CHURCHES (fn. 1)
In their earliest ecclesiastical constitution the areas
that were later included in the county of the city
and in the modern county borough formed part of
the Mercian diocese which was established in the
7th century with its seat at Lichfield. In the partition
of the diocese about 680 north Warwickshire,
consisting of the Arden district which included
Coventry, became part of Lichfield diocese and the
southern or felden district part of the diocese of
Worcester. (fn. 2) This division of the county between the
two dioceses and the consequent ecclesiastical association of Coventry with Lichfield survived for over a
thousand years into the 19th century.
According to the decision taken at the Synod of
London in 1075, that only the larger towns should
be see towns, Bishop Peter in that year transferred
his see from Lichfield, which was then only a village,
to Chester, the seat of the Norman earls. Later, his
successor, Robert de Limesey, finding his influence
in Chester overshadowed by that of the earls,
resolved to transfer the see again, this time to
Coventry where a rich Benedictine abbey had been
founded in 1043 by Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and his
wife, the Countess Godiva. This move was probably
made in 1095, when de Limesey could take advantage of Abbot Leofwine's recent death, though
he did not receive papal authorization for it until
1102. At the same time he obtained from the Crown
the custody of the abbey. Thenceforward the bishop
had a cathedra in Coventry as well as in Lichfield, the
abbey becoming, as a result, a cathedral priory. (fn. 3)
Robert de Limesey himself, who died in 1117, and
three out of his five immediate successors - Robert
Peche (d. 1126), Walter Durdent (d. 1159), and
Gerard Pucelle (d. 1184) - were all buried at
Coventry, but subsequent bishops at Lichfield. (fn. 4) It
was possibly one of the manifestations of Lichfield's
growing challenge to Coventry's established position
as the see town that it was at this time a matter of
contention between the monks of Coventry and the
canons of Lichfield where the bishops should be
buried: in a confirmation of 1183-4 Bishop Pucelle
stated that any bishop, dying in office, who chose to
be buried at Coventry, should have his wishes
carried out absque omni contradiccione; (fn. 5) the monks
vainly protested against the burial of Bishop
Geoffrey de Muschamp at Lichfield in 1208; (fn. 6) and in
1224 Bishop de Stavensby intervened to prevent the
removal from Lichfield of the body of his predecessor, William de Cornhull, (fn. 7) which was presumably
being claimed by Coventry.
The bishops continued for several centuries to be
occasionally referred to as bishops of Chester (fn. 8) as a
result of their brief connexion with the town at the
end of the 11th century. From Walter Durdent's
time onwards, however, they regularly styled themselves bishops of Coventry until, about 1228,
Alexander de Stavensby began to use the double title
of Coventry and Lichfield. (fn. 9) When in 1236 the monks
of Coventry made it one of their complaints against
him that he called himself Bishop of Lichfield and
not, as earlier bishops had done, of Coventry only, de
Stavensby claimed that the change had been
sanctioned by papal ordinance. (fn. 10) This ordinance
may have been granted in connexion with the
decision reached at Rome in 1228, during the dispute
over the election of bishops between the monks and
the canons, that thenceforward the two bodies
should elect in alternation, the monks having the
first turn. (fn. 11)
The bishops do not appear to have had their own
accommodation in Coventry (fn. 12) before 1224-5 when
the prior and convent, 'to enhance the dignity of the
bishopric', granted de Stavensby a plot adjoining
their graveyard on which a residence was to be built
for him. (fn. 13) In 1283 it was agreed that as the 'episcopal
house' was dilapidated and its site too small the
prior and convent should grant the bishop a
neighbouring site of equal size, with 200 marks for
the repair of the existing house and the construction
of extra buildings to accommodate the bishops and
their retinue at visitations. (fn. 14) This enlarged building
may have been the 'palace' which in 1364 the bishop
leased, with its gardens, for four years, reserving its
use to himself and his household when at Coventry
and to his clerks whenever the annual synods were
held there. (fn. 15)
The title of Coventry and Lichfield and the
palace at Coventry were retained by the bishops
until the Dissolution. At the beginning of 1539
