A Guide For Visitors (And Some Background For Those Who Have Come To Stay) – St. George’s Church, Warminster
First published in 1996:
This Guide to St. George’s Church and Parish was written and compiled by Terence Howes to fill a perceived gap in readily available information for visitors and newcomers to Warminster.
Church and Presbytery, August 1986.
Presbytery bay window rebuilt October 1988.
The new Church porch built to commemorate
the visit to England by
Pope John Paul II in 1982.
As we go to press we learn that Bishop Mervyn has asked Fr. David to take over the parish of the Immaculate Conception at Stroud, Gloucestershire, during Easter Week 1996. We welcome Fr. David’s successor, Fr. Paul Brandon, ordained in June 1992, who came to us from Stroud to take up his first appointment as parish priest on 12 April to lead us into the twenty-first century. Ad Multos Annos.
Fr. Paul Brandon 1996.
Photo courtesy of Brian Hobson, LRPS, BIPP.
Outlying Villages In The Roman Catholic Parish Of Warminster
Bishopstrow
Boyton
Brixton Deverill
Chapmanslade
Chitterne
Codford St. Mary
Codford St. Peter
Corsley
Corton
Crockerton
Heytesbury
Hill Deverill
Horningsham
Kilmington
Kingston Deverill
Longbridge Deverill
Maiden Bradley
Monkton Deverill
Norton Bavant
Sherrington
Stourton
Sutton Veny
Tytherington
Upton Lovell
Upton Scudamore
Witham Friary
Map of Villages
Preface
Warminster is a busy town and it is constantly changing. As in many towns today, a few shops and businesses can proclaim “Established 18 . . something or other” on their letterheads and if shop fronts are not permanently boarded up their occupants come and go almost with the regularity of the seasons, in this cold economic climate.
So it is with our people. We have some who are long established in the town; some who come with the Army regiments, and two or four years later leave, to be replaced; and some who have recently come to occupy the many new houses which seem constantly to be springing up in every nook and cranny.
We are not a tourist town on the scale of the Cathedral cities of Bath and Salisbury – although we do have Stonehenge and Longleaf – but many visitors pass our way and we are continually seeing new faces and saying goodbye to old friends.
This short booklet is intended for all who have an interest, passing or permanent, in Warminster. If you are here for a fleeting weekend we hope it will give you the flavour of the town and of our parish. If you have come to live here then hopefully it will give you some background information and help you get the feel of St. George’s. If having done so you feel inclined to join the active crew of Peter’s barque, you will find a list of activities – and contact phone numbers – on the inside front cover of our monthly magazine.
Whichever and whoever you are, welcome to Warminster, and especially to St. George’s Church.
Introduction
Our town is situated more or less in the centre of twenty six villages which comprise our parish, which is some fifteen miles across from east to west and about ten miles from north to south – not far short in area of the Isle of Wight. Our parish priest is also Catholic Chaplain to the Army Barracks, a mile or so from the town centre, and additionally we have a Catholic Primary School, a hospital, two recently built blocks of sheltered housing, and many nursing homes. Center Parcs, at Longleat, opened in July 1994, and pending a possible future interdenominational Chapel on the site, where Sunday Mass might be celebrated, we are happy to welcome holiday-makers from Center Parcs to our services.
The town of Warminster has been very extensively researched by a one-time curate at St. John’s Anglican Church, Rev. John J. Daniell (The History of Warminster – 1879). The history of the Catholic Church in Warminster has been meticulously chronicled by a former parish priest, Rev. Dr. J.A. Harding, M.Litt. Ph.D. (1971-1978) in 1300 Years (1980); and many informative and illustrated books about Warminster from the 1880s onwards have been written and produced by a local historian, Danny Howell, commencing with Yesterday’s Warminster (1987). Other informative books are listed in an Appendix. Few places can boast of such a rich harvest of information about their past. In this booklet you will find our story very thinly spread, but you might discover why we who live here have grown to love our town and parish; few of us would willingly leave.
We, the Catholic community of Warminster, like to think that we play a constructive part in the life of the town. From Parents against Drugs to stage productions at the Athenaeum, from participating in area schools’ sports to joining the campaign against a threatened closure of our hospital, our people are working with others to further the good of the town and to maintain the fabric of society. Long may that partnership continue.
