Patrick Comerford
When I was visiting Saint Chad’s Church in Hopwas in recent days, I noticed the old font in the churchyard, on the south side of the church. The font is a surviving reminder of Saint John’s Chapel, a chapel-of-ease on Hints Lane that was replaced when Saint Chad’s was built in 1879-1881, along with the bell that still tolls in Saint Chad’s Church.
I decided a few days ago to go in search of the site of Saint John’s Chapel, and found the old churchyard on Hints Lane, less than half a mile west of the Tame Otter.
This is a very small cemetery off a quiet road. A few of the gravestones are very worn, only a few of them can be read and there is no sign to describe the former churchyard. The small rectangular plot of land is surrounded by a low wall, with just a small metal gate.
Saint John’s Chapel was built as a chapel-of-ease for Tamworth parish in 1836. There are no signs to indicate that a church once stood on the site, although some of the legible gravestones indicate it continued to be used as a burial ground until the early decades of the 20th century.
When the Revd William MacGregor (1848-1937) was appointed Vicar of Tamworth in 1878, he gave Saint Editha’s Church a major facelift, had its bells recast, and built two churches, at Glascote and at Hopwas. He believed that Saint John’s chapel, built over 40 years earlier was too small to cater for the growing population of Hopwas. But when he sought land to build a new church, he was opposed by Sir Robert Peel who argued that the population was not large enough.
Nonetheless, MacGregor managed to secure a site for his planned church from the Revd TK Levett of Packington Hall in 1878, with additional land donated by Herbert Dean. The church was designed by John Douglas and consecrated in 1881.
The original chapel structure may have survived a little longer after the font and bell were moved up the hill to the new Saint Chad’s, for the Tamworth Herald reported on 16 April 1898 that the holy table from Saint John’s was made use of in the new workhouse chapel in Tamworth.
All that remains of Saint John’s today may be a handful of stones in among the graves in the former churchyard in the centre of the village. Even the tree planted to mark Queen Elizabeth II’s 90th birthday has wilted and seems to have died.
Two other traditions, the Methodists and the Roman Catholics, have also had a long presence in Hopwas, alongside the Church of England.
Francis Wilson (1835-1917) introduced Methodism to Hopwas three months after he moved to the village in 1866. When his cottage on School Lane became too small for the growing congregation, a new chapel was built in 1888 on Hints Lane on the other side of the village, a little further west along Hints Lane. Hopwas Methodist Church has been in the heart of the village ever since.
Hopwas Methodist Church is part of the Tamworth and Lichfield Methodist Circuit, a collection of six churches in Tamworth, Lichfield, Alrewas, Hopwas, Shenstone and Stonydelph. The Revd Joanna Thornton is the Superintendent Minister, and Sunday services in Hopwas are at 10:45 am. On a fifth Sunday in the month, a joint service alternates between Hopwas Methodist Church and Saint Chad’s Church.
In the past, Hopwas also had an interesting Roman Catholic presence. Local tradition says that Catholics in the area attended Mass in the chapel in Comberford Hall until the Comberford family moved away in 1671, although that date ought perhaps to be as late as 1718, when Catherine Comberford died.
The Catholics in the area were then served by visiting priests from Pipe Hall, the home of the Weld family, who were descended from the Comberfords through the Heveningham family, and from Oscott College. The Revd Dr John Kirk of Holy Cross, Lichfield, took charge of what was called the ‘Hopwas Congregation’ in 1801, and the congregation met in houses until 1815.
However, I have yet to identify those houses. It would be interesting if there is any continuity in that Catholic tradition between the houses used by the congregation in those years and the two houses in Hopwas still owned by Catherine Comberford when she died in 1718.
The Birch family gave a small plot of land at Coton in 1815, and Father Kirk built a small chapel. The chapel opened on 15 August 1815, when the preacher was the recently-ordained Dr Henry Weedall (1788-1859), later President of Saint Mary’s College, Oscott.
For 50 years from 1826, the Revd James Kelly was in charge of the Tamworth mission. A new church and presbytery were built in 1829-1830 ‘entirely through his exertions’, although other accounts suggest that the energetic Father Kirk also remained involved, and that the new church in Tamworth was partly endowed by John Talbot (1791-1852), 16th Earl of Shrewsbury, who lived at Alton Towers, who commissioned AWN Pugin to build many churches in Staffordshire, and who was once ‘the most prominent British Catholic of day’.
In the 1820s, Kirk also built Holy Cross Church on Upper Saint John Street, Lichfield, which was later enlarged and rebuilt in 1832 by the Lichfield-born architect Joseph Potter (1756-1842).
A piece of land in central Tamworth was acquired from Sir Robert Peel, and Kirk’s Lichfield friend Potter was commissioned to design a neoclassical church with an attached presbytery, although it is possible that the church was designed by Joseph Potter jnr.
The foundation stone was laid on Good Friday, 17 April 1829, and the church was opened on the feast of Saint John the Baptist, 24 June 1830, by Bishop Thomas Walsh (1777-1849), Vicar Apostolic for the Midland District, when a choir from Oscott College sang.
Saint John’s Church, Tamworth, was remodelled and extended and given a distinctly post-war character in 1954-1956, and its brick exterior makes it look like a 20th century church. Its story has developed quite separately from the ‘Hopwas Congregation’ that met in houses in Hopwas from 1801 to 1815, or its distant predecessor in Comberford Hall a century or more earlier.
