CATHEDRAL HISTORY
Horseferry Road Closed; Cathedral Opened Patrick Rogers
The New Year offers the opportunity to look back on another New Year, that of 1903, when the Cathedral was about to open to its first worshippers, the displaced worshippers from the newly-closed St Mary’s Mission Chapel in Horseferry Road. The New Year offers the opportunity to look back on another New Year, that of 1903, when the Cathedral was about to open to its first worshippers, the displaced worshippers from the newly-closed St Mary’s Mission Chapel in Horseferry Road. So what did the Cathedral look like a hundred years ago? After more than even years of work the structure was at last complete. The final act took place on 2 January when the bronze cross, 10ft 3in high, its twin arms denoting that this was the seat of an archbishop, was placed in position at the top of St Edward’s Tower. Cardinal Vaughan had blessed it privately on New Year’s Day. A relic of the True Cross, sealed in a silver tube, was placed in a cavity in the bronze cross before it was put in place. Inside, the Cathedral was bare brick. Only the structural marble columns lining the nave and the sanctuary were in place. The main altar was there, but the baldacchino would not appear for another three years and the electric chandeliers for another six. The nave of the Cathedral was a vast expanse of darkness – gloomy, cold and a bit damp. But in two of the chapels decoration was underway. The firm of J Whitehead & Sons had completed the marblework (except for the floor) in the Chapel of St Gregory and St Augustine in October 1902 and that in the Holy Souls Chapel the following month, and had started on the marblework of the sanctuary tribunes. The two Chapels were now full of scaffolding and George Bridge and his 26 young lady assistants from a studio in Oxford
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A view from the entrance to the Lady Chapel across to the gallery above the Archbishop's throne – all structural columns and bare brick
Street were putting up the mosaics. Daily services were taking place, but not yet in the Cathedral. Nearby in the Cathedral Hall, then known as the Chapter Hall, the celebration of Mass and the Divine Office had started on Ascension Day, May 1902. The Hall would continue to be used for this purpose until the Cathedral was permanently opened, commencing with Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve 1903. At 8.30am on the Feast of St Joseph, 19 March 1903, the first Mass was held in Westminster Cathedral, the event being described
in The Tablet two days later. It was celebrated not, as might have been expected, on the main sanctuary, but in what was to become the Lady Chapel, which was boarded up and curtained off from the rest of the Cathedral for the purpose. Neither did the congregation consist of the great and the good, as also might have been expected, but of those at the other end of the social scale who inhabited the tenements and slum dwellings of old Westminster, then being rapidly demolished, in the area between the Cathedral, the Abbey and Millbank. Those attending the Mass were from St Mary’s, the old mission chapel on Horseferry Road, founded by a French refugee in 1813. In 1850 it was adopted by the Jesuits as part of the conditions under which St James, Spanish Place was licensed. But in 1900 responsibility had been taken over by the new Cathedral and it was administered from Archbishop’s House. Alerted to the danger of closure, in February 1903 the congregation had petitioned Cardinal Vaughan to allow St Mary’s to remain open, but to no avail. On Sunday 15 March, after a final Mass and Benediction, the old mission chapel was abandoned and the congregation of St Mary’s, together with their choir, moved to a new location in the Cathedral Lady Chapel. The parish of St Mary’s continued to use the Lady Chapel, referred to as the Parish Chapel to distinguish it from the Chapter (Cathedral) Hall where services were also taking place, until the main body of the Cathedral was opened for regular services on Christmas Eve. In it they Oremus
FEBRUARY 2021