Bishop Roland Lee wrote to Cromwell to urge the
preservation of the cathedral at Coventry, being his
'principal see and head church', in order, as he
expressed it, that 'I may keep my name'. But in spite
of the pleas of the mayor and aldermen and the
suggestion, supported by Lee, that Coventry should
become, like Lichfield, a collegiate church, (fn. 16) the
cathedral church was largely destroyed after the
dissolution of the priory and the palace gradually fell
into decay. (fn. 17) Coventry thus ceased to be the seat of a
bishop, although it was not until after the Restoration that the style 'Coventry and Lichfield' was
reversed, by Bishop John Hacket (1661-70) and his
successors, to that of 'Lichfield and Coventry'. (fn. 18)
In 1837 Coventry's ancient connexion with Lichfield was finally severed (fn. 19) under an Act of 1836,
effecting a general reorganization of dioceses, (fn. 20)
whereby the archdeaconry of Coventry, comprising
the four deaneries of Arden, Coventry, Marton, and
Stoneleigh, was transferred to the diocese of
Worcester. Thenceforward the former diocese of
Lichfield and Coventry was to be known as Lichfield only. (fn. 21) This loss of episcopal title and influence
and the subordination of Coventry to a distant see
town, with which there were no historical links, (fn. 22)
were clearly unpopular, and, with the subsequent
growth of population in the Coventry area and elsewhere in north Warwickshire, the new diocesan
arrangement proved at length unworkable.
Proposals began to be made in the 1840s to
increase the number of bishops in order to keep pace
with the general rise in population, especially in
large towns; (fn. 23) the Cathedral Commissioners, who
were appointed in 1852, recommended, in their
report of 1855, the creation of several new sees,
including one for Coventry. (fn. 24) A strong local movement in Coventry also favoured the restoration of a
diocese, and in 1860 a memorial headed by Lord
Leigh and W. S. Dugdale was addressed to the
Prime Minister on the subject; a similar memorial
from the clergy of the archdeaconry followed. Both
were ineffective, (fn. 25) and although attempts on a
national scale to enlarge the episcopate continued (fn. 26)
and there was constant local agitation, the question
as it affected Warwickshire was not formally raised
again until towards the end of the century. In the
1880s a scheme was put forward, supported by Dr.
Henry Philpott, Bishop of Worcester, for the
creation of a separate diocese for Birmingham (at
that date still in the archdeaconry of Coventry)
which, it was suggested, might also include Coventry
within its boundaries and in its title. The scheme had
subsequently to be abandoned, partly for financial
reasons, and also for lack of general public support
and co-operation by the clergy. Instead, Philpott's
successor, J. J. S. Perowne, tried the experiment of
creating a suffragan bishopric for the Rector of St.
Philip's, Birmingham, who continued to reside in
that city but took his title from Coventry. This
measure, however, did not sufficiently lighten the
pressure of work on the bishop nor satisfy either
Coventry or Birmingham, (fn. 27) since it ignored the
marked differences in their respective characters and
rates of development. This incompatibility was noted
by the second suffragan bishop, E. A. Knox, in his
description of the archdeaconry of 'placid' Coventry
as 'administered by the most charming of oldfashioned country clergy, whose interest in Birmingham was, to say the best, tepid'. (fn. 28)
The situation may have been a little improved by
the formation in 1892 of the archdeaconry of
Birmingham, which removed five rural deaneries -
Birmingham, Coleshill, Polesworth, Solihull, and
Sutton Coldfield - out of the fourteen into which
since 1859 the archdeaconry of Coventry had been
divided. (fn. 29) Nevertheless when Charles Gore became
Bishop of Worcester in 1902 he found the amount of
diocesan administration 'almost overwhelming'. (fn. 30) It
was Gore who took the first decisive steps towards a
eventual solution of the diocesan problem by allowing the suffragan bishopric of Coventry to lapse
when Knox moved to Manchester in 1903 (fn. 31) and
concentrating his energies on the creation of the
diocese of Birmingham of which he became the first
bishop in 1905. (fn. 32) The diocese included the recentlyformed archdeaconry of Birmingham, an area which
covered the city and its suburbs and a further part of
the north-west of Warwickshire stretching from
Seckington and Newton Regis in the north to Tanworth and Nuthurst in the south. The parish of St.