On a more international level we have a strong branch of Amnesty International in Warminster – two of our parishioners are officers – and at any given time the parish is sustaining a project in a Third World country. We have a very special link with Burma where the democratic leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, is related to a parishioner. St. George’s is by no means asleep!
Warminster – Its History
A town bearing the word Minster usually does so because there was once a monastery in the area, but not so with Warminster. Historians have vied as to how we acquired our present name. In a document dated c.900 (Canterbury MSS. – Codex Dup. Vol. II p.328 (A.D. c900) we are referred to as WORGEMYNSTER; in the Domesday Book (1086) the reference is to GUERMINSTER; and various spellings occur in the 15th and 16th centuries. It is conjecture that GUERMIN (guerre – French for war) was the name of an ancient Wiltshire Chief, but no one is sure.
Daniell’s History of Warminster records the lives and conditions of slaves in Wiltshire. On Warminster Manor, he tells us, there were twenty-four serfs, native Britons, held in bondage. “They received two loaves a day besides meals at morn and noon, and were free from sunset on Saturday till sunset on Sunday”. Warminster Manor then was Crown property, so other serfs outside the royal household will not have fared so well. As a royal manor, Daniell explains, Warminster was exempt from “assessments’, but it was obliged to furnish the king and his attendants with board and lodging whenever the royal household came. Charles II did so in 1663, as did George III in 1789. “A large flag floated over Cley Hill whenever the royal household stayed at Longleat” – when the whole entourage numbered about forty-five persons.
Travelling in the area was not easy. “The roads had become so ruinous in winter (that) many roads were impassable for wagons, coaches and for laden horses” (1726). Tolls became payable as roads were improved; typical tolls were one shilling (5p) for a coach and six horses, sixpence (2½p) for a wagon with three oxen. Today we have a bypass, opened in 1988, and traffic through the town, although considerable, is much less than it would otherwise have been. Andrew Houghton, in his book Before The Warminster Bypass (1988) gives a detailed description of roads and tracks in this part of the world dating back to Roman times.
The railway came to Warminster in 1851 – from Westbury; by June 1856 the line had been extended south-east to Salisbury, with five intermediate stations (in order: Heytesbury, Codford, Wylye, Wishford, Wilton) – today there are none. But today there are two trains a day direct to Waterloo to connect with the Eurostar for Paris and Brussels. One step forward and two steps back.
Warminster – Its Catholic History
Rev. Dr. Harding acknowledges in the Preface to his book, 1300 Years, that it was a single sentence in John Daniell’s book that encouraged him to embark on his own researches. That sentence described the finding of a leaden seal behind Portway House (near Warminster’s town centre) bearing the heads of SS. Peter and Paul on one side and of Pope Boniface IX (1389-1404) on the other. Dr. Harding writes “For me the seal was a symbol – a symbol of a living link which had existed for hundreds of years between our town and the eternal city”; and from there he went on to explore the significance of that symbol and what lay behind it.
The Chapter headings of 1300 Years range from “Saxon Beginnings’ to “And A Priest Of Our Own’ (1938), and the book tells the fascinating story of the Faith in Wessex through the ages. It tells, for example, how the Minster Church on the western edge of the town – Catholic of course when it was built – was originally dedicated to SS. Simon and Jude, but in the twelfth century changed its dedication to St. Denys, a missionary bishop sent to France in the third century, and the patron saint of Paris.
Dr. Harding takes his readers cantering down the centuries, detailing Wiltshire sites where Mass was celebrated both in the Sarum rite and in the Latin, and narrating customs such as the suspension of the Blessed Sacrament in a Pyx above the altar rather than in a Tabernacle – (this still occurs today at Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight) – and of marriages taking place in the Church porch before the couple entered for the Nuptial Mass.
Dr. Harding takes his story up to 1978 when St. George’s Church was consecrated by Bishop Mervyn Alexander. He concludes “Our History ends but the Story continues”. That was almost twenty years ago and in that time a new generation has arrived on the scene. The children of the seventies are the parents of the nineties; we hope that they in turn will inspire their children with the same spirit and zeal which encouraged our forefathers to keep the Faith alive in Wessex, to carry it over the threshold of the millenium.
Warminster Yesterday
In “Yesterday’s Warminster” (limited edition 1987) Danny Howell, with photographs and prose, paints a graphic picture of life in the town and villages between 1880 and 1940. The story of the first fifty of those sixty years is one of steady decline; the population of five thousand in 1931 had barely grown in hundred and thirty years, and the economic prosperity of the town had declined considerably year by year. It was only the establishment of the army garrison in 1937 that halted that decline and reversed the downward trend in Warminster’s economy.
