NOSTALGIA: The progress of the Roman Catholic Church around Milnthorpe

Following the 16th-century Protestant Reformation, Roman Catholic worship did not quite die out in South Westmorland.

‘Old Catholic’ families like the Stricklands of Sizergh kept the sanctuary lights burning in their private chapels and fugitive priests, risking martyrdom, held clandestine masses locally.

North of Kendal, a Catholic community quietly settled at Dodding Green around 1715 but it hardly touched outlying parishes.

In 1804, the vicar of Heversham, Dr Lawson, knew of no resident “papists except two in a very poor family”.

Just over Westmorland’s border with Lancashire (England’s most Catholic county) St Mary’s R. C. Church at Yealand Conyers, built by the Gillow family in 1852, ‘out-did the Anglican Church in prominence and style’.

But its ministrations only strayed northwards in 1926 when Canon Birchall celebrated a private mass in Arnside for just seven worshippers. Around 1930, partly to cater for summer visitors, Arnside acquired larger premises dedicated to St Mary of Lourdes.

At Milnthorpe, the Catholic congregation increased when wartime evacuees arrived in 1939. For them, a mass centre was opened in The Cookery Rooms (now the library) in The Square.

But, when the war ended, the ‘accommodation was no longer available’. This blow hit not just village Catholics but Italian ex-prisoners of war (POWs) who had stayed on in the area after the neighbouring Bela Prison Camp disbanded.

Incidentally it was Peter Capasso, the son of an ex-POW and currently chairman of the parish council, who recently discovered a memoir about the inauguration of the Milnthorpe church.

In the 1940s, the main Catholic driving force was a village GP, Dr Patrick Byrne, who firstly provided, in August 1946, a room in his house and then the Stoneleigh Surgery garage.

Here the priest, Father Slater, recalled “our altar was a trestle table set amid oil cans and woe be-tide the faithful if it was raining as devotion was somewhat lessoned in avoiding raindrops seeping through the roof.”

Then ‘great was the joy’ in December, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, when worshippers moved into a disused malt kiln behind Haverflatts Lane.

At first the makeshift ‘chapel’ lacked doors, pews and kneelers. Nevertheless, when it was eventually consecrated to Christ the King it was replete with colourful vestments, and was illuminated by ‘new fangled’ fluorescent tubes and (partially) heated by ‘electric braziers’.

Memorably, there was also a panoply of plaster Saints. But, when the new church was built across the lane in 1970, most of these ornaments did not grace its serene and possibly unique seven-sided interior, which featured ceramics by the renowned sculptor Adam Kossowski.

In contrast, Pevsner’s ‘Buildings of England’ on Cumbria castigated its exterior as a ‘bunker’!

Remarkably, no representatives of other branches of the faith were invited to the dedication.

Nearly 50 years on, sectarianism has long been minimised and Roman Catholics invariably join their protestant friends at ecumenical events, including popular open-air services on the village green in front of the Anglican parish church, showing that local Christians remain at the heart of the community.