On this day … 28 May 1892

On 28 May 1892, St Wilfrid’s Catholic Church in Chapel Street reopened after a major restoration that transformed the inside and outside of the building.

The church had first opened for worship almost a century earlier on 4 June 1793, the moving force for its establishment being the Rev Joseph ‘Daddy’ Dunn, the architect of the expansion of the Catholic presence in the town into the next century.

Worshippers at the church in its early days would have been astounded by the restoration at the end of the century. The original church was a much humbler building, brick-built and with a plain flat ceiling. Improvements were made over the course of the century: it was rebuilt and enlarged in 1839, and in 1879 the interior was remodelled.

But by 1890 the exterior, in particular, was badly in need of repair, as the Preston Chronicle noted, ‘The old walls were preserved, and as they were rough brickwork, very much the worse for wear, the exterior of the edifice presented a sorry spectacle.’

When the church first opened it represented a bold statement of the confidence of Catholics in the town, establishing their place of worship among the homes of the most affluent and influential Prestonians in fashionable Fishergate. The church it replaced, St Mary’s in Friargate, had been hidden from sight up a narrow alleyway, with good reason, for throughout the eighteenth century the town’s Catholics were forced to ‘lie under the bushel’, to avoid provoking No-Popery hostility.

And, surely, naming the church for St Wilfrid harked back to the pre-Reformation name for the parish church, before that church was renamed St John’s in the sixteenth century.

Having overseen the building of St Wilfrid’s, Fr Dunn next turned his energies to providing for the education of his parishioners, opening a school in Fox Street in 1814. Many Protestants, including the Earl of Derby, contributed to an appeal for funding; Fr Dunn was very much an accepted member of Preston society and played an important part in the town’s public life.

In 1816, Fr Dunn bought a plot of land behind the Fox Street school in what became St Wilfrid Street, to serve as a burial ground for the town’s Catholics. The first burial took place in 1817, and the last in 1854 when the burial ground was closed. In between, more than 5,000 people were buried there.

A team of volunteers, led by Margaret Purcell, transcribed the burial records, and Glenn Swarbrick took their work a stage further by transforming the transcriptions into a spreadsheet, which he has put on line and made freely available.

In fact, Glenn has done far more, writing short biographies of those interred there, linking families together, and uploading the results as he progresses. His latest upload was just a few days ago on 22 May:

‘Today I have uploaded further information on 95 of the 114 people listed in second section of surnames beginning with M – McArdle to McWrennall, including two people killed at railway stations: Catherine McAvoy, who was struck by a train at Farington Station; and John McNamara, a 12 year old boy killed at Lostock Railway Station.

‘Perhaps the most shocking death was that of Bernard McNamara, who was shot and killed by soldiers in Lune Street, an act commemorated by the monument in front of what was the Corn Exchange.’

Bernard, a cotton stripper, who lived in Birk Street, was born in Ireland in about 1824, and was just seventeen when he was killed. Glenn has provided a full account of his shooting here (the link will take you to the rest of the site):
http://www.mit-stamtrae.co.uk/st_wilfrids/st_wilfrids_preston_further_information_M.htm#M96

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Sources
Hewitson’s History of Preston
The First Catholic Charitable Society of Preston