Church of St Thomas the Apostle, Killinghall

The Church of St Thomas the Apostle, Killinghall, is an Anglican parish church on Otley Road in the village of Killinghall, North Yorkshire, a few miles north of Harrogate on the edge of Nidderdale. It was designed in 1879 by William Swinden Barber, the Halifax architect of Gothic Revival churches, when the ancient parish of Ripley was divided to create a new parish of Killinghall, and it opened in 1880, a trim building of local stone in the Decorated Gothic manner whose story preserves, in unusual detail, the whole texture of Victorian village church-making: the bazaars and benefactors, the gentry arriving by carriage, the slow accumulation of stained glass and memorials, and the long line of vicars whose lives stretched from Cambridge colleges to mission stations in Kenya and India.

Before St Thomas' was built, the Anglicans of Killinghall had to walk a mile and a quarter to Ripley church every Sunday, a journey that defeated the elderly and infirm. The village schoolroom was eventually licensed for worship, but as the Bishop of Ripon observed, it lacked those influences which belonged to a consecrated building. By the 1870s the growing village needed its own church and parish. The endowment came from the sale of a glebe farm at Ripley; Dr and Mrs Beaumont of Knaresborough gave more than an acre of land for the church and its approaches, later selling two adjoining acres for £200 as a burial ground; the Ecclesiastical Commissioners granted £1,500; and local landowners subscribed the rest, helped by a three-day bazaar in August 1879 held under the patronage of Miss Ingilby of Ripley Castle, carefully designed to attract the gentry of Harrogate, who duly arrived in large numbers by carriage and raised over £300. The first vicar's bargain was a hard one: in return for the vicarage grant, the Reverend Reginald Keightley Smith had to pay the Commissioners £214 a year, the whole of his stipend apart from the use of a vicarage that did not yet exist. By July 1880 the building had cost over £4,000; by 1980, its centenary year, it was valued at £400,000.

Sir Henry Day Ingilby of Ripley Castle laid the foundation stone on Saturday 26 April 1879 before three hundred onlookers. Barber designed the church in the Curvilinear or second period of Decorated Gothic, the style of about 1290 to 1350, built of dressed ashlar blocks of Killinghall stone, almost certainly from the village's own quarry. Cost kept the carving of capitals and vaulting minimal, but there is tracery in the windows, the west wall's two aisle-end windows shaped around the form of a Canterbury cross, and a St Thomas cross surmounting the north porch. The craftsmen were a roll-call of the West Riding: the mason was James Simpson of Harrogate, father of David Simpson, four times mayor of Harrogate and builder of its Grand Hotel; the joiner was William Bellerby of York, the slater Mr Baynes of Ripon, the plumber and glazier John Naylor of Halifax, and the painters Hirst and Barraclough of Brighouse. Inside, two arcades of four doubly-chamfered arches on circular columns with octagonal capitals divide the nave from its aisles, all the woodwork in pitch pine, with the chancel arch built, as the contemporary press reported, as lofty as possible, the chief internal feature of the structure. The Caen stone font and pulpit, designed by Barber and sculpted by Charles Mawer of Leeds, were the gift of Lady Ingilby. The bellcote holds two bells: the larger, of 1879 by Mears and Stainbank, hung with rope and wheel, and a smaller Taylor bell struck by the clock, whose Potts of Leeds turret mechanism and face were given by the daughters of George Lewis, churchwarden for forty-one years.

The consecration, on Thursday 29 July 1880 by Robert Bickersteth, Bishop of Ripon, was the great day in the village's history. The Pateley Bridge and Nidderdale Herald described the constant stream of brilliant equipages, the unceasing flow of pedestrians, and bunting copiously displayed, the church crowded to excess with a very brilliant assemblage headed by Sir Henry Day and Lady Ingilby. Twenty-three clergymen processed to the chancel; the Killinghall choir, augmented by the Ripley choristers, sang to a harmonium, the organ chamber being still empty, and the bishop preached on the eighth verse of Psalm 26, Lord, I have loved the habitation of thy house, observing that no excuse could now be made that the congregation had no church immediately at hand. The burial ground was consecrated directly afterwards, two hundred villagers sat down to tea, and the day's collections went to the building debt. Less than a fortnight later the building claimed its only recorded casualty, when the mason's man Anthony Carrow fell from the scaffolding and fractured his thigh, though he was soon progressing favourably in Harrogate's Cottage Hospital.

