Patrick Comerford
After visiting Saint Mary’s Church, the mediaeval Church of England in Thame, I visited Saint Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church on Brook Lane. It is a modern church, built in 1996-1997, but the church also led to me learning more about the traditions and stories surrounding the Roman Catholic presence in the south Oxfordshire market town.
There were few Roman Catholics in the Thame area in the centuries after the Reformation, although at times they may have had a safe house at Thame Park.
Roman Catholic worship is known to have taken place at Thame Park in the early 17th century, when Lady Agnes Wenman lived there. She was a Catholic and the wife of Sir Richard Wenman (1573-1640), who was later given the Irish peerage titles of Baron Wenman of Kilmainham, Co Meath, and Viscount Wenman of Tuam, Co Galway, in 1628.
Agnes Wenman came from a Catholic family and was the daughter of Sir George Fermor of Easton Neston, near Towcester, Northamptonshire, and his wife Mary, daughter and heiress of Thomas Curzon and a god-daughter and maid of honour of Mary I of England.
The Jesuit missionary priest John Gerard had stayed as her guest disguised as a layman, and she was a friend of Elizabeth Vaux, a sister-in-law of Anne Vaux, an ally of Henry Garnet, the Jesuit priest. This led to suspicions that she was involved in the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, and both she and her husband were questioned separately in December 1605m but Henry Garnet was executed in May 1606. Agnes Wenman died in 1617.
In the following century, another Lady Wenman was also a prominent Roman Catholic at Thame Park. Lady Eleanor Bertie (1737-1804) was a daughter of Willoughby Bertie, 3rd Earl of Abingdon, who was suspected of having Jacobite sympathies. She was brought up a Catholic by her mother, Anna Maria Collins, and at the age of 29 she married the 24-year-old Philip Wenman, 7th and last Viscount Wenman, in 1766.
The Roman Catholic population of Thame in 1767 was five: Lady Eleanor Wenman, her sister, her two servants and a hatter’s widow. Lady Eleanor allowed Mass to be celebrated in the chapel at Thame Park, with the approval of her husband, and she supported a number of Jesuit chaplains at Thame Park, including Father Bernard Cassidy (1713-1788), also known as Bernard Stafford. He was from Ireland and had been the Jesuit Superior in Oxford from 1771. When he died, he was buried in the chapel at Thame Park.
The last chaplain at Thame Park, Father William Hothersoll, left in 1799 to join a fellow Jesuit priest at Saint Clement’s in Oxford, after the Catholic mission moved there. Eleanor Wenman died in 1804. The date of the last Roman Catholic mass at Thame Park chapel is not known. The chapel at Thame Park was substantially renovated and enlarged in 1836 and became an Anglican chapel.
For a while, the town welcomed French priests escaping persecution during the French Revolution. But there was no formal Catholic provision in Thame until the early 20th century.
Colonel Harman Grisewood and his Roman Catholic wife open the chapel in the grounds of the Prebendal House in Thame on 5 January 1913 as the Chapel of the Holy Family. Father Randolph Traill was sent by the Diocese of Birmingham to begin a mission in the area, and he living in the Prebendal Lodge in 1920. The chapel within the grounds of the Prebendal House is thought to have been built ca 1234.
The Grisewood family left the Prebendal by 1924. Colonel Grisewood’s son, Harman Joseph Gerard Grisewood (1908-1997), had a long career with the BBC. In his autobiography, One Thing at a Time (1968), he recalled his Catholic childhood in the 1910s and 1920s in the rambling 13th century house at Thame, with its own chapel and its own resident priest, Father Traill.
He recalled a terrifying incident when one day he and his brother, on an outing with their nanny and a nursemaid, were stoned in their prams by villagers as they approached Saint Mary’s Church of England parish church.
A new church was built in in Brook Lane, Thame, in August 1922, and was dedicated to Saint Joseph. Father Traill brought a statue of Saint Joseph from the Prebendal chapel to the new church.
The population of Thame started to grow rapidly after World War II as employment changed from farming to engineering, and by 1958 the parish numbered 270 people. Saint Joseph’s Hall, a prefabricated timber building was built beside the church in 1963 as a parish hall.
The church was extended in 1972 and 1983, but the town grew rapidly yet again in the 1980s, bringing increased pressures for a larger church. Building work on a new church began in September 1996, the church from 1922 was demolished in January 1997, and the new church was – completed in June 1997. Many of the stained glass windows in the original church were preserved and restored in the new church.
The church was blessed and opened by Archbishop Maurice Couve de Murville of Birmingham on 20 June 1997.
Saint Joseph’s Church in Thame is one of the newer churches in the Archdiocese of Birmingham. It has a traditional design, with a large, well-lit interior and furnishings and stained glass of some quality.
The new church and parish rooms were designed by the architect John D Holmes. The church faces south, has a spacious, well-lit interior and high-quality furnishings and stained glass. This description follows conventional liturgical orientation.
The church has brick-faced walls in stretcher bond with a slate roof. The plan is nearly square, with a narrower sanctuary in the liturgical east. There are two cross-roofs over each side with large windows. At the east end of the nave roof is a small flèche. There are diamond-shaped windows in the apex of east and west gables.
The entrance is in a link building at the liturgical west that leads into a narthex connecting the church and the parish hall. A large slate plaque commemorating the opening of the church is set below a window beside the entrance.
The four-bay interior has a boarded timber ceiling on laminated timber portal frames. The dadoes under the windows, the west wall and the east chancel arch are all of brown exposed brick. The chancel is plastered, with a timber ceiling.
The sanctuary furnishings are by David John in matching stone. The semi-circular sanctuary steps project beyond the chancel arch. A modern crucifix hangs above the tabernacle. The font at the west end has a circular bowl on a square stem.
All the windows have stained glass by Bowman’s Stained Glass of Aylesbury (1997). Those at the north-west, north-east, south-east and to the sides of the sanctuary depict the Sacred Heart, Our Lady of Thame, apostles, evangelists and saints, while those to the north and south are largely abstract. The small gable window at the west depicts the Ecce Homo, and the east window the dove of the Holy Spirit. There is an etched glass screen at the narthex.
Saint Joseph’s Cottage nearby was once a convent for the Sisters of Providence, who ran a nursing home and care facilities and provided support for a local hospice. The legacy of the convent and the sisters continues through a local foundation, the Foundation for the Sisters of Providence.
As for the chapel at the Prebendal House, it is still in private hands but it no longer functions as a chapel.
• The Sunday Masses in Saint Joseph’s Church, Thame, are: 6 pm Saturday, Vigil Mass; 9 am and 11 am, Sunday. The Parish Priest is Father Michael Puljic.
