St. Thomas of Canterbury - Stories from the Minute Book, 1993-2000

Holy Rosary, Billingham: Stories from the Minute Book, 1993-2000

Between January 1993 and the start of the new century, a small group of parishioners met three or four times a year in the sacristy of Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary in Billingham. The Parish Finance Committee, they called themselves. Their minute book was kept in a careful hand and signed off at the close of each meeting, and it runs from the very first gathering through to the year 2000. Most of it is roofs, drains, draws and decorators. Stay with it, though, and you can watch a parish keep itself standing through a tight decade and get ready for its fiftieth year.

A Committee Is Born

27 January 1993

The inaugural meeting opened at 11am on Wednesday 27 January 1993 in the sacristy, with the parish priest, Father Michael Keoghan, in the chair. Five appointed members took their places: Vincent Corcoran, Eric Ferguson, Albert Garner, William Smith and Charles Weir. Luigi Faso and Arthur Ryan were added soon after. Vince was elected secretary and correspondent, a role he would hold for years.

The committee took its shape from a proposed constitution circulated by Canon Barrass in a letter to parish priests dated 23 December 1992. Members spent a long first session working through the detail. Who counted as an appointed member, what made a quorum, how ordinary and extraordinary meetings should be called, and what the rights and duties of the committee actually amounted to.

They also settled how often to meet. Three times a year. At the end of January once the annual accounts were done, again at the end of May, and in mid October. Father Keoghan led the prayers that opened and closed the meeting, and every gathering after it kept to the same.

Dry constitutional housekeeping, on the face of it. Underneath, the parish now had a proper way of looking after its money, with minutes, a budget, and a line of accountability running up to the Bishop.

Memory about Vincent Corcoran

When Vince retired from parish work he was given a gift, shown in the photo above, and it meant a great deal to him. He would never say so himself, but he gave years of himself to the parish, and it counted. We owe him our thanks, and we mean it.

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The Storm That Came First

January to May 1993

The new committee barely had time to settle before the weather gave it work. On the night of 23 and 24 January 1993, days before the inaugural meeting, a storm damaged the church roof. By the time the members sat down, repair was already the first live item on the books, with a builder’s report awaited.

Alongside the roof sat a bigger question, the church windows. Members held a full discussion about protecting them from extreme weather and from ongoing vandalism, and a set of transparent screens was proposed. The minutes set the case out at length. There was the partial sound proofing, the warmer church in cold spells, and the point that windows already protected had lost none of their light. A budget of £6,000 was set, with Father Keoghan advised to put an expenditure application to the Bishop through the Diocesan Finance Committee.

By 26 May 1993 both matters had closed well. The roofing contractor, Luigi Faso, had been over the roof and carried out what was needed, and the damage, the minutes note with some relief, turned out to be less serious than first feared. The window screens were done too, at around £5,286, comfortably under the estimate of nearly £6,000.

It set the rhythm for years afterward. Get a contractor in, square it with the Bishop when diocesan money was involved, and hold the final cost down wherever they could.

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Fifty Years a Priest

Summer 1993

Among the business of 26 May 1993 came a happier note. The 25th of July 1993 would be the Golden Jubilee of Father Dillon, fifty years a priest, with a celebration Mass set for the Monday after, 26 July.

The committee wanted the whole parish in on it. Parishioners would get the chance to give to a Golden Jubilee Fund, and Father Keoghan was asked to have envelopes printed, carrying the words “Father Dillon Golden Jubilee 25/7/93”, ready to hand out once the announcement had gone out from the altar in early to mid June.

Easy to read straight past, a few lines in a finance book. One of the rare places where the ledger stops to mark a man.

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When the Diocese Counted Every Penny

October 1993

The wider Church was under financial strain, and in October 1993 it landed on the sacristy table as two memos from the Diocesan Treasurer. One set out the 1994 budget for Central Services. The other dealt with loans for new buildings and major repairs, and with the money parishes were holding on deposit at the diocese.