The interior grew richer over the following decades, chiefly through the generosity of two local families, the Strothers of Low Hall and the Cautleys of the Manor House. Thomas Strother gave the altar in memory of his mother and paid for the east window by Cox and Son, whose central lights tell the story of the church's patron, Doubting Thomas, kneeling to examine the wounds of the risen Christ, beneath rose lights of the Paschal Lamb, the pelican in her piety and the intertwined Alpha and Omega. Other windows commemorate the Strothers with the raising of Lazarus and the widow of Nain's son, and Saints Peter and Paul. Dinah Cautley, widow of a doctor of obstetrics, gave the three-light south aisle window of Christ healing the sick in his memory in 1887, another in memory of her mother showing the Annunciation and Resurrection, the carved oak chancel screen of 1905, and the two-manual pipe organ, built by William Andrews of Bradford and installed in 1908, in its day one of the largest in Nidderdale, renovated in 1992. The north aisle windows depict Mary and Martha of Bethany, given by the village postmaster for his wife Ann Mitchell, the postmistress, and King David with his harp, honouring George Thomas Woods, church organist for twenty-four years. A reordering of the chancel between 1905 and 1908, designed by C. Hodgson Fowler after Barber's retirement, raised the floor in Pateley Bridge stone, added the oak altar and screen, and even fitted wrought iron gates to keep summer visitors from wandering into the chancel when the church stood open for private prayer. Memorial tablets remember, among others, Second Lieutenant John Marmaduke Strother MC, killed in action at twenty-four in 1917 and named also on the Arras Memorial, and Arthur Keightley Smith, son of the first vicar, lost at sea near Sumatra in 1942.

The clergy list is a small history of the Church of England. Reginald Keightley Smith, son of a Liverpool West India merchant, served from the consecration until his death in 1904, performing the first baptism in August 1880. Canon Sydney Robert Elliston, once a journalist on the Morning Leader, carried the parish through the Great War and the Depression until 1935. Alfred William Price, vicar from 1936, answered a parishioner's complaint about the untidy hair of the vicar and some of the choirboys with the cheerful promise that you may be sure the choirboys and myself will stand before the looking glass in future, brush and comb in hand. Canon Lindsay Shorland-Ball doubled as a naval chaplain in the Second World War, and his successor, the Venerable Robert Collier, had been a missionary in Kenya, registrar of native Christian marriages there, and chaplain of St George's Cathedral in Madras before coming to Nidderdale, ending his days as Archdeacon of Waterford and Lismore in Ireland. Under Robert Morris in the 1950s the church kept a fine choir with a reputation for music of a high standard, invited on occasion to sing evensong at Ripon Cathedral. The vicarage, built on Otley Road in the early 1880s and the scene of generations of fetes and garden parties, was sold in 1976 when the parish was joined with Hampsthwaite, a union made official in 1993 and later extended to Birstwith and Felliscliffe; the patrons of the living have included a continuous line of Ingilbys of Ripley Castle. The church's centenary on 29 July 1980 was marked by a service with David Young, Bishop of Ripon, Sir Thomas Ingilby cutting the cake, and the churchwarden and historian Mrs K. J. Russell recording that the church had by then seen 1,437 baptisms, 491 marriages and 1,077 burials. Today St Thomas' remains a working village church in the united benefice, with Book of Common Prayer services most Sundays, a choir, concerts, tea and toast on term-time Tuesday mornings, and the graves of its Victorian benefactors, the Cautleys prominent among them, lying in the churchyard their gifts adorned.