of all the new cathedrals, defining an office ‘which would be distinct from that usually associated with Crown patronage’.
Before the Reformation, the parish church had had a Lady Chapel, founded in 1322. When this was revived in 1935 it was fitted up with an altar provided as a memorial to Canon McLeod who had been the Vicar of Wakefield from 1919.
St Mark’s Chapel gained new features in 1943, making use of a bequest by Miss Margaret Percy Tew. The beaten-metal altar front and carved and gilded reredos were designed by Sir Charles Nicholson. The altar rails, again designed by Nicholson, were made by Robert Thompson of Kilburn and bear his trademark mouse.
A House for the Bishop
At the suggestion of Bishop William Boyd Carpenter, a separate fund was established in 1885 to provide a house for the bishop. Fund-raising was led by Carpenter’s wife who enlisted an impressive team of other women to canvass individual rural deaneries and run bazaars. By February 1888, a little over £10,000 had been raised. It was an open question as to whether a house would be bought or built. The purchase of Thornes House, Wakefield, was an early suggestion.
When Bishop How first came to Wakefield, he stayed at Thornhill Rectory, which had been made available to him by his old friend, Canon Brooke. He moved quite soon to a house in South Parade, Wakefield, rented from Michael Edwin Sanderson, later to be the diocese’s greatest benefactor. In 1889, he moved to Overthorpe, Thornhill. He found living in either Wakefield or Thornhill inconvenient as almost every journey across the diocese meant changing trains at Mirfield junction, described by his son as ‘the gloomiest and draughtiest of all stations’. How would have liked to live in Mirfield and a substantial property, Hall Croft, became a candidate but the Ecclesiastical Commissioners were anxious for the bishop to live nearer to, or in, his cathedral city. By 1890, a three-acre site had been acquired in the highly respectable St John’s area of Wakefield. William White, a colleague of George Gilbert Scott, was commissioned as the architect, and the foundation stone of the new brick Gothic ‘palace’ was laid on 24 October 1891. How moved into the mansion in 1893. The name Bishopgarth was chosen by the four men who had guaranteed to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners that a house would be provided. The term ‘garth’, derived from a Norse word for a yard and could mean an enclosure or a Manor House. The name was given to a hymn tune composed in 1897 for Queen Victoria’s jubilee by Arthur Sullivan to How’s words ‘O King of Kings whose reign of old hath been from everlasting’.
Bishopgarth
Bishopgarth was fitted with electric lighting in 1908, long before many of the parish churches.
Bishop How’s successor, George Rodney Eden, lived at Bishopgarth for some twenty years. However, in August 1918, he announced that high taxation and the high cost of living made it impossible for him to continue in residence there. It was immediately requisitioned by the Ministry of Pensions but was later let to the West Riding County Council. Eden moved to the Manor House at Heath where he remained for the rest of his period as bishop. A chapel was created there and, inter alia, was used for at least one confirmation service. James Seaton, Wakefield’s third bishop, lived at Heath for a short while but in April 1929 he declared his intention to move to Bishopgarth. He died there in 1938. As Archdeacon of Pontefract, Campbell Richard Hone had bought Woodthorpe Lodge with nine acres of grounds, a paddock, some woodland, a lawn and both flower and kitchen gardens. When he followed Seaton as Bishop of Wakefield in 1938, he insisted on remaining there. He described Bishopgarth as ‘a most inconvenient and badly planned house’, with ‘dark passages and small cubicle rooms for ordination candidates, a range of necessary rooms under the roof and awkward larders and kitchens’. His wife said that it was ‘quite impossible’ and that she could not manage it with all its inconveniences and the shortage of servants. Renamed Bishop’s Lodge, the house at Woodthorpe was bought by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. All subsequent bishops have lived there. Bishopgarth was sold to the West Riding County Council.
The Principal Administrative Bodies
In October 1888, Bishop How held a meeting of clergy and laity in the Wakefield Church Institute to establish the principal Diocesan societies: these were the Wakefield Diocesan Church Extension Society (which was to assist with funding both churches and parsonage houses), the Diocesan Board of Education (which was to contribute towards school buildings, teachers and the teacher training college at Ripon), and the Bishop of Wakefield’s Spiritual Aid Fund (for increasing stipends, providing visiting clergy during the sickness of an incumbent, helping to fund temporary rest for overworked clergy, and assisting infirm or aged clergy to retire). The Board of Education worked conjointly with the Ripon Diocesan Board of Education until January 1890.
An appeal was made at the October meeting (and many times subsequently) for donors to the funds who might give a single capital sum or promise an annual subscription. The initial subscription list was short and the sums promised, typically of the diocese, only modest. The donors could indicate which of the three funds they were supporting and it was soon clear that most regarded the Spiritual Aid Fund as the most important. In their first year the Church Extension Society received £742, the Board of Education £597, and the Spiritual Aid Society £3,650, including one donation of £1,000 earmarked for the parish of St Luke’s, Heckmondwike.
In May 1908, the different funds were brought together under the new umbrella of the Wakefield Diocesan Fund and the office of Organizing Secretary was established. A Diocesan Loan Fund was founded in 1911 to further assist church extension.
Wakefield Diocesan Church Organization Society was founded in 1894 as a limited company to hold trusts and land on behalf of the diocese. It became, inter alia, the trustee of parochial property used partly for religious and partly for secular purposes since this could not be vested in the minister and churchwardens but only in an incorporated body.
Bishop How held his first (and apparently only) synod on 29 April 1889. Some 250–300 clergy walked in procession, to the gaze of numerous bystanders, wearing their surplices, college hoods and caps, from the Church Institute in Marygate to the cathedral for a communion service led by How and the two Archdeacons. From the pulpit, How observed that he saw no need for the synod to meet either regularly or frequently. He referred to the importance of the laity in diocesan affairs. He spoke of the necessity, among the clergy, for personal holiness, pastoral activity, and their own daily prayer. He referred to the disputes over ritual then dividing the church, called for tolerance of the different positions and said that ‘there are but few now who rejoice in the spectacle of prosecution of ritual offenders’ although he added that, in his view, ritualism went against the spirit of loyalty to the church.
At the afternoon meeting in the Church Institute, How returned to the matter of the laity and spoke of having decided at the outset of his tenure to set up a Diocesan Conference. The Conference, presided over by the bishop, was to be the principal forum of the diocese and was to have no more than 460 members. Clerical members included the Archdeacons, Rural Deans, Proctors in Convocation, and all beneficed clergy. Unbeneficed clergy who had held the bishop’s licence as priests for two years, were also included. The Diocesan Chancellor and the Registrar were among the lay members, together with one representative from each parish, with a second from parishes with a population of over 4,500. Lay members were to be elected triennially in each parish by male communicants aged over twenty-one. The bishop could himself nominate ten people – clerical or lay – as members. The Conference was to elect a standing committee to be charged with its general business.
The first Conference was held on 22 and 23 October 1889, in the hall of Wakefield Mechanics Institute (popularly known as the Music Saloon although strictly the term applied only to its upper floor hall). The bishop spoke of the Conference aims to make the Church in the diocese as efficient as possible and to raise the ‘lofty standard of religion and of spiritual life among the people’. A committee was appointed
