was, at £175, the third largest. From Halifax, perhaps reflecting the disappointed hopes there, the offertory was fifty-second from the top of the table, a mere £18.
By 1888, the Wakefield Bishopric Fund had raised £83,510 19s 5d of which £79,857 was invested as an endowment. The Order in Council creating the bishopric was signed on 17 May 1888. It specified that All Saints parish church should be the cathedral.
The Diocese
The new diocese was created largely from the Ripon Archdeaconry of Craven but taking in also the parishes of Crofton, Warmfield and Woolley from York’s Pontefract Rural Deanery. It lay between Heptonstall, to the north-west, Halifax, Drighlington and Morley to the north, Penistone and Barnsley to the south, Ripponden and Marsden to the west and Warmfield and Wakefield to the east, and included the industrial towns of Batley, Brighouse, Dewsbury, Halifax, Holmfirth, Huddersfield, Mirfield and Ossett, The two greatest centres of population were Halifax and Huddersfield.
It had 167 benefices including the chaplaincies of West Bretton, and Stainborough. Between 1836 (when the Diocese of Ripon was founded) and 1888, 105 churches in the new diocese had been consecrated. Eighty-two of these were new parish churches. Thirteen were parish churches that had been rebuilt or built on new sites. A further eight were mission churches or chapels of ease. The most recent of the new parish churches were St John the Baptist, Daw Green (1886), Hartshead St Peter with Clifton (1886), St Mark’s, Huddersfield, and St Anne’s, Southowram (1887). St Luke’s, Sharlston, which was a daughter church in the parish of Warmfield, was also consecrated in 1887.
Those advowsons that had been held by the Bishop of Ripon or the Archbishop (as Bishop) of York were transferred to the successive bishops of Wakefield.
The diocese had six rural deaneries, more or less comparable to those taken from the Archdeaconry of Craven. The Ecclesiastical Commissioners had intended it to have a single archdeacon. However, the clergy in the new area petitioned them for a second and an Order in Council of 17 November 1888 provided for Archdeacons of both Halifax and Huddersfield, each to receive £200 a year from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. Straton, the Vicar of Wakefield, and the other of the two secretaries of the Wakefield Bishopric Fund, was promptly appointed as the Archdeacon of Huddersfield to be followed, when Straton became Bishop of Sodor and Man in 1892, by the new Vicar of Wakefield, William Donne.
The Rural Deaneries of Halifax, Birstall and Dewsbury came within the Archdeaconry of Halifax, and those of Huddersfield, Silkstone and Wakefield were allocated to the Archdeaconry of Huddersfield. (The Halifax Rural Deanery, by then with some fifty parishes, was given a second Rural Dean in 1914 for an experimental period.)
The November 1888 Order allowed for twelve honorary canons which were to include the four priests who had been Canons of Ripon or York but were now in the Wakefield Diocese. The two Archdeacons were instituted and the first eight Canons installed on 4 December 1888.
There was already one Religious Order – the Community of St Peter, Horbury – within the boundaries of the diocese. When the Community of the Resurrection moved to Mirfield in 1898, it gained a second.
The boundaries of the diocese changed as populations continued to grow and new dioceses were formed. The major change came in 1926 under the Pontefract and Hemsworth Deaneries Transfer Measure, when the diocese was extended and the Rural Deaneries of Hemsworth and Pontefract, which had been until then in the Diocese of York, were added. This brought a further thirty-five parishes into the diocese. The Rural Deanery of Silkstone was then renamed Barnsley, and the Rural Deanery of Pontefract was created. Midhope, which came into the Diocese of Sheffield at its foundation in 1914 but which was run in plurality with Penistone, was transferred to the Diocese of Wakefield in June of that year. Five years later, in 1919, the parishes of Tong and Wyke were transferred from Wakefield to the new Diocese of Bradford. When the Diocese of Blackburn was formed in 1927, from a part of the Diocese of Manchester, the parishes of Todmorden and Walsden were added to the Wakefield Diocese and the patronage of the two parishes was vested in the Bishop of Wakefield instead of the Bishop of Manchester.