Because the Catholic community shares in the fortunes of every town and city those upsz and downs in Warminster are of legitimate interest to the parishioners of St. George’s. It is interesting to note that the prosperity which the garrison began to bring to the town in 1937 – more families to spend more money in local shops – virtually co-incided with the establishment of the parish in 1938 and the arrival of the first parish priest. For the next eighteen months, despite the gathering war clouds, the future seemed assured; and by the time the second world war was well under way in the 1940s the American garrison at Sutton Veny brought even more prosperity – though at a price in suffering and death that no one willingly would have paid.
Danny Howell’s book is replete with anecdotes of a bygone age; of butchers walking their cattle from the station to the slaughter-house; of eccentric characters, like the man who regularly took a Gladstone bag to the butchers to purchase a piece of fat shaped exactly to fit his bag; of hardworking thrifty labourers bringing up often large families on around £2 a week; of village fetes which attracted all manner of freak sideshows, such as displaying the world’s largest man and the world’s smallest woman; of club concerts which sported bizarre entertainment, like the presentation of an 18 carat gold watch to whoever could tell the biggest lie; and numerous other oddities.
Amateur operatics came into being in the 1920s when many Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas were performed at the Athenaeum, pioneered by a Rev. Dudley Lee who also re-activated the town’s Cricket Club. Thus “the Church’ was able to show a presence other than its customary one.
The general overall picture of the people of Warminster is that of a happy and contented community, far from wealthy, but enjoying the rhythm of a more leisurely life-style, and accepting with stoicism the inevitable accidents in factories and on farms that interrupted their lives.
In recent times the people of Warminster have been relieved at the shelving of plans by the Local Government Commission in 1994 to abolish the County Council and to merge Warminster with Salisbury in a new Unitary Authority. A public outcry caused the Commission to change its mind, and Warminster remains with a Town Council and a District Council (West Wilts) within the overall County of Wiltshire. Peace at last, but for how long?
Our Church
The twentieth century, now nearing its end, opened with great potential for the small Catholic community, though they could not have foreseen what was in store. Until 1900 the nearest place for Mass had been Frome, but in that year a Mr. and Mrs. William Tisseman – who has moved here from Bath in 1898 – made their house, “Torwood’, 24 Boreham Road, available for a monthly celebration of Mass. Dr. Harding comments (1300 Years) “The Mass had returned. The long night of winter was over, and for the handful of local Catholics the first signs of Newman’s “Second Spring’ were beginning to appear”. This arrangement seems to have continued until the arrival of the Ursuline Sisters in 1907. (See next Chapter).
Following the departure of those Sisters in 1919 Catholics were able for a short period to attend Mass at Sutton Veny (about two and a half miles away) where large numbers of Anzac (Australian and New Zealand) troops were still stationed. That was fine for the short time it lasted, but by then Warminster’s Catholics were used to the maxim “all good things come to an end’; they were prepared for anything.
When the Sutton Veny army camp closed Canon Lee (later Bishop Lee) obtained the use of an old army hut near the railway station – where the supermarket Lidl stands today – as a Mass Centre, but realising that this could only be temporary, he sought a site for a permanent Church. Mr. Tisseman eventually found the site on which the Church stands today, and the Diocesan authorities acquired it together with the adjacent cottage, No.33, which is still Church property although rented out. The original Church, built 1921/2, consisted of only the nave of the present Church, exactly oblong, and with no additions. While it was under construction Mass was said in the tiny cottage next door – in the upstairs room, with the overflow congregation on the staircase.
On 13th April 1922 Bishop Burton opened the new Church, but for sixteen years it remained without a priest of presbytery, being served from Frome, nine miles away. In 1938 the Church was enlarged by the addition of the two transepts, – the Sanctuary being “pushed back’ to its present position. The presbytery was also built that year, and Fr. Donal O’Connell was inducted as the first parish priest. That was on 24th September.
Mention must surely be made at this point that Fr. (later the Rt. Rev. Mgr.) Sutton, parish priest during the war, and a stand-in Chaplain to the United States Air Force base at Sutton Veny, liked to recall that immediately prior to D-Day (6th June 1944) some thirty Masses were offered in and around Warminster, mostly by US Air Force Chaplains for the men who, he said, “were nearer death and so always ready to go to the Sacraments”.
