in the Cathedral News in February 1940 spoke of the ‘keenness and shrewdness of that fine face and clear-set eyes’. A memorial was unveiled in the cathedral at the time of the Diocesan Conference on 8 October 1942.
Bishop Eden
Wakefield’s third bishop, James Buchanan Seaton (1868–1938), a bachelor and a moderate Anglo-Catholic in the Lux Mundi tradition, died in office. Seaton was a Yorkshireman to the extent that during the summer, he followed the fortunes of the county cricket team closely. He was born in Leeds and was educated at Leeds Grammar School where he gained a scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford in 1886. He took a Second in ‘Greats’ in 1890, and returned for a period to teach at Leeds Grammar School. He was made deacon in 1892 and priest in 1893. In 1893–96 he was a curate at Oswestry parish church. For the next four years he was the Vice-Principal of Leeds Clergy School (Leeds Theological College) before becoming Vicar of Armley in 1905–09. He spent the next five years in South Africa as Rector of St Mary’s and Archdeacon of Johannesburg before returning to Oxfordshire in 1914, as the Principal of Cuddesdon Theological College and Vicar of Cuddesdon. He was made an honorary Canon of Christ Church, the Oxford cathedral. Appointed as Bishop of Wakefield in 1928, he was consecrated on 1 November in York Minster and enthroned on 30 November. Spoken of as a man of ‘deep humility and boundless kindness and thoughtfulness’, Seaton was able to relate easily to the miners and mill workers of his diocese as well as to the professional classes, and made himself readily accessible to all. Seaton’s contribution in all his different spheres of work was not that of great achievements conceived and carried through, nor yet original enterprises in any particular direction. It was always and everywhere the same, namely himself and his personality. At the enlargement of the diocese in 1926, he set out to recruit more clergy and to obtain a suffragan bishop. He knew all his clergy well and entertained them at Bishopgarth. It seemed that he hated committees but loved working with young people. He held youth weekends at Bishopgarth for both males and females, hosting up to fifty at a time. He lived simply. He used to have his meals at a window in his study. He loved the Bishopgarth garden and enjoyed weeding the lawns. He ‘seldom said or did things that interested the press’, and was not a good platform speaker. He was, however, a keen supporter of the work of the church overseas and the translation of one of his young clergy to the See of Gambia must have given him immense pleasure.
The Cathedral
Under the Order in Council of 17 May 1888, Wakefield’s medieval parish church became the cathedral of the new diocese. Bishop How’s first ordination, of four deacons and two priests, took place there ten days later, even before his enthronement.
The installation and enthronement of the first bishop on 25 June 1888 was a major event both for the town and for the diocese, celebrated by the Mayor and Corporation as well as by the churches. It included a reception in the Town Hall when a series of illuminated addresses were read, and a lunch, presided over by the Archbishop of York, William Thomson, in the Corn Exchange before the procession to the new cathedral.
As a consequence of now having a cathedral, Wakefield became a city by Letters Patent dated 11 July 1888.
Wakefield Cathedral about 1900
At Bishop How’s enthronement, the Archbishop of York pointed out that the cathedral was inadequate for its new purpose and also urged the church people from across the diocese to support it financially. The first of his points was met when the extension to the east was completed in 1905 as a memorial to How. The second remained a perennial problem.
Planning for the cathedral extension began within two months of How’s death. An appeal was launched for £50,000, and John Loughborough Pearson, architect of the new cathedral at Truro, was commissioned to provide the designs, although the work was completed after his death under the direction of his son Frank. The slope of Kirkgate allowed Pearson to provide a crypt with a chapter house and vestries. The high-gothic scheme included lengthening the chancel, creating the Chapel of St Mark beyond it at the eastern end, and building north and south transepts. The foundation stone was laid by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Frederick Temple, on 18 June 1901. Work was soon to be suspended until further money was raised. Eventually £48,286 was subscribed and the extension was consecrated on St Mark’s Day, 25 April 1905.
The procession on 25 April 1905
The numerous niches on the outside of the vast east wall never held the figures for which they had been designed. The new chancel was consecrated on 27 December 1905.
The clerk of works was a Mr Crooks from Bristol Cathedral, and the main contractors were Armitage and Hodgson. The extension furnishings, including carpets from the East, were overseen by a ladies’ committee headed by the bishop’s wife, Constance Mary Eden. An altar cloth was worked by the Sisters of St Peter’s Convent. A monument to How in the form of a white marble tomb chest with a recumbent effigy by J. Nesfield Forsyth was placed in the south transept.
The memorial to Bishop How
Later memorials to the successive bishops and to some archdeacons have been placed within the extension. A memorial window to the diocese’s first registrar, William Francis Lovell Horne, who died in 1911, was added to St Mark’s Chapel.
Prior to the completion of the extension, Bishop Eden set up a committee to consider ‘the mutual relations of the diocesan and parochial authorities in Wakefield Cathedral’. A memorandum of 1905 focused on the lack of endowments, the adjustment of the legal position of cathedral and parish church, and the liabilities for the maintenance of the extension which could not ‘fairly be met by the parish only’. In a lecture in 1908 on the cathedral, William Donne claimed that the extension cost £110 a year to maintain but that there had not been much support from the diocese.
A Cathedral Management Committee was set up in 1910 under the chairmanship of the bishop, with equal representation from the cathedral and from the diocese
The Sanctuary was enhanced in 1912 by the addition of stone canopied sedilia and a credence on the south side with a bishop’s and chaplain’s seat opposite them. The bishop’s seat was flanked by the figures of St Paulinus and William Walsham How. Designed by Frank Loughborough Pearson and executed by Nathaniel Hitch, they were given as a memorial to the baronets Robert and Tristram Tempest of Tong Hall.
The Cathedral Sanctuary, Harriet Evans
It is thought that a great stone cross was erected towards the end of the tenth century close to the cathedral site, marking a preaching station. Such a cross was found in 1861 at a butcher’s shop in Westgate where, lying on its side, it was used as a doorstep. It was taken some years later to the Yorkshire Philosophical Society’s museum in York. In 1933 a replica of the cross was provided by Wakefield Historical Society and placed in the south transept.
Unlike the old cathedrals, Wakefield was and is a parish church as well as the mother church of the diocese. The Vicar of Wakefield had to serve as a parish priest, with attendant civic as well as pastoral responsibilities, but was also a significant figure at diocesan level. In the early years, both Norman Straton and his successor, William Donne, had the diocesan status of archdeacon. No subsequent vicars of Wakefield did. Under the Cathedrals Measures of 1931 and 1934, and an Order in Council of 1937, the Vicar
