Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
St. Paul's Church - WWI Centenary Website
Hi folks,
At St. Paul's Church on Wightman Road, we've been doing a lot of research into our parish records, most of which are at the London Metropolitan Archives, to find out about the church and the parish during the First World War. We've been working on this for quite some time and mulling over ideas for how to share our findings. We're hoping to put on an exhibition in the autumn, but in the meantime we've set up a website, called "Harringay Remembers" to showcase some of the things we've found out. The website has just gone live and you can find it here - it is definitely a work in progress, so look out for new things over the coming weeks and months!
We chose to use the name "Harringay", rather than just linking it to the church, because the information relates to the whole parish and not just to those people who were churchgoers or thought of themselves as C of E - the records relate to people of all faiths and no faith.
We appreciate that not everyone is keen on commemorating the First World War and we understand that all commemorations carry with them the risk of glorifying war - that is certainly not our intention, and we really just want to share information about the parish and its people during the war as a topic of social history and, of course, in the hope that remembering the horror of war will help to promote peace. In order to achieve these goals, we'd love to have your help. If you have any information that might help us to build upon what we already have, then please get in touch. We're also very happy to list other groups' commemoration events on the site, so please let us know about those, too.
We hope that you find the information interesting and that we can expand the site further to include more about how people dealt with the war at home.
Happy reading!
Tags for Forum Posts: First World War, St Paul's Church, centenary, church, history, local history, war, website
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Karen Alexander on
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Just had a quick look - it's great. Thank you for all your hard work and research. I was struck by the loss of the war memorial which was lost in the 1984 fire. Wouldn't it be great to find a way to replace it and restore a permanent memorial to our Harriingay residents who fought for us all.
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Permalink Reply by Bethany Burrow Atherton on
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Thanks Karen - glad you like it. I agree that the loss of the war memorials is very sad and, personally, would welcome a discussion about whether some replacement should be created. However, I've chatted to some people about it, both inside and outside the church, and there seems to be a big split between those who can't understand why it hasn't been done already and those who are very much opposed to installing a new one (the thinking being that existing memorials should be treated with respect, but to create new ones could be seen as glorifying war). I'd be interested to hear others' views - I'm busy with the website right now, but at some point I'll start a specific thread on it and see what people think.
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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I may have this story wrong, but my understanding is that a memorial that used to be in the church is now in Hornsey Town Hall. As I understood it, the Old Hornseyans memorial was originally in South Harringay School, moved to St Paul's Church, Wightman Road and, after the fire at St Paul's, to Hornsey Town Hall.
Here's a snap I took a few years back.
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Permalink Reply by Liz on
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That's right Hugh. I used your pictures in this post in History of Harringay about Harringay's "hidden" war memorial.
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That's right, it was in the church, but this is a completely different memorial from the "church" ones, though. This memorial was in the old St. Paul's church for a while after the school switched to a primary school, but it only commemorates those people who went to the Hornsey County School and not the wider population of the parish (not that there's anything wrong with that, of course!).
I was thinking about putting up a page about it on the Harringay Remembers site, but hadn't quite got round to it yet - Hugh, would you mind if I used your pictures (with credit, of course) on the page when I get to it?
By the way, Liz, I completely agree with your views about the memorial being shut away - I actually expressed that on the post that Chris Setz put up about the Town Hall last night, coincidentally!
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Please do go ahead and use the picture. If I get round to it, I'll arrange to take a rather better one.
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Great, thanks!
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OK, I've put a page up about it - it's a bit vague and a bit of a "holding page" really, as I've got a bit more research to do on it (I'm going to the archives tomorrow, so I'll try to fit it in) - the thing being, as explained on the new page, that there ought to be significant crossover between the names on this one and on the memorial that was in the church already; this is dependent on the boys at the school being from the parish, of course, which may not have been the case. As you'll see, I have found one that appears on both! http://harringayremembers.wordpress.com/war-memorials/old-hornseyan...
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I had an extremely fruitful visit to the archives today, and I've updated the page I put up yesterday accordingly - new pics including the fire damage to the memorial and the memorial in situ in the old church are up too.
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Thanks for the update. Good to see a pic of it in situ.
You write elsewhere on your website about a stone celtic cross memorial that stood outside the church. It seems odd that it wasn't in a state to be restored. I wonder if it too got carted off somewhere for restoration only to be forgotten.
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It wasn't carted off for restoration. It was simply carted off. By whom, I'm not certain (and no-one else I've spoken seems to know either), but if it survived the fire, it certainly didn't survive the aftermath.
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