After Fr. Donal’s induction in 1938 forty years were to elapse before the debt-free Church could be consecrated; (the original “1922′ Church had been given debt-free to Warminster by the diocese, but it had later incurred much expense in the building of the extension). St. George’s was eventually consecrated on its patronal feast, 23rd April 1978; by then the Church Hall had been built (1957) and the Church had a new altar – facing the people – with a matching Lectern and Font, all on the Sanctuary. The altar contains the relics of St. Oliver Plunkett (1629-1681) and of Pope St. Pius X (1903-1914).
The next major addition to the Church was the building of the present narthex, or porch. That was in 1982, in commemoration of the visit to Great Britain of Pope John Paul II. One wonders today how we ever managed without it; the present glass doors, then of course wood, opened virtually on to the street. In that year too, the Lady Chapel acquired its new carved wood statue of the Mother and Child, and the plinth supporting the Book of the Gospels which is inscribed around its four sides “The Word was made Flesh” (John 1.14).
In 1988, the year of the parish’s golden jubilee, the Church was re-roofed, decorated, and re-furnished with new matching pews. (The old carpet was replaced in 1995, when the interior was again repainted.)
In 1989 Warminster’s first ordination to the priesthood took place in St. George’s Church when Fr. Vincent Curtis, born in Bradford-on-Avon but brought up in Warminster, was ordained by Bishop Mervyn Alexander; (years earlier, on Whit Sunday 1976, Rev. Wallis Hardy, a former Anglican priest, had been ordained to the diaconate in St. George’s Church). Almost ninety years from the first Mass to the first priest! – as the psalmist says (89.4) “A thousand years in thy sight are as yesterday”. A melancholy thought for those who look forward to quick results.
As the twenty-first century looms upon us we wonder what changes the next hundred years will bring; grandiose plans are already afoot, as indeed they should be, for not to change is to stagnate. Certainly our predecessors in 1900 could not have forgotten the fruits of their endeavours, but their grain of wheat has already “yielded a rich harvest”. (John 12.14).
Our Convent
Persecution of Catholics in France at the turn of the last century drove many priests and Sisters across the Channel; Brittany’s loss was Warminster’s gain. Dr. Harding relates (1300 Years) how the Warminster and Westbury Journal (8th December 1906) first brought to parishioners the news that the mansion in East Street (now Yard Court) was to be “taken’ – that is, on lease – by “ladies of the Urusuline Order’. Soon the Sisters’ Convent Chapel, a separate corrugated iron building in the grounds, was made available for morning Mass and evening Benediction on Sundays and Holy Days. A succession of Chaplains – at least seven – served the Convent for the next twelve years. Local Catholics, remarks Dr. Harding, “like the Wise Men of old, must have rejoiced with exceeding great joy”. The Sisters called their House “St. George’s Convent” in order to associate themselves with England’s patron saint and to underline their allegiance to the host country.
But life for the Sisters was not easy; there was much bigotry and intolerance in the town, despite the fact that throughout their years here – which included those of the First World War (1914-1918) – they gave local girls an excellent education. However, eight of the twelve Ursuline Sisters died without being replaced, and the remaining four returned to France in 1919. Fifty-four years were to elapse before Sisters returned to Warminster, and in 1973 Salvatorian Sisters (SDS – Sisters of the Divine Saviour) opened a Convent at 37 Boreham Road, three doors from the Church. The Sisters provided much needed help at the then fairly recently opened Catholic Primary School. Unfortunately after only nine years the Sisters had to depart – in 1982 – but happily they returned in the autumn of 1990 and established a Convent at 9c Boreham Road. The Sisters continue to give sterling service to the parish; although not now on the teaching staff of the School one of the Sisters is Vice-Chairman on the Board of Governors, and they give much help with preparing the children for the Sacraments. The Sisters undertake much pastoral work in the parish, and also lead and guide preparation for the liturgy on Sundays and for festive occasions in the Church’s calendar. We hope and pray that this time they have come to stay.
The official opening and blessing of the school
on 23 April 1970 by Mgr. T.J. Hughes.