The figures were sobering. Parishes had around £5.5 million on deposit, of which £4.9 million was already tied up financing current loans, with a further £1.4 million earmarked for parish schemes. Returns on the diocese’s own capital investments were falling sharply, and that drop fed straight into the Diocesan Levy. The 1994 Central Services budget showed income down hard. No provision had been made that year for contingencies, and the deficit, in the minutes’ own blunt phrase, was rising to new heights.

Members noted that the papers had made them aware of a changing picture, and of the need to conserve and build up diocesan capital. For a parish lining up spending on roofs, doors and heating, the timing carried its own weight.

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The 200 Club and the Quiet Art of Raising Money

1994 onwards

If the levy was the pressure, the 200 Club was part of the answer. By the autumn of 1994 it was running with around 205 members, each putting in £12 a year. Gross income came to £2,460. Prizes took £1,320 of that, leaving the parish a clear £1,140.

Around it grew a small calendar of fundraising. A Grand Summer Draw, an annual Christmas Draw, registered charity status sought, prizes that ran from a £50 voucher to gin, port, sherry, fruit cake and boxes of chocolates. Books of raffle tickets were ordered by the hundred. Mrs Margaret McCann took the job of promoter.

The committee fussed over the detail in the way volunteers do. Were last year’s tickets still valid. Should there be a push timed to the next draw, as Albert suggested in May 1995. The Christmas Draw of 1998 turned a profit of £595, and the thing kept ticking over season after season.

Nothing here made a headline. It quietly underwrote a fair slice of what comes next.

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The Battle for the Car Park

1995-1999

The longest running saga in the book has nothing to do with the church building. It runs on a patch of tarmac.

The parish car park sat in the north west corner of the playing fields belonging to Billingham and Stockton Technical College. In October 1995 the committee realised, with some discomfort, that no written agreement covering it could be found anywhere. With nothing on paper, the minutes admit, the parish’s authority to use the car park had become obscure.

Things sharpened in January 1996, when press speculation had a supermarket taking over the college playing fields. That same month the Land and Property Manager for Stockton Borough Council accepted an invitation to the sacristy. He walked the site with members, looked over the access from Sidlaw Road and the question of an exit onto Dunbar Road, and judged the surface badly in need of upgrading. Responsibility had passed from Cleveland County Council to the Borough under a 1981 agreement, he explained. On whether the parish could simply buy the land, he gave little away, saying he did not much care for selling off small parcels in that way.

What came next was two years of grind. Through 1997 the Borough issued a schedule of terms and conditions the committee found ambiguous and, in places, alarming. A clause letting the Council end the tenancy on three months’ notice struck members as unreasonable, and they pushed for twelve. Mr Noel Coward, who knew the car park’s history, was brought in to advise. Extraordinary meetings were called in June and July 1997, and again across 1998.

A grievance ran underneath all this. In 1998 the committee set down that council contractors had used the car park as a works compound while they resurfaced footpaths around Sidlaw Road and Chepstow Close. Large lorries had stood there for weeks. Tarmac was stockpiled, and heavy plant scooping the material had torn up the surface. The parish reckoned it was being penalised for being a good neighbour.

Resurfacing tenders came in. Alan Taylor quoted £6,000 in May 1998, with later figures of around £8,000 for part of the site and £15,000 for the whole. By 1999 the long argument settled. An agreement between Holy Rosary and the Borough was signed and returned, with a cheque for £200 to cover legal and surveyor’s fees. By the meeting of January 2000 the talk had moved on to replacing missing fence posts and laying a small pedestrian path.

Fr Butter's Memory

The car park was I believe originally the College tennis courts.

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Saving the Medway

1996-1999

The Medway was the parish’s odd, much loved outbuilding. Originally a temporary classroom, part brick and part timber, it stood on the north side of the church and served the Catholic Women’s League, the Mothers and Toddlers group and Sunday parish hall users.

