AP WMS 5(1) s1 f01 v1 e1
Reverend Eric Littler talking to John Reid on establishing the Parish of St Francis of Assisi in Kitt Green. Recorded on the 7 August 1981.
Audio description below:
How does one go about forming a new parish?
- Well, you’ve obviously got to have some starting point and some central point, but there had always been a small… I say always, since 1964 there had been a small chapel of ease here in Kitt Green dedicated to St Francis, built or rather arranged in an old miner’s billiard hall and so we took that as our centre of activity, and the old schoolhouse which hadn’t been used as a school since 1927 or thereabouts, which was alongside it and an ex-army hut of the first world war which had been bought for ten pounds in 1922 formed our basic complex. Services had been going on spasmodically as a chapel of ease, but only one per Sunday and only a few people had been attending. So, having come the first thing we had to do was to start making sure that people knew we were there, what the place was, of course this meant advertising. Every house in the area receives a leaflet saying, this is now your area church, this is where you ought to be coming and our services are, and the vicar lives at, all the usual information. But as an added piece, because of my hobby which is collecting matchboxes, and I know quite a lot about the match industry, I’d got a friend of mine to produce some advertising matchboxes for me, and on the front were some very pretty pictures of sailing ships standing in Cornwall and on the back was an advert for the parish. We got these at the normal wholesale rates, so I sold them to local pubs, shops and whatever at the normal wholesale rate. They then got their profit as usual, so it was no skin off their nose. They didn’t mind selling something which they were going to make a profit out of, so these matchboxes got into houses which wouldn’t even normally think of the Church at all. With the advert for the church in, we got free advertising, the shops got their profit and the wholesaler got paid.
Very clever. So, you started to advertise?
- Yes.
What would you describe as boundary for the parish?
- Well, the parish officially is everything north of a line drawn across City Road at Bell Lane Junction, to include the whole of Bell Lane and everything north of that up to the River Douglas, but going out including the bottom part of the Norley Hall Estate, the Saddleback area and the top part of the Marsh Green Estate from the Roman Catholic Chapel out towards City Road. That will take the whole thing out as far as the River Douglas. It gives us one of the largest parishes in Wigan, with a population of over ten thousand, the largest baked beans factory in Europe and the only parish church as far as I know, which used to be a billiard hall.
Is it still a billiard hall?
- Oh no no, we no longer have the billiard table there, but we’ve extended the building in time. Gradually it was proving too small, we were spending quite a lot of time turning people away. We were one of the only churches as far as I was aware in Wigan that was turning people away because we were too full. We tried having loud speakers in one of the old rooms, but this wasn’t a great success, because obviously people wanted to see what was going on as well as hear, and so we extended the buildings from seating one hundred and fifty gradually out to the fact that we can now seat about three hundred, and we’ve always got a very viable building, economically it doesn’t take very much to heat, it looks quite pleasant from the outside and from taking services, it’s a very friendly sort of building, not off putting like one of those great monstrosities which you can see around, which I won’t name, in the area.
Audio Details
| Forename | Rev Eric |
|---|---|
| Surname | Littler |
| Middle Name | |
| Township | Kitt Green |
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