Our School
Cardinal Basil Hume once reminded Head Teachers “There is a great and urgent task to hand on to the next generation the truths of our Catholic Faith revealed to us by Our Lord, as taught us by the Church down the ages. We must help our young people to learn the Faith, love the Faith, live the Faith. There is so much to teach, so much to learn. That is a task and a responsibility for our families, our schools, religious communities, and parishes.” (Briefing 30.9.88 Vol.18 No.19 and 5.8.88 p.337/8). We like to boast that here in Warminster St. George’s School is fully alive to this ideal.
In many parishes, especially in cities, the history of the last hundred and fifty years shows that the Catholic school was the first to be built, and the parish Church second; this order reflected the priority of the bishops. Hand on the Faith to the children first; Mass can always be celebrated in the school while the church is being built, probably many years later. But this order presupposes a preponderance of Catholic children; this is not usually the case in rural and semi-urban areas.
In Warminster the parish was thirty years old when the prospect of a Catholic School became a real possibility. In September 1969, after many years of lobbying by his predecessors, Fr. Nicholas McCarthy, then parish priest, was able to assemble two or thee people to plan the details of a school on a site in Woodcock Road, about a mile from the Church. The Working Party must have worked extraordinarily hard because in only five months St. George’s School was opened – on 2nd February 1970 – with fifty-two pupils. Two months later, on the feast of St. George, the School was blessed by Mgr. T.J. Hughes, deputising for Bishop Rudderham who was unable to arrive until the evening.
A heavy blow struck on the night of 13th/14th March 1974, when the classrooms were destroyed by fire; only the administrative block was spared. Arson was suspected but never proved. The tragedy, however, brought the townspeople together; far from the bigotry which sixty years earlier had beset the Ursuline Sisters, now the whole town rallied with sympathy and fund-raising; and eight months later rebuilding commenced. Bishop Mervyn Alexander blessed and rededicated the new School on 24th August 1975. A new Hall and two replacement classrooms were added in 1990.
The School fire on the night of 13/14 March 1974.
In 1985 the Board of Governors, to comply with legislation, increased their number from six to fourteen to include representatives of Town and County Councils, and of parents and teachers. The additional numbers, however, meant much more than lengthier meetings and a proliferation of papers. Governors were expected to attend training courses to perfect their art, and more modern ideas emerged and evolved. Annual Reports by Governors to Parents became mandatory “to stimulate interest in the school’ as the statute put it.
Marquee at St. George’s School, Warminster,
for Mass on the occasion
of celebrations for the School’s
SILVER JUBILEE,
18th June 1995
In April 1993 the school “went LMS’, in the jargon then prevailing. The Education Reform Act of 1988 had required local Education Authorities to prepare plans for all schools to become “locally managed’; this the County’s schools did in batches, and St. George’s turn came five years later. In retrospect this proved to be a twelve months’ state of limbo, because on 1st April 1994 the School “opted out’ (of LEA control) and became “Grant Maintained’. St. George’s is now a Grant Maintained School – a GMS – with all that that entails. An influx of parents to the new Governing Body replaced the departing Town and County Governors.
The School’s very attractive brochure proclaims “Our aim is to provide for all our children the best possible standards of education in a caring atmosphere”. Usually about half the children are from the current local military community, and are therefore liable to leave, and to be replaced, following military requirements at the barracks. These children are not therefore as a rule able to follow our indigenous children to St. Augustine’s Catholic Secondary School at Trowbridge when they reach eleven.
The School’s silver jubilee was celebrated in great style in June 1995 when Bishop Mervyn celebrated Mass in a huge specially erected marquee, preceded by a Festival of Music to which the Regiment of Yorkshire contributed a Drum Display, and followed by entertainment by the School’s Singing Club. Our School is well-placed to move into the twenty-first century.
The Ecumenical Scene
After several false and faltering starts the inaugural meeting of what was then known as the Warminster Council of Churches took place at The Rectory, under Anglican auspices, on 26th June 1986. The Minutes record that the meeting “began with a splendid buffet” – alas, never since repeated – provided by Rev. Alan Elkins and his wife. The programme for the future was ambitious, but still within the limits of what was realistic and attainable: combined monthly Sunday Evening Services, Lenten and Advent Weekday Services, and open-air gatherings on suitable occasions. After ten years, which included a change of title to the present Churches Together In Warminster – a national change in fact when the former British Council of Churches was replaced with Churches Together in England (on 1st September 1990) (and similarly for the other component countries of the United Kingdom) – it can be said that Churches Together In Warminster (CTW) has met with modest success. CTW is still flourishing and receives occasional publicity in the local press.
