, and the Wakefield Diocese – especially the Church of England Men’s Society – was asked to help both to finance and to run recreational huts where there were to be facilities for acts of worship as well as for games such as billiards. Volunteers assisted the men stationed there to write letters home. Wakefield’s main contribution was the provision of a huge sectional building in Clotherholme Road, North Camp, Ripon. This was opened on 21 February 1916 by Lady Armytage attended by Bishop Eden. It was a wooden building measuring 140 feet by 30 feet with an administration block of 80 feet by 25 feet. It had a large recreation room, a refreshment bar, and three rooms with billiard tables.
The Church Extension Fund gave £100 towards a chapel at Halifax War Hospital in 1916.
District Visitors, Women Workers and Deaconesses
Records show that, in terms of church attendance, women far outnumbered men. Tables showing the numbers coming forward for confirmation reveal about twice as many females as males. On the only occasion when the figures for the electoral rolls were recorded separately, in 1922, they included 21,960 men and 34,569 women. Women had, however, only a secondary status – much needed for pastoral work but excluded from sacramental roles and largely from administrative ones, too.
In the years before the Second World War, parochial District Visitors – probably always women – served in great numbers. In 1915, the first year for which records survive, there were 1,038. In 1930, there were 1,490 and in 1938 there were 1,135. The system had been established nationally in the nineteenth century. Evidence from parish magazines shows that they each had a small area, perhaps just one or two streets in an urban parish and a cluster of houses in a rural one. They called at intervals on all the households in their district, whether the members were church people or not. They probably got to know their clients well. Although it was not their principal function, where possible they collected money for church work, including funds for the Church Missionary Society. Primarily, however, District Visitors took clothing and blankets and harvest produce to the needy, distributed tracts, urged parents to bring children for baptism, suggested that older children and young people attend confirmation classes, and, importantly, knew those who were ill, when they might distribute vouchers for nourishing foods such as beef tea. Until the coming of the National Health Service in 1948, hospital treatment was costly, but those of the well-to-do who played a major part in sustaining local hospitals, had the right to introduce people for free care; the District Visitors regularly sought these ‘recommends’ for those in their patch and also found a means of sending some few for a convalescent stay at the seaside. All but a handful of such Visitors were unpaid.
In contrast to the District Visitors, there were very few Women Workers. These were expected to undergo a modicum of training and to give many more hours to the work. Unless they had private means, they might well be paid. In 1900, the Diocese of Ripon established the Grey Ladies settlement in Bingley for the training of women church workers. Bishop Eden attempted something similar. In 1901, he founded a Home in Westgate, Wakefield, which would serve as a hostel for trainee women. Courses of lectures were provided for the resident women. A Miss Beresford from Bedale was placed in charge of the Home and took up residence there. Canon Foxley Norris was appointed as the non-resident warden. The Home had a management council made up entirely of men. Such women as came into residence were expected to pay a guinea a week for their board. The bishop envisaged that the centre would undertake work among the factory girls who loitered in city-centre streets in the evenings. A club ran 7pm–9.30pm nightly for girls and young women, offering a chance to learn needlework, to play table games, or to listen to a Woman Worker read. Women from the parish of Wakefield helped to run it. Their role included cutting out clothes, so it would seem that some dressmaking was attempted. It was expected that Women Workers would also be attached to a parish, for daytime pastoral work. Parishes were asked to donate £10 a year to the Home. It was reported in 1902 that Miss Beresford paid visits to ‘a large colliery village’ once a week where she ran a mothers’ meeting and visited from house to house. She also ran a mothers’ meeting at the Westgate Home.
The Home was not a success, failing to draw more than half-a-dozen women at most, and it closed in 1904. But an Association of Women Workers was formed in its place. Sporadic courses of lectures continued and there were occasional conferences. In 1910, Bishop Eden offered to grant a diocesan licence ‘to those ladies who are able voluntarily or at a salary to devote their whole time or such a specific portion of their time as shall be deemed adequate to the work of the church’. To qualify they had to be recommended by a parish priest and accepted by the bishop, to have had adequate training in the particular departments of work to which they proposed to devote themselves, and to satisfy the bishop in an examination of general knowledge of the Bible and prayer book, and technical knowledge of some special branch of church work or social service. It seems likely that the Association died with the outbreak of war. However, there were still some Women Workers: in his memoir, Wakefield’s fourth bishop, Bishop Hone, recalled a Mary Ashton assisting him with visiting and with the pastoral care of young women during the war when he was Vicar of Brighouse.
Just as there were few Women Workers, so too there were never many deaconesses. In 1930, when the Lambeth Conference sought to determine what deaconesses might do, there were only 260 in the Church of England as a whole. The Order had been founded in 1861 and deaconesses were normally paid a stipend. The first reference to one in the Wakefield Diocese was in 1896 when Edith May was serving at St John’s, Wakefield. Records show individual deaconesses working at St Mary’s, Luddenden, in 1915, St Michael’s, Castleford, in 1926, St Paul’s, Armitage Bridge, in 1931, and St Mary’s, Mirfield, in 1938. There is little evidence of what they did. However, the 1930 Conference referred to them as assisting the minister in preparing candidates for baptism and in the administration of baptism itself, officiating at the churching of women, and reading Morning and Evening Prayer in church, although excluding such parts as were reserved to the priest. Very importantly they could not assist in any way with the service of communion. It seems likely that much of their work lay in teaching in Sunday Schools and in visiting.
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,
