History of Holy Name - Jabez Clegg

The Holy Name is situated on the Oxford Road in the middle of the developing University precinct. At the moment of writing the area of the parish comprises acres of derelict land, houses due, and in many cases overdue, for demolition, large University buildings, some still in process of erection, and in the remoter parts of the parish some blocks of flats or maisonettes. A hundred years ago it was mostly a residential neighbourhood. There were then green fields behind the presbytery, in the course of the years to be built on with long rows of terraced houses. The big houses became lodging-houses or business premises; families occupied single rooms in squalid conditions often, and the people of the parish. The gentle clip-clop of the carriage and pair or the heavier sound of the horse-drawn trams plying up and down the Oxford Road gave place to the unending roar of traffic or the whine of the jets circling into Ring way airport. In 1870 Fr Birch formed a choir: a formidable task in those days when church music was an elaborate affair and critical ears exacting. He also built the Burlington Street School which, as numbers increased and legislation progressively limited the size of classes, had to be considerably enlarged.
A fragment of this building still survives in 1971 and is used by the Scout Group and Girl Guides of the parish, the rest having been demolished in the 1920s to provide the playground for the Bernard Vaughan School in Dover Street.
In the days before T.V., wireless and the cinema, the parish church catered almost as much for the social as for the spiritual needs of its flock .Quickly in this new parish various guilds and sodalities came into being, fulfilling this dual purpose, of which the first was the Children of Mary, followed shortly by the Men’s sodality, the Women’s, the Boys’ and the Girls’. Each of these met weekly and at other times they met for socials, concerts, tea parties or hot-pot. They met in the afternoons in the Sodality Room where they could have a good chat together while doing their darning or knitting, or be entertained by a sing-song or the occasional lecture, and the inevitable cups of tea.