However, ecumenical bonds were given a great boost in the late summer of 1988 when St. George’s Church was completely closed for several weeks for redecoration and refurbishing. We were given hospitality for weekend Masses at the nearby Anglican Church of St. John, where their Sunday Morning Services were re-timed to accommodate St. George’s Masses. Thus the nineteenth century St. John’s Churchyard – where incidentally some of our own parishioners are buried – witnessed a steady stream of worshippers passing each other throughout Sunday mornings.
But it was the weekday Masses in the old Anglican Churches in the outlying villages which really thrilled. Many of those Churches were pre-Reformation and until now Mass had not been celebrated within their walls for over four hundred years. Among these was the Church of SS. Peter and Paul at Longbridge Deverill, where the altar stone was used by St. Thomas a Becket when he came to consecrate the Church in 1167. Then there was St. Peter’s at Codford, dating back to the thirteenth century, still with the original East Wall. Also from the same period, St. Margaret’s at Corsley, where, in 1377, “there were 177 poll-tax payers”; and SS. Peter and Paul at Heytesbury, rebuilt in the twelfth century from a former Saxon Church, as Collegiate Church for four Canons.
We also took the Mass to All Saints Parish Church at Norton Bavant, a twelfth century Church, partly rebuilt in the nineteenth, but still with the priest’s room and fireplace in the original west tower, and to St. Leonard’s at Sutton Veny, where the roofless nave and transepts of the fourteenth century Church have been left as picturesque ruins in the grounds now owned by parishioners of St. John’s.
On Saturday mornings Mass was celebrated in the unique Chapel of St. Lawrence which stands in Warminster’s busy High Street. The Church was built in the early thirteenth century in what was then a graveyard, as a Chapel of Ease for those who could not get to the Minster Church of St. Denys because of floods in the Portway area. St. Lawrence’s had a resident priest/school-master, the last incumbent being paid a pension of £5 a year in 1549. St. Lawrence’s Church is now non-denominational; it belongs to the townspeople and is run by “twelve, ten or eight of the principal honest and discreet men of the parish of Warminster”. They are known as “feoffees’, a feoffee being “one who receives a fief’, that is, a trustee of land being held by feudal tenure.
In recent years a tradition has grown that the Churches Together in Warminster hold a combined open-air service in the grounds of St. Lawrence’s Church on the morning of Good Friday. Loud-speakers are used, and leaflets distributed, hopefully so that onlookers will know, and appreciate, the solemnity of the day.
A pleasing development has been the periodic holding of “Clergy Fraternals’ when ministers of the various Churches get together to discuss matters within their spheres of interest.
Our Association With St. George
The association of our parish with St. George is fortuitous rather than planned. It has already been observed that the Ursuline Sisters, driven from France by religious persecution in 1906, sought refuge in this country – no Asylum or Immigration Laws in those days – and in gratitude for a haven in Warminster dedicated their Convent to England’s patron saint. Despite the three year gap between the Sisters’ leaving in 1919 and the building of the Church in 1922 it was decided, as Dr. Harding explains, “to call the Church St. George’, thus continuing the already popular dedication chosen by the Ursuline Sisters”. Taunton in Somerset is the only other parish in this diocese dedicated to St. George.
Whenever possible during the past seventy years major events have been held on St. George’s feast day, 23rd April. Thus in 1970 St. George’s School was officially opened and blessed on that day. In recent years the rotating ecumenical service has contrived to arrive at “the RC Church’ on or near St. George’s Day; in 1994 this occasion was enhanced by the release of some two hundred red and white balloons (colours of the cross of St. George) with goodwill labels to wherever the winds could carry them. (One, we later heard, had landed in a school playground in Yorkshire.)
It is rather sad that St. George today has rather a low profile in the hearts of most English people by comparison, say, with St. Patrick in Ireland or St. David in Wales. Yet it was not always so. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries St. George’s Day was a “Holiday of Obligation’, and before the reform of the Church’s Calendar of Saints in this century the feast even had an “octave’ (eight days of commemoration) in Churches and Cathedrals dedicated to the saint.
