of Education which would be needed in January 1890 when the new diocese became independent of the Ripon Board.
Throughout the period under consideration and indeed until it was replaced in 1971 by Synodical government, the Conference normally took place annually over two days in October, meeting in various halls and churches across the diocese. It received reports from all diocesan organizations and heard papers on key issues affecting the Church nationally or at diocesan level.
The Conference also passed resolutions on many issues, including pending parliamentary action. Early in its life, for example, there was a special meeting in April 1883 to debate a motion opposing the Welsh Suspensory Bill which was to disestablish the Church in Wales. Education was a major and perennial issue in the first decades of the diocese. In 1908, at the time of an Education Bill aimed at reversing some of the provisions of the 1870 Education Act, the Conference placed on record its ‘deliberate conviction that there is no hope of any arrangement of the Education Question affording any permanent settlement or lasting peace, which does not secure – as far as it is possible to secure it – the opportunity of full church teaching for all children whose parents desire it, given by qualified teachers who are themselves members of the Church’.
From time to time the Conference focused, too, on social questions. The 1907 Conference, for example, heard a paper on housing reform (a matter in which Bishop Eden was especially interested) by Canon Moore Ede of Gateshead, who referred to the value of town planning, to co-operative house building on lines known as Tenants Limited, and to garden cities. In 1923, the Conference focused on birth control and the instruction of the young in the ‘laws’ of sex.
Licensed but unbeneficed priests living at the Community of the Resurrection in Mirfield were included in the membership of the Conference. This brought it one of the best minds in the Church at the time, Walter Howard Frere (1863–1938), an outstanding liturgical scholar who had been one of the six original members of the Community and who was the Superior at Mirfield in 1902–13 and 1916–22.
Changes in the diocesan organization reflected those at national level. Prompted, it seems, by the great Pan-Anglican Congress of 1908, the two Archbishops set up a committee to look into the organization and financing of the churches. In the light of the committee’s recommendations, the financial organization of the Wakefield Diocese was reshaped. Canon Richard Phipps, who had come to Wakefield as a curate at the cathedral in 1892, resigned the living of Brighouse in 1912 to become the Wakefield Diocesan Secretary, and, in anticipation of the national scheme, he masterminded a restructuring of the financial organizations of the diocese. Under his guidance, and after agreement at the 1912 Diocesan Conference, the over-arching Wakefield Diocesan Board of Finance was established, to take control from 1 January 1914, of the Wakefield Diocesan Education Society and the Wakefield Diocesan Fund (which held both the Wakefield Church Extension Fund and the Spiritual Aid Fund). From then onwards, the Conference, which was the supreme authority in matters of finance, had responsibility for determining the sum needed each year for diocesan expenditure.
The new scheme set out seven areas of church work and the diocesan bodies which would come under each:
Training for the ministry
Ordination Candidates’ Fund.
Maintenance of the ministry, clerical and lay
The Bishop of Wakefield’s Spiritual Aid Society.
The Wakefield Church Extension Society (object iii).
Provision of pensions for the ministry
The Wakefield Clergy Pensions Fund.
Provision for widows and orphans of the clergy and for necessitous clergy
The West Riding Charitable Society Ripon and Wakefield section.
The Queen Victoria Clergy Fund.
(Neither of these was strictly diocesan but could be used by the Board of Finance as distributing agencies.)
The erection of church buildings
The Wakefield Church Extension Society.
The Wakefield Diocesan Loan Fund.
The Cathedral Sustentation Fund.
Religious education of the young
The Wakefield Diocesan Education Society.
The Diocesan Association of Church Schools.
The Wakefield Diocesan Sunday Schools Association.
Provision for expenses of diocesan and central organizations
General Purposes Fund.
The Conference had the responsibility of appointing the Board of Finance.
Until 1912, giving by parishes towards the expenses of diocesan administration was entirely random (or so it seems). The sums contributed were very widely varied depending in part, but in part only, on the size and affluence of the parish. In 1911, the smallest sum contributed, 19s 4d, came from Farnley Tyas. The parish of Dewsbury gave £58. At the 1911 Diocesan Conference the scheme for quota payments was introduced, with parishes being assessed against a variety of criteria and then informed of the size of contribution required in the following year ‘to meet the diocesan and central needs of the church’. Free-will offering schemes were strongly recommended. The system was, inevitably, widely resented albeit utterly essential. In 1930 a report was made to the parochial church council of Holy Trinity, Wakefield, observing that Holy Trinity had always considered the payment of the quota as its first duty. The note adds the wry observation that it was ‘almost alone’ in the diocese in taking this view initially.
In 1913, Phipps, who had private means, moved into Manygates House, Sandal, a substantial dwelling lying in some six acres of parkland and ‘pleasure grounds’. In the absence at the time of any other diocesan administrative base, the house became the centre for meetings of the Diocesan Board of Finance and other committees.
Diocesan conferences gained a place in the national administrative structure in 1920 when the Church Assembly was established after the seminal report of 1916, Church and State, had argued that Parliament had ‘neither the leisure, fitness nor inclination to perform efficiently the functions of ecclesiastical legislature’. The Assembly was made up of a House of Bishops, a House of Clergy and a House of Laity. Under the Church Assembly (Powers) Act of 1919 it could pass measures which, if approved by Parliament, received Royal assent, just as Acts of Parliament would do, and became part of the statute law of England. Effectively the state church gained a high degree of self-government. Diocesan conferences elected their representatives to serve for three-year periods in the House of Laity. Parochial Church Councils and the attendant Electoral Rolls became mandatory. The number of parochial representatives on the Diocesan Conference depended from 1921 on the size of the electoral roll rather than on the number of communicants.
The Diocesan Board of Patronage was established in 1920. The Diocesan Dilapidations Board came into being in November 1923 under the new Church Assembly’s Ecclesiastical Dilapidations Measure of that year. Its concern was with the state of repair and the maintenance of parsonage houses. It had to appoint surveyors, and any further alteration to the houses could be made only with the Board’s consent. It was accepted that the Board might itself have to instigate repairs and would then need to recover costs.
The diocese had perhaps no permanent office until 1923 when it made use of 5a South Parade, although certainly for a time in the 1890s its administrative headquarters was in Manor
