We Shall Remember Them: Biographies of Men Associated with St Werburgh''s Who Gave Their Lives During World War I

To wander into St Werburgh's is to enter a glorious church, the first Mass celebrated here by Cardinal Manning on Christmas Day 1875. Its Solemn Opening was on 13 July 1876, a full Haydn Mass by way of musical accompaniment. But how much of the church we see today would have been visible then? None of the fine stained glass windows, all later additions. Edmund Kirby, our architect, was famous for his love of plain glass, with just the odd pane here and there picked out in green or yellow, to give an enchanting off white effect. You can see this today in the Clerestories of the church, the upper levels of windows, or, in closer detail, if you go into the Day Chapel. The High Altar? Placed there in the early 1920's as part of our Commemoration of the Great War dead. The wonderful Hanging Cross? 1933, as the date at the bottom testifies. And there are many signs of the beautiful re-ordering of the church in the first years of this century, the elegant new Altar, the re-positioning of the Pulpit, and the removal of the old Choir Stalls, all celebrated in the re-opening of the newly re-ordered church on 14 May 2002. Last, but certainly not least, the superb three-manual Binns Organ, was installed in the early months of 2004 and formally inaugurated at a Celebrity Recital on 19 June that year. Our church then, like all others, is a study in 'change in continuity', so much the same and so much altered over time. If that is true of the fabric of our church, how much more must it be the case with the living stones of which our community is built, the men and women, boys and girls who have made up our Parish since its foundation in 1757. None of those individuals who first welcomed visiting Missionary Priests to inns and taverns in the city to say Mass in the middle of the eighteenth century are still with us: but we are their successors today, St Werburgh's Parishioners in 2015 as they were two hundred and fifty years ago. Our prayer is always the same: that we will hand on our great Parish to the next generation in at least as good a condition as we inherited it ourselves. Who were the living stones of a hundred years ago? The Parish's Great War Group has done a magnificent job in researching the lives - and deaths - of the more than one hundred parishioners and friends of this Parish who were caught up in the First World War and made the ultimate sacrifice. But this book is so much more than their obituaries; it is nothing less than a picture of our life together a hundred years ago, and, like the church building itself, at one and the same time so recognisable and so utterly strange. The past may be a foreign country but, in this case, it is our own country, and we are proud to acknowledge it as ours. Two of the features of the building that haven't changed over time are the Cheshire sandstone pillars on which the whole fabric rests, and the pine benches on which we sit. That is itself a symbol of change in continuity. They are the benches on which the men and women sat whose lives you will read of in this book, and to gaze at those pillars is to be transported back a hundred and forty years to the church's opening. I cannot thank the members of the Great War Group enough for their painstaking and time-consuming work in researching these lives, and for the way the whole Parish has got behind this project, with their information, ideas, suggestions and enthusiasm. Every November, and most noticeably on Remembrance Day, we say Lawrence Binyon's words in his poem For the Fallen: They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old. Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them. In this book, I like to think we have kept faith with our Parishioners of a hundred years ago. We have remembered them. See more