St. George’s Chapel, in the grounds of Windsor Castle, built in 1347 or thereabouts, is still very much alive to the significance of St. George; the Chapel is used whenever the Sovereign bestows the Order of the Garter on one of her subjects. However, as a recent letter to The Times somewhat cynically suggested, St. George will once again be invoked by the English when they come to realise that they are being ruled by Brussels!
Great St. George, our patron, help us,
In the conflict be thou nigh;
Help us in that daily battle
Where each one must live or die.
Conclusion
What more can be said in a pocket-sized booklet? As a parish we feel that we in Warminster are an integral part of the family of our diocese of Clifton which itself, together with that of Plymouth and the dioceses of Wales, formed The Western District, established in 1688. In that year, the Hierarchies of England and Wales having been eliminated by Elizabeth I and her successors (plus of course Oliver Cromwell), Rome divided the two countries into four Districts, or Vicariates, each administered by a Vicar Apostolic. Ours was The Western District, and its colourful history is recorded in “Fathers In Faith’, edited by Dom Aidan Bellenger OSB MA PhD FR Hist S FRSA of Downside Abbey. Clifton was created in 1850.
So we have a historic lineage, and we are justly proud of our heritage. We hope and pray that this “sensus fidei’, feel for the Faith, will rub off on all who come this way.
St. George, Patron of England,
and Patron of our Parish of Warminster,
Pray for us.
Parish Priests Who Have Served Warminster
Fr. Donal O’Connell 1938-39
Fr. Joseph Sutton 1939-51
Canon Joseph Renehan 1951-65
Fr. Nicholas McCarthy 1965-71
Fr. John Harding 1971-78
Fr. Michael Larkin 1978-81
Fr. Michael House 1981-87
Fr. David Ryan 1987-96
Fr. Paul Brandon 1996-
Assistant Priests At Warminster
Fr. Edmond Murphy with Fr. Sutton.
Fr. (now Canon) William Roche with Canon Renehan.
Fr. Michael O’Sullivan with Canon Renehan.
Fr. Bruno Bradley with Fr. McCarthy.
Fr. Edwin Gordon with Fr. McCarthy.
There have been no curates at St. George’s since 1971.
Rev. Wallis Hardy, ordained Deacon in 1976, worked in the parish from then until 1983, and gave invaluable help to Fr. Harding, Fr. Larkin, and Fr. House. He now lives in retirement at Walton-on-Thames, Surrey.
The Ordination of Father Vincent Curtis by
The Rt. Rev. Bishop Mervyn Alexander D.D.
Bishop of Clifton
Saturday 10th June 1989.
Photo B.A. Tunbridge & Co. Bristol.
Acknowledgements & Bibliography
For source material for the compilation of these notes I am deeply grateful to Rev. J.J. Daniell (The History of Warminster), to Rev. Dr. J.A. Harding (1300 Years – A History of the Catholic Church in Warminster), to Mr. A. Houghton (Before The Warminster Bypass), to Mr. Danny Howell (Yesterday’s Warminster), and to Mr. Kevin Robertson (Wiltshire Railways In Old Photographs).
I am also grateful to Mr. Cliff Topping for the sketch of St. George’s statue on the front of the Church and to B.A. Tunbridge & Co. of Bristol for the photograph taken on the occasion of the ordination of Fr. Vincent Curtis.
I am indebted to Eileen Knowles for guiding me on historical facts; without her assistance these notes would have contained historical innacuracies.
Finally I would like to thank Fr. David Ryan, parish priest 1987-1996, for asking me to write this Guide, and for encouraging me whilst doing so.
Baker (1990) With All Hopes Dashed In The Human Zoo.
Bellenger (1991) Fathers In Faith (edited).
Cundick (1987) The Inns And Taverns Of Warminster.
Daniell (1879) The History Of Warminster.
Dawkins (1989) When Warm Milk Was Fresh Milk.
Harding (1980) 1300 Years – A History Of The Catholic Church In Warminster.
Houghton (1988) Before The Warminster Bypass.
Howell (1987) Yesterday’s Warminster.
Howell (1988) Smallbrook Farm Warminster.
Howell (1989) Warminster In Old Photographs.
Howell (1990) Five Connected Lives.
Howes (1988) St. George’s Catholic Church In Warminster 1938-1988.
Phillips (1988) The Warminster Trail.
Robertson (1988) Wiltshire Railways In Old Photographs.
St. George’s Church, A Guide For Visitors. Copyright Terence Howes.