HISTORY OF THE PARISH 

OF OUR LADY & ST CUTHBERT

PRUDHOE

1870 - 2005

Written by Fr Paul Zielinski 

to Celebrate the Restoration of the Church in 2005 

(click on any of the photographs on this page to enlarge)

From its beginning in 1870 the parish has always included the villages of Bywell, Stocksfield, Hedley-on-the-Hill, Mickley, Newton, Ovingham and Ovington. For the first twenty five years it also included Crawcrook and Wylam.

THE BACKGROUND OF THE 19th CENTURY

 

Between 1815 and 1870, industrialization spread slowly across  Europe.  Industrial regions grew up around major ore and coalfields, drawing millions of workers from the villages to form a new class of labouring poor.  From 1870 to 1914, Europe experienced a Second Industrial Revolution based on a booming world trade and the establishment of a popular consumer market.  Electricity, chemicals and motor vehicles replaced iron, coal and railways as the driving force of economic change.  The mining of coal in the Prudhoe area brought about an significant increase in the size of the town.  Coal was king then, and the wealth from it  would be instrumental in the provision of a Catholic chapel in 1870, a Catholic school in 1875, a Reading Room for community use in 1885, a Catholic cemetery and the replacing of the original chapel with our magnificent church in 1891.

This period of the second half of the nineteenth century laid the foundations for momentous social change on a global scale, assisted in part by human inventions. To mention but a few examples, it was in 1862 that the Suez canal was opened. 1863 saw the Emancipation of American slaves, and 1865 saw the end of the American Civil War.  In 1869 the first American trans-continental railroad was completed.  In 1870 the large scale Jewish emigration from Europe to America began.   In 1877 Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India.  In 1878 the first electric street lighting was installed in London. In 1880 the first refrigerated cargo reaches London from Australia.  In 1882 the first frozen meat exports from New Zealand took place.  In 1888 Brazil abolished slavery. In 1896 Marconi built the first radio transmitter. In 1901 the first wireless message was sent across the Atlantic.  In 1904 the Panama canal was opened. Between 1891 and 1905 the Trans Siberian railway was built. Interestingly, in 1904 when our church was in the process of being dismantled and transferred to it present site, there were only 8,000 motor vehicles in Britain.

In the life of the Catholic Church, the second half of the nineteenth century was not lacking in history making developments. In 1850, the Catholic Church in Britain was coming out of a long period of persecution with the re-establishment of Catholic dioceses and the Catholic hierarchy. The pace of school and church building accelerated to meet the spiritual and educational needs of an increasing Catholic population, swelled by Irish immigration. In Rome, in 1854, Pope Pius IX defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Only four years later, in 1858, the young and frail Bernadette Soubirous was having visions of our Lady at the grotto of Massabielle at Lourdes in the French Pyrenees. Divine healing there in the spring waters would be a harbinger of great strides in medical science that has transformed the way illness is treated across the globe. In 1869 the book describing the first 200 miracles at Lourdes sold 800,000 copies. But human beings are prone to other diseases, more insidious than infection and malfunction of the body, that cannot be cured by science. So, on 8^th December 1869 Pope Pius IX announced the summoning of a General Council of the Church to tackle the 19^th century’s unbelief and rationalism, and to strengthen the Church against hostile societies and governments.  On 18^th July 1870 the final vote at the Council on Papal Infallibility was 533 bishops in favour and 2 against, defining the Church’s belief that the Holy Spirit preserves the Teaching Authority of the Church from error concerning matters of faith and morals.  Soon afterwards, on 4^th August 1870 King Victor Emmanuelle invaded the Papal States and a millennium and a half of Papal rule in Rome came to an end. The papacy was to being liberated from the trappings of worldly power, enabling the Pope to be seen on the world stage more clearly as a spiritual leader, pure and simple.  How necessary this would be for the following century, marked, as it would be, by the amplified destruction of mechanised war on a global scale and the nuclear threat.  The Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century had created vast work forces of labouring poor across Europe and elsewhere, often living in squalor. So we find that in 1891 Pope Leo XIII published his most famous Encyclical “Rerum Novarum”, which highlights the plight of the poor in industrial society.  The rich, it says, have a duty to help the poor and this duty goes beyond mere charity.  He attacks unrestricted capitalism and insists that the state has a duty to intervene on behalf of the worker, that there should be a living wage and that labouring people have the right to organise themselves into unions.  By this teaching, Leo gave authority to social Catholicism and he opened the door to the evolution of Catholic democracy. In 1879 the Pope had made John Henry Newman a Cardinal. The 1880’s and 1890’s also saw a flowering of scholarship in Biblical studies. 

The Industrial Revolution, as in many other towns and villages around this country, brought about rapid economic and social change to Prudhoe.  In 1821 the population here was only 318. Good coking coal for the Steel Industry was discovered in the area, and in 1860 Prudhoe colliery was opened, with the one at West Wylam starting production nine years later.  So, by 1885 Prudhoe’s population had grown to over 4,000. By 1921 it had risen to 5,424.  A rural village had become a busy industrial town. Both the Prudhoe and the West Wylam mines were owned by the Mickley Coal Company, which in 1885 belonged to Messrs Cookson, and Cuthbert Liddell, with Matthew Liddell being initially the Manager and eventually the main owner of it.  It was under Matthew that the great development of the mines took place, and he became a wealthy man.