GREEN HAMMERTON
Nestling on the west side of the village Green at Green Hammerton is St.Joseph's, since 1961 the chapel of ease to Our Lady’s. Every Saturday at 5.30pm about fifty parishioners from a wide rural area gather to celebrate Mass.
Why is there a chapel at Green Hammerton? The ultimate reason is that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries recusant traditions lingered on among small Catholic communities in the villages along the River Ouse in this area. Various arrangements were made to provide them with services after Catholic emancipation, and in 1870 a Catholic chapel was built in Nun Monkton, the next door village to Green Hammerton, by Canon Robert Thompson. It was small but could hold 150 people. Nun Monkton was selected because a ferry (long since shut down) meant that it linked villages on both sides of the Rivers Nidd and Ouse. The presence of a Catholic priest in the village made quite an impression on the people of Nun Monkton. The late Reg Burton, an inhabitant of Nun Monkton, remembered how the children of the village would watch the Catholic parish priest smoking his pipe by the Presbytery.
However around World War Two the ferry shut, Nun Monkton became a backwater, and the parish was attended only by a few Catholics. In 1949 the chapel was shut and later demolished and for just over a decade, Mass was held in the Green Hammerton Reading Room still standing near the village post office. The parish became one for Catholics living only on the west bank of the Ouse.
In 1960 Fr Walsh of Our Lady’s decided to find a site for a new chapel. The following year the parish purchased the former Congregational church in Green Hammerton, originally built as a Methodist Chapel in the late 1790s. The chapel and the graveyard behind it are both listed.
Buying and converting the chapel cost several hundred pounds, considered a large sum in those days and much of it was raised by the parish itself. Parishioners organised whist drives, raffles, socials, and sales. The architect Derek Walker redesigned the interior of the church in a fashion which owed little either to its non-conformist past or earlier Catholic styles. It was designed to have an east-west orientation (later changed by vote of parishioners to the present north-south orientation) with a simple table serving as altar against vertical slats of brown varnished wood under a black ceiling. There are no statues, other than one of St.Joseph at the back of the church, taken from the Nun Monkton church. The wooden panels were originally matched by chairs, intended to give a sense of a community meeting in the spirit encouraged by the Second Vatican Council, perhaps even of liberation.
The chairs were later replaced, after another vote, by traditional pew benches taken from the former Catholic chapel of ease at Minskip when it was closed. The transfer was paid for by anonymous donors in the parish.
A room at the back was used for socials and whist drives, but was eventually sold.
Even in its reoriented form and with the pews, the church conveys very well the hopeful spirit of innovation and lightness which characterised English Catholicism in the early 1960’s at the time of the Council. Walker’s designs were deliberately intended to be cost-effective for many of the materials and much of the work was done by local people.
On August 20, 1961, Bishop George Dwyer consecrated the newly refurbished church and it was opened for services. Whether on the dark evenings of winter, or the long light days of summer, Mass at St.Joseph’s Green Hammerton remains a moving experience because the chapel has such a strong local and rural feeling in contrast to the urban setting of most churches these days.
In the informal setting of St. Joseph’s, priest and people, pray and worship in closer proximity than in a large basilica and so are more conscious of each other. A chapel of ease does not have the institutional underpinning of a town church, but perhaps this proximity of parishioners and priests compensates for that. Certainly a long succession of parish priests since 1961 – Fr Kelly, Fr Wilkinson, Fr Ryan, and Fr Pat to name but a few - have got to know the people of the St.Joseph’s well and appreciate the strong commitment they have to this Mass centre. Any mention of St.Joseph’s and its history would be incomplete if it did not mention the role of the Allen family of Green Hammerton who over more than thirty years have been its custodians and caretakers, helping keep it alive as a warm and welcoming centre of faith.
