Halifax Minster, Chris Lord Photography
The historic significance of Halifax Parish Church was recognized when in 2009 it was given minster status. The accolade was celebrated at a service in November.
But although an Act of Parliament now provided for the South Yorkshire see, for some years the matter was dropped. There was an economic recession affecting both agriculture and commerce. Although the Diocese of Liverpool was formed in 1880 and that of Newcastle in 1882, there was no progress for some years on the Wakefield scheme.
Two things in 1884 prompted a second campaign to secure the new diocese. The first was the establishment that year of the Diocese of Southwell. The second was the death of Bishop Bickersteth and the appointment of William Boyd Carpenter who was consecrated on 25 July 1884, to the Ripon see. One of the key figures in reviving the scheme and in ensuring a successful conclusion was the Vicar of Wakefield, Norman Straton, who, new to Wakefield in 1875, was by 1884 one of the leading churchmen in the Ripon Diocese and had become a Canon of Ripon in 1883. The other most significant figure was Joshua Ingham Brooke, who had been Rector of Thornhill since 1867, and Rural Dean of Dewsbury since 1871, and was, like Straton, a Ripon Canon.
In 1884, Straton conceived the idea of bringing the (national) Church Congress to Wakefield in 1886 as a means of promoting the Wakefield scheme and adding to the funds. The Congress founded in 1861 in Cambridge, was a voluntary gathering bringing together Anglican clergy and lay people, and embracing Evangelicals, Ritualists and the broad church party. Straton obtained support at a public meeting in August 1884 to request the Bishop of Ripon to secure the next Congress for his diocese.
At Bishop Boyd Carpenter’s first Diocesan Conference, held in Leeds on 11 October 1884, Francis Sharpe Powell, a former Member of Parliament for the West Riding who had strongly supported Halifax’s claims in 1875, raised the subject of the division of the diocese and ensured the carrying of a motion asking the bishop to name a committee to raise the necessary funds.
Boyd Carpenter paid his first visit as bishop to Wakefield on 21 January 1885 to attend the annual Church Institution soiree. The event became not so much a social event as a campaign meeting at which the bishop was urged to exercise his good offices to secure the swift division of his diocese, in particular by driving the fund-raising. That June, Boyd-Carpenter wrote to all his clergy urging them to ‘do all in their power’ to secure the completion of the Wakefield Bishopric scheme. He subsequently visited many centres in the Ripon Diocese to foster the setting up of local fund-raising committees.
By the time of the Ripon Diocesan Conference in October 1885, Straton and Brooke as secretaries of the Wakefield Bishopric Fund had contacted all those who had offered subscriptions during the earlier campaign and succeeded in obtaining promises of £24,365. Straton was able to say, ‘Those who have hitherto regarded the erection of the Wakefield bishopric as an event which might possibly occur in the distant future must now be aware that it has come within measurable distance.’
The Church Congress, held in Wakefield in 1886, amply demonstrated the facilities Wakefield could offer as the diocesan cathedral city. It opened with a reception in the recently built Town Hall on 5 October followed by processions to the parish church, St John’s and Holy Trinity where services were held simultaneously. The trade floor of the Corn Exchange was converted into the Congress Hall. The Music Saloon in Wood Street and the Church Institute in Marygate were taken over by caterers. The offices of the Wakefield Charities in Market Street became a press room and the postmaster ensured that reports could be sent by electric telegraph to all parts of Britain. One of the country’s leading clerical outfitters exhibited his garments in the Co-operative Society’s store in Bank Street.
The Wakefield scheme had nothing like the financial support from wealthy merchants or landowners that other nineteenth-century bishoprics enjoyed. Wheatley-Balme was the only individual to contribute more than £1,000. Much of the money came from subscribers giving no more than a guinea. District Visitors and other collectors brought £645 from people who had little beyond pence to give. Offertories were held in many of the parishes of the Ripon Diocese. The sum from Huddersfield parish church was the second largest and amounted to £184. At Wakefield parish church the offertory 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