ORIGIN AND EARLY DAYS

Like many another modern church, S. Wilfrid's may be said to have had its origin in a gift. Sometime in the 80's, a visitor, so it is recorded, desiring to ensure a strong Catholic influence in Harrogate, called one day on the Vicar of S. Peter's and handed to him a cheque for £200, with the request to open a fund for providing a new church in Harrogate on the rapidly developing Duchy of Lancaster estate.

For a considerable time, beyond the offer by the Duchy of a site of about sixty yards square, no definite steps were taken, with the result that the Duchy authorities imposed a time limit of two years, during which the work should be begun if the offer were to hold good.

Bishop Boyd Carpenter then set aside the sum of £3,500, part of a legacy by Mr. Thomas Lockwood for church extension in Harrogate, which, augmented by private donations, would provide £150 a year as stipend for the priest for the new church. During the two years' grace, efforts were made by the Bishop to find a suitable priest willing to embark on the work of organising a new parish, and raising the necessary funds for building a church.

With what was nothing better than a bit of waste land, liberally littered with contractor's rubbish, with no buildings in which a congregation could be gathered, with no house for a priest, and with no defined district, the prospects did not appear alluring, and for one reason or another some seven or eight priests came, looked, asked a few questions, and went away. Still, there was that little nest-egg of £200 as the nucleus of a Building Fund., and there was the assured wage of £3 a week for a priest, and a magnificent opportunity for a work for God waiting for the exercise of vision and faith.

It was not until the spring of 1902 that things began to take shape. A little band of keen churchmen, who had formed themselves into an unofficial committee, discussed the situation with the then Vicar of Crakehall, the Rev. William Fowell Swann, who had been asked by the Bishop to meet them. At the unanimous wish of the committee Fr. Swann resigned his benefice, a definite decision was taken to set the work going, and on S. Bartholomew's Day the first congregation gathered in a temporary corrugated iron building erected on the corner of the site.

Such briefly, may be said to have been the origin of S. Wilfrid's, Harrogate. From the first it was intended by the founders that the church to be built should be as fully worthy of its purpose as human skill and devotion and opportunity could secure, and that the accessories of an august type of worship should in themselves be an offering of beauty. That intention, even in the days of difficulty, was never lost sight of.

Realising that so often, from lack of means, the Catholic Faith has had to be presented in a setting of many limitations, the founders kept steadily in view an ideal of worship which should present to those who had eyes to see, and a spirit to appreciate, the Church of England at its best. The house that was to be built for the Lord was to be " exceeding magnifical ".