Shortly after the 1926 extension of the diocese, the Archdeaconry of Huddersfield became the Archdeaconry of Halifax, and the hitherto Archdeaconry of Halifax became the Archdeaconry of Pontefract. The extension of the diocese provided an entitlement to six further honorary Canons.
The Bishops
Wakefield had three bishops in its first fifty years, William Walsham How in 1888–97, the long-serving George Rodney Eden, who was bishop in 1897–1928, and James Buchanan Seaton who died as the diocese celebrated its jubilee in 1938. After its major extension in 1926 made the assistance of a suffragan bishop highly desirable, Campbell Richard Hone, already the Archdeacon of Pontefract. became the first Bishop of Pontefract in 1931.
Wakefield’s first bishop, William Walsham How (1823–97), had spent twenty-eight years as Rector of Whittington, Shropshire (his father had purchased the advowson) before, styled Bishop of Bedford, becoming a suffragan to the Bishop of London and Rector of St Andrew Undershaft in 1879. He was consecrated in St Paul’s Cathedral on 25 July. In 1888, at sixty-four, and now a widower, How recoiled from the prospect of ‘spending his declining years in a region of smoke, of coal pits, and mill chimneys’ and shrank from the heavy task of organizing a new diocese, but regarded it as his simple duty to accept the challenge. He had a friend there already in Joshua Ingham Brooke, the Rector of Thornhill, whom he promptly appointed as his Archdeacon of Halifax. Another friend, William Foxley Norris, was presented by Sir John Ramsden to Almondbury in 1888. How’s son Henry became Vicar of Mirfield in 1889. How had been educated at Shrewsbury School and Wadham College, Oxford, before going on to Durham for a course in Theology. He was, for a new diocese, primarily a safe pair of hands. He was of high-church leanings but was not an out-and-out Tractarian: he conducted retreats and held quiet days, but he abhorred some of the ritual associated with the Oxford Movement. The education and welfare of children were among his prime concerns and he was one of the original figures named as a trustee for the National Society for the Protection of Children when it gained its royal charter in 1895. It was under his influence that the Church of England Society for Waifs and Strays founded a boys’ home, Bede House, in College Grove Road, Wakefield in 1892. He died on 10 August 1897 while on a fishing holiday in Ireland. Today he is best known for his hymns, in particular ‘For all the saints who from their labours rest’, which he wrote at Whittington and which was first published in 1864 in Hymns for Saints Days and other Hymns.
Bishop How
Unlike Bishop How, George Rodney Eden (1853–1940) had an accelerated career, at least until he reached Wakefield. He came from what used to be termed ‘a good family’, his grandfather, Sir Robert Eden, being the third baronet of West Auckland. He was educated at Richmond (Yorkshire) and Reading and gained a scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge. In 1879, shortly after his ordination as a priest, he was invited to serve as the chaplain to Joseph Barber Lightfoot, Bishop of Durham. Four years later he was presented to the living of Bishop Auckland. In 1890, he was consecrated at Canterbury as the Suffragan Bishop of Dover. He was still only forty-four when he was enthroned at Wakefield on 4 November 1897. He took his seat in the House of Lords on 27 February 1905 where he was regarded as an authority on education. He was for a time chair of the Education Committee of the Church of England National Assembly. In Wakefield, Eden was in the forefront of some of the social movements. With Walter Moorhouse, he established the Wakefield Sanitary Aid Society. Pressure from this body contributed to the local authority’s decision to clear the slums and build housing estates. With Edwin Hirst, he set up the Wakefield Garden Suburb Trust, acquiring a tract of land to the north of Dewsbury Road and then selling individual plots at modest prices to artisans or men from the lower middle class. An able administrator, he served at least once as secretary of the Lambeth Conference, staying for some weeks at Lambeth Palace. He retired in
