Church of St Thomas, Thurstonland

The Church of St Thomas, Thurstonland, stands on Marsh Hall Lane in a hilltop village above Huddersfield in West Yorkshire, an Anglican church whose 109-foot tower and spire still command the surrounding Pennine countryside. Completed in 1870 to designs by James Mallinson and William Swinden Barber, it is an Arts and Crafts building in the Gothic Revival style, funded principally by William Legge, fifth Earl of Dartmouth, consecrated by Robert Bickersteth, Bishop of Ripon, and listed at Grade II within the village conservation area. Its nave is crowned by an arch-braced hammerbeam roof, and its story, unusually well documented from foundation stone to the present, is a portrait in miniature of Victorian church building among the mill villages of the West Riding.

Before the church existed, Thurstonland made do with an inadequate chapel-room, originally a dissenters' chapel of 1810 that served as a chapel of ease for Kirkburton parish from 1834 to 1870. The energetic vicar of Kirkburton, Richard Collins, had already seen three new churches built in his sprawling parish by 1869, and Thurstonland was next. A local fundraising attempt around 1850 had failed; a second, in 1867 and 1868, succeeded. The village's scattered population of about 1,200 people of limited means, working in agriculture and manufacturing, could not pay for a church themselves, so the Church of England appealed to its wealthier friends. J. F. Winterbottom of Eastwood Hey in Berkshire bequeathed the one-acre site, the Earl of Dartmouth headed the subscription, and Colonel Brooke of Honley, J. Hirst JP, Colonel Bradbury and others contributed, while local ladies organised a bazaar. The villagers themselves raised one hundred pounds and, having nothing more to give, offered their hands instead, levelling the sloping site by manual labour.

The design was produced between 1867 and 1870 by the Halifax and Huddersfield partnership of Mallinson and Barber, though it was Barber who closely supervised the work and was largely responsible for the plans; a sketch among the practice's papers of William Butterfield's St John the Evangelist at Birkby suggests that Butterfield's 1853 church may partly have inspired the design. The craftsmen were thoroughly local: George Pollard of Huddersfield was mason, Joah Swallow of Hepworth joiner, Goodwin and Sons of Huddersfield slaters, Alfred Jessop of Shepley plasterer, with Leonard North of Kirkburton and then Thomas Elliott of Bradford as clerks of works.

The foundation stone was laid with full Victorian ceremony at half past one on Monday 26 July 1869, before a crowd so large the site had to be roped off. Countess Augusta of Dartmouth and Richard Collins led the procession, followed by the Earl, the intended first incumbent Robert Boyle Thompson, more than twenty clergymen and a dozen dignitaries. The congregation sang This stone to Thee in faith we lay, an inscribed silver trowel was presented to the Earl, and into a cavity in the cornerstone went a bottle of documents sealed beneath a brass plate naming the patrons, clergy, churchwarden George Wood Jenkinson and the architects. The Countess struck the stone with a mallet and declared it laid, and three hundred people then sat down to luncheon in a marquee in the next field, through a long afternoon of toasts in which Barber himself replied for the architects. Fifteen months later, at eleven o'clock on 3 October 1870, Bishop Bickersteth of Ripon consecrated the church and graveyard, processing in with over thirty clergymen to a building filled to overflowing, while Samuel Pontefract of South Crosland played the nearly finished organ for the first time. The day's collections of £363 7s 1d went toward the final £400 of building debt, and Thompson, in his speech at the smaller luncheon that followed, pointed proudly to the church's free seating, where rich and poor could worship together without rented box pews.

The building Barber gave Thurstonland was designed in the geometric Decorated style to seat 385, built of hammer-dressed stone with ashlar dressings beneath a slate roof. Unusually, the tower stands at the east end of the nave, its ground floor doubling as the porch, with a splay-footed stone spire, originally planned at forty feet but raised to fifty-two, pierced by four lucarnes and eight further openings, a hollow cone of stone blocks standing without any internal frame. Over the south door is a canopied niche with a carved figure. Inside, the dark-stained arch-braced hammerbeam roof shows to full effect against pale ceilings and the light of clear-glazed windows. The first floor of the tower held a stepped children's gallery, open to the nave as a balcony above the pulpit, reached by its own stair so that Sunday School children could come and go without disturbing the service; it was screened off around 1984 and is now disused. Above it sit the dark clock chamber, with an 1889 turret clock by Potts of Leeds still maintained by its makers, and the bell chamber with the church's single bronze bell. The aisle is paved with coloured encaustic tiles to the architects' pattern, the original carved oak pulpit of 1870 still stands on its stone plinth by the chancel arch, and most of Mallinson and Barber's pews survive in place. The east window by William Wailes, depicting the Parable of the Good Samaritan, cost one hundred pounds and was given by the inhabitants in 1870 in memory of Thomas Brooke, whose good deeds, Collins explained at the consecration, the parable was chosen to honour. The organ, built by F. W. Jardine for Kirtland and Jardine in 1870 and fully restored in 1990, fits an arch designed for its exact dimensions; the reredos arrived in the 1920s. A square marble font of 1870 on four colonnettes, given by the wife of the vicar of Lockwood, vanished during the 1980s alterations that created the church room at the back of the nave, and its whereabouts remain unknown.

The graveyard is older than the church, part of it consecrated for burials by March 1862, and holds Commonwealth war graves of five soldiers and one airman of the First World War. Its most poignant feature lies in a separate field behind the church, added by the vicar Arnold Escombe Jerram before 1910: around two thousand mostly unmarked graves of patients who died at Storthes Hall Hospital, the great psychiatric institution at Kirkburton that operated from 1904 to 1991. In 1913 the village feared epidemics when the sexton economised by leaving graves open to the weather until each held its full complement of four coffins; the vicar and hospital chaplain P. S. Brown insisted there was no danger to health, though water had to be ladled from open graves before funerals.

The roll of clergy carries its own stories. George Lloyd, curate in charge from 1861 to 1865 in the old chapel-room, founded the association that became the Yorkshire Archaeological Society and personally supervised the first excavations of the Roman fort at Slack, supported by the same Earl of Dartmouth who later paid for the church. Robert Boyle Thompson, the first incumbent, an Irish-born evangelical granted the living at twenty-eight, went on to do celebrated mission work in the London slums of Seven Dials. His successor David Harrison died in post in 1882 aged only thirty-seven, his coffin carried on foot the mile and a half to Stocksmoor station by parishioners who accompanied it by train to his native Colne. John Leech served twenty-four years from 1882, and his daughter married a later vicar, Maurice Gerber, who like several incumbents also served as chaplain to Storthes Hall. Arthur Dilworth came to Thurstonland in 1939 after a decade as a missionary and divinity school principal in Burma; Ernest Parry, vicar from 1950, had founded the Holy Way divinity school at Kudat in Borneo, training the first Chinese priests of the region, and died in harness in 1953. From 1953 the parish was held jointly with New Mill, and from 1996 John Sean Robertshaw, later an honorary canon of Wakefield Cathedral and a Territorial Army chaplain, led the Upper Holme Valley team ministry that includes the village.

Today St Thomas' serves Thurstonland and neighbouring Stocksmoor as part of the Upper Holme Valley team in the Diocese of Leeds, working closely with the village first school, the two village associations, and even the pub and cricket club. Regular worship includes holy communion, family communion, sung eucharist and all-age services, with a twice-monthly children's church, while the church room hosts Rainbows, the Mothers' Union, a knitting group and a weekly coffee morning. A century and a half after the villagers levelled its site with their own hands, the church they could not afford to build but helped to raise remains the centre of their community, its slender spire still the landmark of the hilltop.