By the mid 1990s it was failing. Dry rot had set in, and in 1995 John McArdle replaced some of the woodwork. Then worse. A pipe leaked in the kitchen, rainwater seeped through the roof badly enough to soak the roofing boards, and electrical problems followed. The damp was doing real harm.

The first instinct was to make the building permanent. In January 1997 Albert Garner and Vince Corcoran went to Stockton’s Technical Services Department to see the planning officer, Miss Vicki Popplewell, and ask how feasible it would be to convert the Medway from a temporary classroom into something permanent. Later that month Father Butters and Vince met Councillor Jim Vaughan, Chairman of the Planning Committee, out on the site. Vaughan admired the trees along the Sidlaw Road boundary, called it a beautiful area, well looked after, and made clear that any reasonable development would probably be acceptable. Useful backing, the committee thought, from a man who was both the local ward councillor and chairman of the planning committee.

Then the cost arrived. Asked for a price, Alan Bays of Elliotts of Peterborough put a replacement standard unit at around £40,000, well out of reach. So the committee changed tack and decided to refurbish what it had. Members met the Diocesan Building Officer, Mr Alan Johnson, for guidance, and the work went to a local contractor, Alexander Sinclair (NE) Ltd, whose quotation to re-roof came to £1,969 plus VAT.

Through 1998 the Medway was rebuilt around the parish’s ears. The roof was refelted, soffit and fascia renewed. An external wall went up. New emergency exits and doors were fitted, an outside light wired in, and the cavity walls, which turned out to hold no insulation at all, were filled. Cracked board panels came out and were replaced. The unsafe Burco boiler went. Kitchen and toilet were upgraded, and an electrical contractor went over the power supply and the heating.

By the spring of 1999 it was done, and the committee did something it almost never did. It was Charles Weir who proposed it, that the secretary write a note of thanks to Luigi and his staff for the excellent work carried out on the Medway. On 5 May 1999 the secretary set down, by hand, the committee’s gratitude to Luigi Faso for the skilful and efficient workmanship that had brought the Medway up to its present high quality accommodation, transformed, in the writer’s own words, so magnificently, to everyone’s absolute delight.

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A Parish That Looked Beyond Itself

1996

For all the talk of roofs and tarmac, the committee did not keep its eyes only on Billingham. The parish counted two of its own among religious working overseas in hard and sometimes dangerous conditions, Sister Susan McClean and Father Damien Rwabukamba, and a famine relief box stood in the church for their work.

In October 1996 a letter came from the Rt Rev Ambrose Griffiths, Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle. He was writing to every parish with a substantial deposit at the diocese, appealing for help with St Michael’s, Elswick, a deprived Newcastle parish whose junior school building had fallen too far to be brought up to standard economically. The plan was to extend the infant school into a primary, at a cost to the promoters of £130,000. Each parish was asked to give £1,000 for every £50,000 on deposit, about two per cent.

The committee’s decision was unanimous. It agreed to back the appeal and forward a contribution through the Diocesan Deposit Account. The same readiness showed closer to home, when St Paul’s School came looking for help and members agreed to make a short term loan available.

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Bringing the Parish into the Computer Age

1995-1998

Father Butters had a modernising streak. From the mid 1990s he kept coming back to the same point. The parish records needed updating, and it was time to put them on a computer.

Albert Garner had raised the benefits of computers as early as 1994, and Gerard Kelly was asked to look into it for the parish. The idea grew with each meeting. There was talk of a complete parish management system covering sacramental records, the parish register, the death register, a suppliers register, parish accounts, planned giving, a general database, a diary and rota builder, word processing and file maintenance, all tied together by a modem.

For a good while it sat on hold, the discussion left for another day more than once. By 1998 the mood had shifted. Members were satisfied that an Apple machine, an award winning system by then, would meet what the parish needed, and Father Butters took on the job of seeking diocesan guidance and approval before going ahead.

