In the heady days following the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829), John, 16th Earl of Shrewsbury readily opened his cheque-book for schemes to further the cause of Catholicism in Britain.
He bought an estate at Cotton, a couple of miles north of Alton Towers in 1843. It seems that he intended it as a residence for his nephew and heir, Bertram, and planned a road (only partly constructed) linking Cotton to Alton Towers.
His plan changed three years later, when the Earl offered the Hall to Father William Faber (1814-1863), who with a group of eleven followers had founded a community called the Brothers of the Will of God.
Father Faber was devout, energetic and incorrigible. Always in uncertain health, he drove himself to accomplish God’s work, while following an erratic path from his Calvinist upbringing and his Anglican ordination to his conversion to Catholicism.
His small band of followers immediately began to construct, largely by their own hands, a Catholic church designed by A W N Pugin and dedicated to their patron saint, St Wilfrid, and a small school, even though there were no local Catholics apart from members of the Lord Shrewsbury’s retinue.
Though Pugin is always credited with the design, with its elegant broach spire, it’s unlikely that he had much to do with the interior: he would have disapproved of the west gallery in which the choir sat until the late 1930s.
Pugin intended the church to have “the only perfect chancel in England and with an East window he could die for” but it was never built. The existing chancel and vestries were designed in 1936-37 by George Drysdale.
Faber felt strongly attracted to the Oratorians, an order firmly wedded to an urban ministry, and Faber resolved to leave Cotton to found what eventually became the London Oratory on Brompton Road in Kensington.
St Wilfrid’s Church was opened on Easter Tuesday, April 25th 1848, and in October of that year the forty Oratorians, led by Father (later Cardinal) John Newman, took up residence at Cotton Hall.
Three months later, on January 30th 1849, they moved on to a disused gin distillery in Birmingham which became the basis of the Birmingham Oratory.
Lord Shrewsbury was not best pleased that Cotton had been abandoned, although a priest remained to continue the mission and the bishop confirmed 125 parishioners in October 1850.
The Earl offered the Hall buildings to another religious group, the Passionists, who arrived on December 15th 1850. They failed to settle at Cotton: parish attendances rapidly declined – one writer described the locals as “loaves and fishes” Catholics – and the order failed to attract novices.
The death of the 16th Earl in 1852 meant that financial support dried up, and by 1856 the order had moved on, heavily in debt, leaving the parish under the direct and remote supervision of the diocese of Birmingham and making the other Cotton buildings redundant.
The eventual solution was the transfer of Sedgeley Park School, a long-established Catholic institution dating from 1763, from its unsatisfactory premises on the southern outskirts of Wolverhampton.
St Wilfrid’s Church and the preparatory department of the school opened on St Wilfrid’s Day 1868, and the rest of the school followed in 1873. An initial building programme of 1874-75 was extended in 1886-87 and again in 1931-32.
Financial pressure caused the closure of Cotton College in 1987. Dry rot was discovered in the church in 2009, and the final Mass was celebrated on October 24th 2010.
The archdiocese stripped the interior of the Grade-II listed church so that it and the college buildings could converted to residential accommodation by the Amos Group: St Wilfrid’s Church – Amos Group Ltd; Cotton College – Amos Group Ltd.