My Town Monday - Part 8

This week I thought I would write about my church "St Joseph's and the English Martyrs".

My family have been coming here for years and it has hosted the weddings of both my parents, my sister and myself as well as family funerals and other ceremonies.




We have had our fair share of priests over the years and currently have "Canon Eddie" who is loved by everyone. He is 70 + years old and a real character, who has his feet firmly in the land of the young generation being the only priest I know who has an Ipod!!

There is actually quite a large Catholic contingent in Bishops Stortord today , however in 1896 when the Sisters of Namur came to Bishops Stortford, there were only two Catholic families here - one being German and the other Irish.

The two Catholic Nuns were tolerated by the locals and really left alone .The Nuns were responsible for founding St Mary's convent which at that time only taught a handful of children ( my old school written about in a previous MTM post).


A Cardinal Vaughan visited the two Nuns in 1900 and decided that Bishops Stortford would be the perfect place to set up a small monastery and chapel.

He therefore instructed Redemptorist Father Oliver Vassall-Phillips to visit the town and find suitable premises. He in turn enlisted the help of a Lay Brother named Xavier Kerr, and both arrived in Stortford on 5 May 1900. They lived in a small cottage close to Windhill Lodge and held Mass in the convent every Sunday.

During Father Vassall-Phillips initial search of the town he did find a suitable property in which to start a monastery and chapel, but a passive resistor who hoped to keep Catholics out of the town quickly bought this up. When further searches for property proved fruitless he was of a mind to seek permission from Cardinal Vaughan to move on to the town of Hitchin. But in an encounter with the head of the resident German Catholic family, John Fehrenbach, his outlook was changed.

Learning of Father Vassall-Phillips plan to leave, Fehrenbach explained that he was a clock and watchmaker from Germany. He had a business in the town, and although his wife Ellen was a Protestant, he was anxious that his four children should be brought up as Catholics. His own Catholic training had taught him to keep the faith under any circumstances, and since the birth of his children he had regularly prayed to St Joseph that a priest might come to town. That prayer had been answered, so why, he asked, was the priest now leaving.

He then took the Father to see a disused public house at the corner of Portland Road and Newtown Road that, along with a piece of uncultivated land alongside, might be a suitable site for a small church to be built on. The pub was the former Cricketers Arms that had closed in 1884, and the site proved perfect for the task


Within weeks a small 'temporary' church built of corrugated steel was erected, and in November that year (1900) opened for worship. It was named St Joseph's, but its flimsy structure did bring about a certain amount of ridicule from New Town residents who quickly dubbed it the 'Tin Tabernacle'. Regardless of this, local people soon began filling the church every Sunday to sing hymns and listen to simple sermons, and many conversions to Catholicism were made.

Fate then took a hand. In 1903 a large landowner in the town, Mr W Wilby, died. His estate was left in the hands of his trustees, who in November that same year engaged Messrs G E Sworder to sell his properties in an auction held at the George Hotel. One of the properties, Windhill House – comprising of 5 acres, stables and coachman's cottage – went for £3,100, and the adjoining St Katherines House, used as a High School for girls, went for £1,850.

Both were bought by a Mr Foster on behalf of the Catholic Church, though this wasn't known at the time. If the purpose of his bidding had been known, then those still determined to keep Catholics out of the town may well have outbid him.

Plans for the site began immediately. The adjoining St Katherines House was to be demolished so that Windhill House could be extended for use as a monastery, and on the site of the old stable block, facing Windhill, would be built the new St Joseph's church.


Renowned church architect, Doran Webb of Salisbury was hired to design the church and apparently visited Florence for his inspiration. He wanted it to blend in with its surroundings, as all small-town Italian churches do, and locals immediately dubbed the resulting Italian style church the ‘Italian Mission’.

A church in San Miniato designed by Michelangelo inspired the interior, and for this Webb created a star-studded ceiling with scrolls around the arches. He also included a baldachin (a canopy over the pulpit). The marble altar is particularly impressive but the overall decoration was not to everybody’s taste. This was greatly simplified in the 1960s by Father L Hull, who also had the baldachin elegantly altered.







The large crucifix on the church's exterior is said to incorporate a representation of Bishop’s Stortford’s four former wayside crosses, and above the entrance porch are carved two Coats of Arms – one of the Redemptorist order, the other of Bishop Edmund Bonner, the last Catholic Bishop of London in Queen Mary’s reign.


The church, dedicated to St Joseph and the English Martyrs, was consecrated on 19 June 1906 by Bishop James Fenton.

Sadly Father Oliver Vassal-Phillips died at sea on 8 May 1932, while returning to Bishop's Stortford after a strenuous preaching tour of South Africa. He was aged 75

In December 1952 the monastery itself was almost destroyed when a fire raged here for more than three hours, at one point also threatening the fabric of nearby churches, St Michael’s and St Joseph’s.

First on the scene were members of the Salvation Army who, along with locals, formed a human chain to rescue valuable items from inside.

But as fifty firemen, using water pumped from the river Stort fought to contain the blaze, Brother Xavier, dashed back into the smouldering building exclaiming ‘I’ve got to save my three nuns’.

He then reappeared moments later holding a tin of his favourite pipe tobacco!



Born in Donegal, Ireland, in 1862, Brother Xavier Kerr was a Glasgow tram driver before he became a Redemptorist Lay Brother. Despite his arrival to Bishops Stortford to help find premises in which to start the small monastery and church he ended up staying here for the rest of his life.

He became a popular and well-loved man in the town, and when he died in 1960, aged 98, was laid to rest in the Monastery garden cemetery – a small, hedged plot of land at the rear of St Joseph’s church. The cross on his grave can still be seen, along with fifteen other crosses marking the graves of former Lay Brothers and priests.

My Mother who remembers Brother Xavier very well has been a regular at St Josephs since she around 4 years old upon moving to Bishops Storford from Ireland. She tells a really funny account of how she used to be taken to mass every week by her parents who were very strict Catholics.

She recalls being very excited at the time of the "offertory collection". The material covered bag with maghony handles would be passed over the top of her head by the adults , and she would see that all of them would put their hand into the bag.

The "chink" noise of jingling coins would be heard.When the bag was passed to her she dutilfully obliged but very innocently ,thinking this was some sort of "Lucky dip" would place her small hand in the bag and pull out a coin! Sometimes she would be lucky and pull out a shilling or even a half crown which she would then put into her Sunday best dress pocket and spend at the sweety shop later that morning!!

Her parents would have been horrified if only they knew. It did not appear to have been explained to her that you actually had to put the money in!