Worth remembering what a leap that was. A parish keeping its accounts in a ledger and counting the collection by hand, with Bill Smith pushing back in 1993 for automatic cash counters to make banking the coins easier, was getting ready to run itself off a desktop.

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Painted for a Golden Jubilee

1999

The question of redecorating the church had drifted through the minutes since 1993, raised and shelved more than once. In 1999 it got a deadline. The church was coming up to its fiftieth anniversary, and the committee agreed, unanimously, that the work should be finished ahead of the milestone, with a couple of weeks’ clearance built in.

A surveyor’s report set the priorities, and a working party of Vince Corcoran, Luigi Faso and Eric Ferguson was put in to oversee them, with specialist advice from a Mr Barnes. One headache stood out. Scorch marks had built up on the walls above the heaters, so a paint specialist and ICI Paints were consulted about the heat shadows, and the heaters were to get deflectors.

Two estimates came in. In August 1999 the committee took the one from D&L Decorators, costed at £1,300 for materials and £3,500 for labour, £4,800 the total, with scaffolding hired from SGB at around £3,100 including VAT. The brief left no room for doubt. A first class job was expected, safety came first, and any difficulty was to go straight to Father Butters.

The timetable was tight. The church closed from 26 September, with a wedding squeezed in on the Saturday before the scaffolding went up. Statues, the Stations of the Cross, notice boards and amplifiers were taken down and handled, the minutes insist, with extreme care. Benches were shifted to open up the widest space possible, and the decorators sealed the floor under a protective covering. The painters finished by midday on 28 September, ahead of schedule, and the parish set to cleaning, putting the benches back and rehanging the Stations so the doors could open again in early October.

Fr Butter's Memory

Fr Butters remembers the parishioners putting up the scaffolding themselves to save time when the church was being prepared for painting. No health and safety back then!

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Two Priests and a Founding Member

1993-1995

The minute book quietly logs its own changes of hand. Father Michael Keoghan led the committee from its founding in January 1993 and chaired it through the first eighteen months or so. By the autumn of 1994 the chair had passed to Father John Butters, who opened the meeting of 5 October 1994 with prayers and would go on to steer the committee through the car park, the Medway and the redecoration.

One of the original members never saw those years. William Smith, Bill to everyone, had been there from the start, and it was Bill in October 1993 who pressed the practical case for automatic cash counters to speed the counting of the Sunday collection. He died in the spring of 1995. At the meeting of 31 May that year Father Butters opened with the prayer for the faithful departed and spoke of the loss. His name carries the letters RIP beside it on the very first page of the book, added later in the same careful hand.

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Key Dates

27 January 1993. Parish Finance Committee holds its inaugural meeting under Father Michael Keoghan.
23 to 24 January 1993. Storm damages the church roof.
26 May 1993. Roof repaired and window screens completed, both under budget.
25 to 26 July 1993. Father Dillon’s Golden Jubilee.
October 1993. Diocesan Treasurer’s memos on the levy and parish deposits.
1994. 200 Club established. Father John Butters becomes parish priest.
January 1995. Bill Smith present at his last recorded meeting.
31 May 1995. Committee mourns Bill Smith. R. Hannah’s heating quotation accepted.
October 1995. Car park ownership found to be undocumented.
January 1996. Mr Calder of the Borough visits. Supermarket rumours over the college fields.
October 1996. Bishop Griffiths’ appeal for St Michael’s, Elswick.
January 1997. Planning enquiries begin on the Medway. Councillor Jim Vaughan visits the site.
1997. Borough issues disputed car park terms. Negotiations open.
1998. Medway refurbished. Car park resurfacing tenders sought.
5 May 1999. Letter of thanks to Luigi Faso for the Medway.
26 September to early October 1999. Church closed and redecorated for its fiftieth anniversary.
1999. Car park agreement signed with the Borough.
19 January 2000. Committee turns to fence posts and a pedestrian path.

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