Church Association. Some of the Anglo-Catholic churches within the area which was to form the diocese, were at times pilloried in the local press for the curious dress of their incumbents and curates, the rituals of their services and the decor of their churches. But ritualist practices, especially those associated with the communion service, were, under the infamous Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874, also a civil offence. Clergy, albeit not in the Ripon Diocese, had been imprisoned. When the Reverend Sydney F. Green was sentenced to gaol in 1881 and subsequently deprived of his living, Frederick Dykes (brother of the hymn tune composer) resigned from his position as choirmaster at Wakefield Parish Church in protest.
The years 1887–92 saw no less a person than the Bishop of Lincoln, Edward King (1821–1910), charged by lay people within his diocese with unacceptable practices, and judged by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s court and ultimately by the Privy Council. But for what, exactly? He mixed water with the wine before consecrating it; he had lighted candles on the altar even though it was daylight; he made the sign of the cross during the absolution and the benediction; but, much worse, he stood and knelt on the west side of the altar, with his back to the congregation, when he consecrated the elements, instead of on the north side; moreover, he initiated the singing of the Agnus Dei after the prayer of consecration. He was also, it seems, the first bishop since the Reformation to wear vestments. His effective exoneration brought to an end the ritualist trials but did nothing to appease the firmly evangelical. The Simeon Trustees, and no doubt other patrons, insisted that their protegees continued to celebrate communion from the north side of the altar. The use of incense, crucifixes rather than simple crosses, portraits or statues of the Virgin and Child, the figure of Christ on the chancel screen, the existence of a reredos, sculptures or pictures depicting the Stations of the Cross and, of course, the dedication of a Lady Chapel, were widely resisted.
It would be fair to say that Anglo-Catholic churches were in the minority and their rituals rare in the diocese in 1888.
In March 1899, Bishop Eden responded to a Home Office inquiry about the use of confessional boxes to the effect that there were none in the parish churches of his diocese.
From time to time the diocese attracted the hostile attentions of the members of the Protestant Truth Society, or Kensitites, sometimes known as the Wycliffe Preachers, which had been founded in 1890 by the Protestant extremist John Kensit (1853–1902) to oppose Anglo-Catholicism. In June 1907 a group of them gathered at Battyeford, for example, to express their condemnation of the Community of the Resurrection.
Gradually, however, as the details of the granting of faculties show, elements of ritualism became a little more widely accepted, especially from the 1920s, though never by the most firmly evangelical churches and their members.
In 1913, there was some controversy when an anonymous benefactor offered a pair of candlesticks to Halifax Parish Church and also proposed converting the Rokeby Chapel into a side chapel for communion. The majority of the congregation were in favour but there were those who suggested they might never take communion in the church again.
By 1917, it seems that practices associated with the Anglo-Catholic wing of the church were accepted, at least by the press which had hitherto mocked them. When Canon Ernest Winter, who had been Rector of Elland for almost twenty-five years, died in January 1917, the Yorkshire Post reported the funeral arrangements uncritically. It observed that on the evening before the funeral, his body was taken into the church, ‘clothed in priest’s eucharistic vestments’. Six candles were placed round his coffin which was covered with a violet pall. Vespers for the dead were said and men from the parish kept vigil through the night. There were requiem services at 5am and 7.20am before the funeral service itself. Incense was used during the offertory at the funeral and the body was censed. Winter had been described as ‘devoted to the Catholic presentment of the church’.
There was a controversial discussion at the Diocesan Conference in 1919 over alterations in services and in the ornaments of churches. Agreement was finally reached that ‘any definite departure from the usual custom which obtains in a parish church in regard to the appointed ornaments and services of public worship should not come into effect without the consent of the incumbent and a two-thirds majority of the parochial church council’.
Holy Trinity, Wakefield, founded by evangelicals in 1838 as an alternative to the ‘high’ parish church, became Anglo-Catholic in 1925–26 under the Reverend A. E. C. Morgan. He had a new altar built with a reredos bearing carved figures of the crucifixion, ‘the blessed Mother’, Mary Magdalene and the four Evangelists. He also had a small recess formed under the south window of the sanctuary for a credence and piscina. There were those among the former churchwardens and older members of the congregation who strongly objected. ‘It had not been that kind of worship in that church in the past,’ they argued. By 1930, and probably earlier, Morgan was celebrating ‘choral Eucharist’ and marking such festivals as the Purification of the BVM (sic). A Lady Chapel was added to the church in 1930, and at Easter 1931 an account in the parish magazine tells us that ‘the High Altar was beautiful with Arum lilies and the Lady Chapel stood out with Madonna Lilies’. The writer, Dorothy Una Radcliffe, gave £20 towards the cost of the Lady Chapel.
As the cathedral city of the diocese, Wakefield was the target of a campaign in 1926 by the Wycliffe Preachers. The Kensitites were concerned that a proposed revision of the Book of Common Prayer would legitimize the Catholic practice of the ‘reservation of consecrated elements’. They feared the return of the doctrine of purgatory, the confessional box, the veneration of relics and the worship of the Virgin Mary, and argued that it was Protestantism that gave the British their ‘moral fibre’. Their meeting, in Unity Hall, ended with a declaration of loyalty to the principles of the Reformation and a call to the Bishop to vote against any revision of the prayer book.
The first formal assembly of Anglo-Catholics in the diocese was at Elland in 1925. In June 1926 the group met in Wakefield. The day began with Eucharist in the cathedral ‘with full Anglo-Catholic ceremonial including incense’. The celebrant was the Vicar of Wakefield, William Arthur Macleod. After lunch at the Church Institute, the party gathered in Unity Hall with the Vicar of Horbury, Canon Hill, in the chair. The meeting opened with the hymn, written in 1906 by Vincent Stuckey Stratton Coles (1845–1929), ‘Ye who own the faith of Jesus’, which has the refrain ‘Hail Mary full of grace’. The principal speaker emphasized the Ritualists’ wish to include the beauties of art and music in their services and their opposition to the ‘gloomy’ views of Puritans.
The Lambeth Conference of 1930 called for co-operation among the different ‘schools of thought’ within the church.
By 1930, and perhaps before, the hearing of confessions was given a regular place in the cathedral’s week. Macleod organized the reservation of the sacrament, in St Mark’s Chapel, from February 1930 An aumbry for this purpose was blessed on 17 February. In Holy Week, the stations of the Passion were marked, and both Corpus Christi and the Visitation of the B V Mary (sic) were celebrated. Elsewhere in the diocese the next few years saw more faculties granted for the installation of statues of the Virgin and Child, aumbries, reredoses and processional crosses. In May 1931 St Paul’s, Birkenshaw, obtained a faculty for a Vessica with a figure of the risen saviour. A faculty was granted to All Hallows, Kirkburton, in 1932, for the restoration of the ancient chapel of St Nicholas.
Noel T. Hopkins, who served at the cathedral as the Vicar of Wakefield and subsequently as the Provost in1933–62, and who prompted the reinstatement of the Lady Chapel there, was an Anglo-Catholic who had been strongly influenced by Charles Gore (1852–1932), one of the founders of the Community of the Resurrection. In 1938, Hopkins wrote two sympathetic articles for the Cathedral Magazine on ‘Sacramental Confession’. The centenary of the Oxford Movement was celebrated in the diocese in the summer of 1933 with a service in the cathedral on 11 July. The tribute paid to its founders focused on their legacy of ‘a greater sense of the supernatural and a fuller use of sacramental aids for holiness of life’. The evangelical Church Association provided
