Christ the King Church

When Father Michael Byrne arrived in Kingstanding in 1932, he had nowhere to sleep. The parish history, written for its eightieth anniversary, tells how the new priest, 32 years old, knocked on the door of a Catholic family, the McHughs at 634 College Road, announced that he was their pastor, and asked for a bed for the night. He stayed a few weeks, saying Mass every day in their house.

It was a fitting start. The parish was created in 1932 for a housing estate that was still being built, and it had to make itself from nothing.

Mass in the pub

For a while Sunday Mass was said in the assembly room of the College Arms, owned then by the McDonald family, and later in Cranbourne Road School. Then came a wooden church, on a plot that had been set aside for a pub; the parish history notes that the Archdiocese applied for the land, “a local brewery losing out”. Taking Stock, the survey of Catholic churches, dates the wooden church to 1933 and names its designer as G. B. Cox; another listing says 1934. The school beside it opened in 1936.

The parish history says this was the first parish in Birmingham to be named for Christ the King, a feast the Pope had created only in 1925.

Kathleen McCarty remembered Father Byrne as a man who gave everything away: “if he was given anything, money or goods by someone he met at the bottom of the hill on Warren Farm Road by the time he had walked up the hill he would have given it away to someone else who was in need.” In the air raids he walked the parish at night. On the night of the Coventry raid, 14–15 November 1940, he called at her family’s house while they watched the glow of the fires in the sky. In 1941 he left to become an army chaplain.

“The Crib”

The wooden church carried the parish through the war and long after. On 27 May 1945 Barbara Connor married Salvatore Taranto there, an American army cook stationed on the Pheasey estate; the next February, aged 19, she sailed for New York on the Queen Mary. On Friday nights there were dances, and everyone, it seems, called the place “the Crib”. Larry Addison went almost every week in the early 1950s. Maurice Sellars remembered that it “was not a good place to go when the teddy boys were present”.

The parish’s own photographs, now in our archive, show May processions past the school air-raid shelter and in 1949, 1951 and 1961, the cubs of 1950, a Christmas social in 1955, and the last wedding in the old church, in 1958.

Fire, and a new church

In 1958 Archbishop Grimshaw sent Father John Clancy to build a proper church. He stayed until 1986, the parish’s longest-serving priest. The foundation stone was laid in April 1962. That summer the old wooden church, moved to the back of the site to make room, caught fire one Sunday after the evening service and was nearly destroyed. Mass moved to the school hall.

The new church, designed by Jennings, Homer and Lynch of Brierley Hill to seat about 400, was ready for Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve 1962. It is built of brindled brick with a Roman-tiled roof and a bell tower, and inside it is broad and light, with a tall timber reredos behind the altar. The first wedding followed in February 1963. The church was formally consecrated on 28 April 1994, and the St John’s Centre was added beside it in 2010.

Mrs Boyle, a school caretaker’s wife, remembered Father Clancy shovelling snow off the steps so that a bride’s dress would not get wet. His church still stands on Warren Farm Road, on the ground a brewery once wanted for a pub.

Then and now

1962

2010