Medieval church’s star role

Being Vicar of Halifax must be exhausting, but tomorrow’s episode of Songs of Praise has re-charged the batteries of the hugely energetic holder of that post, Hilary Barber. “The BBC lit the church with arcs of light, and for the first time I had a proper sense of it as a 16th and 17th century church,” he says.

The Minster’s own lighting system is out-of-date and deeply unflattering. To update it and to reveal the place in its proper glory, Rev Barber and his team launched an appeal, A Million for the Minster, and appointed an architect. An appearance on TV can do that fund-raising push no harm at all.

Who’d be the Vicar of Halifax? It must be one of the most daunting jobs in the Church of England. To start with, it’s a Crown appointment, so the phone call comes from Downing Street. Then there’s the sheer size of the parish – for a long time it was the third largest in the country, stretching over a hundred miles.

Then there is the Minster, the largest medieval church in Yorkshire and an architectural gem which reflects every period of the long and rich history of Halifax and the West Riding. Naturally, it costs a small fortune to run – £3,000 per week, which has to be found from somewhere by the Minster community.

And finally there are the ancestors.

Everywhere you look in the Minster there are Vicars of Halifax. William Rokeby, for example, vicar from 1502 until 1521, a leading figure in the pre-Reformation church who was one of the clerics who baptised Mary Tudor. When he died, his heart and bowels were interred in a lead casket beneath the Minster’s chancel, from where they were transferred in 1533 to the chapel which bears his name.

Or how about the arch pragmatist, Robert Holdsworth, who said of Henry VIII “if the king reign any space he will take all that we ever had … and therefore I pray God send him a short reign”. He got off surprisingly lightly, with a fine, and when Henry made himself head of the Church of England Holdsworth dutifully installed an English bible. But when Henry’s Catholic daughter Mary came to the throne he promptly restored the Mass. And when Elizabeth I succeeded her, he trimmed his sails again to the prevailing wind and accepted protestant uniformity.

Like Rokeby, Holdsworth has his own chapel. But his successors are not to be outdone. There’s Archdeacon Charles Musgrave, for example, vicar for nearly 50 years, resplendent in folds of marble, about to make a triumphant exit by the west door; and the surprisingly colourful 17th-century Puritan divine, Dr John Favour (at present hiding behind a bookcase); and, Eric Treacy, appointed Archdeacon of Halifax in 1949, and an avid railway photographer, whose impact within the community earned him the nickname the “ecclesiastical mayor of Halifax”.

Hilary Barber is more than a match for his predecessors. He admits that the call from Number 10 came as a bit of a surprise: he had been quite happy in his job as Rector of Chorlton-cum-Hardy in Manchester, and “like most people from the South, I knew almost nothing about Halifax”.

But he rose to the occasion and arrived in the town four years ago in September, the same month that the Halifax Building Society was acquired by the Royal Bank of Scotland and exactly a year before the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

The ensuing crisis has hit Halifax hard: the town had become increasingly dependent on the financial services industry and “we have lost perhaps a thousand jobs in total”. This and the (probably not unrelated) rise of the English Defence League have proved major challenges for Rev Barber and other civic leaders: “but we’re determined to ride the storms”.

After all, sacred and secular turmoil is nothing new to Halifax. The Minster has seen its fair share of religious controversy, but the building also speaks eloquently of the worldly life of the town – its industrial heritage and the hardship and triumphs of its citizens.

Dr John Hargreaves, author of an acclaimed history of Halifax, has researched the history of the Minster. He points to the grave cover standing in the porch which depicts a cross and a pair of cropper’s shears, used for finishing woollen cloth for the market: “It dates from 1150 and is the earliest evidence which exits for the cloth industry in Calderdale”.

Dr Hargreaves describes the Minster as “a treasure house of Halifax’s history”, and at one level it is indeed a museum of often unexpected objects, such as the life-sized painted wooden figure which stands in front of a pillar by the south porch. “It dates from 1701,” Dr Hargreaves explains, “and represents Old Tristram, a licensed beggar who was allowed to beg for alms in the vicinity of the church.”

Despite his own poverty, he gave much of what he was given away.

Charitable giving has long been a tradition in Halifax, and the Minster contains many extraordinary gifts, including the beautiful stained-glass East window, donated by the industrialist Edward Akroyd.

But perhaps the most remarkable gifts are the five Commonwealth windows, donated by Dorothy Waterhouse, widow of a Puritan merchant, in 1652. They recall the most turbulent period in the town’s history – when it held out almost alone against the Royalist army, only to be overrun and occupied for much of the Civil War. The Minster’s stained glass windows were smashed by Roundhead troops, but the clarity and intricate patterning of the windows that replaced them is a reminder of the idealism of those terrible times.

The fact they have survived, together with so much else, is remarkable given that the church had a makeover under the supervision of the Victorian architect, Sir George Gilbert Scott.

But Dr Hargreaves explains that the Vicars of Halifax have always had a healthy respect for the town’s religious diversity, not least because so many of the town’s wealthiest individuals were nonconformists.

“When John Wesley came to Halifax, the then Vicar, Dr George Legh allowed him to preach in the church and lent him his servant and his horse to get to Huddersfield.”

Those links continue today and Rev Barber emphasises the openness of the Christian community that meets in the Minster: “We have a ‘praying community’ of around 200 people who come from across West Yorkshire – from Manningham to Marsden. And we are forging new links, in particular with the town’s Muslim community.”

He is only too aware of the challenges ahead and he and his team have some big plans.

“We need to make the space more flexible so that we can enable the present generation to claim the building.”

To achieve this, the Minster will need to do some things that are controversial – for example removing some of the 17th-century box pews to make space for a stage, and building an extension to house toilets and a kitchen.

“We’re not a museum,” he insists. “It’s not about bricks and mortar. It’s about what goes on inside the church and our mission in the town and beyond.

“We want to reclaim our medieval roots. The Minster should once again be a place where the secular and the sacred combine, only now in the 21st century.”

Songs of Praise, BBC1, 5.25pm, tomorrow.

Information http://www.halifaxminster.org.uk/ or phone 01422 355436.