Mary, Temple Balsall, was also transferred from the
archdeaconry of Coventry to the new diocese. (fn. 33)
H. W. Yeatman-Biggs succeeded Gore as Bishop
of Worcester and from that time the aim of a
separate diocese for Coventry, which had never been
lost sight of, was assured of ultimate achievement.
The next stage was the constitution in 1908 of St.
Michael's, one of the two ancient parish churches of
Coventry, as a collegiate church and the appointment of the new chapter. (fn. 34) In 1910 No. 13 Priory
Row was purchased for use as a chapter house (fn. 35) and
the Coventry College of Clergy was established there
in 1913. (fn. 36) An appeal was launched to raise £60,000
to cover the costs of dividing the diocese of Worcester
and providing a bishop's residence in Coventry.
£26,000 had been given or promised by the end of
1913, and through the work of local committees a
further £16,000 had been raised by the outbreak of
the First World War. Though the war temporarily
frustrated any further effort (fn. 37) Yeatman-Biggs, who
was certainly the inspiration behind the whole
scheme, (fn. 38) continued to prepare the ground both in
Coventry and outside for the creation of the new
diocese, which took place under the Bishoprics of
Bradford and Coventry Act of 1918. (fn. 39) On the tenth
anniversary of the foundation of the collegiate
church, which then became the cathedral, YeatmanBiggs was enthroned as the first modern Bishop of
Coventry. (fn. 40) The new diocese extended over the
whole of Warwickshire apart from the area in the
north-west of the county that was already contained
in the diocese of Birmingham. It was made up of
the archdeaconry of Coventry, containing nine
deaneries, (fn. 41) and that part of the archdeaconry of
Warwick (created out of the archdeaconry of
Worcester in 1910) (fn. 42) which lay within the county -
namely the deaneries of Alcester, North and South
Kineton, and Warwick itself. (fn. 43) These thirteen rural
deaneries were subdivided into 194 benefices. (fn. 44)
Though the names changed from time to time there
continued to be thirteen deaneries in the diocese
until 1963 when the number was raised to fifteen. (fn. 45)
According to tradition St. Nicholas's Church,
which lay in the suburb of Radford to the north-west
of Coventry, may have been the church of the
earliest settlement in the Coventry area. There is,
however, no definite evidence of its existence before
1183-4 and for most of its history it was a dependent
chapel of Holy Trinity Church. (fn. 46) Holy Trinity itself
came into existence some time between 1101 and
1113 (fn. 47) when it is first mentioned as a chapel claimed
by the priory and apparently serving the Prior's
Half - one of the two 'halves' into which Coventry
was divided in the early 12th century. (fn. 48) It is probable
also that St. Michael's (later the other parish church
of Coventry), though it is not referred to by name
until after 1140, (fn. 49) was built at about the same time
as Holy Trinity for the tenants of the Earl's Half.
The two chapels were separated from each other by
the boundary between the halves, but lay very close
together, in what was then one common graveyard
belonging to the priory, (fn. 50) and in approximately the
same topographical relation - Holy Trinity to the
north, nearer the cathedral and the other monastic
buildings, and St. Michael's to the south, by the
earls' castle (fn. 51) - as when they were rebuilt, both on a
much larger scale, in the 13th to 15th centuries. (fn. 52)
The exact relation between the extent of the
Prior's Half and that of the later parish of Holy
Trinity is not certain. It is clear from two descriptions of the bounds of the Prior's Half in the 12th
and 14th centuries, (fn. 53) that it was divided from the
Earl's Half by approximately the same line of
demarcation running through the centre of Coventry
as was Holy Trinity parish from that of St. Michael,
and the Prior's Half seems to have been largely coextensive with the nucleus of Holy Trinity parish.
This comprised the northern half of the town (including Holy Trinity itself and the priory precinct)
and, beyond it, the vills of Harnall, Radford, and
Whitmore much of which was owned by the priory. (fn. 54)
The parish also included, however, two outlying
estates of the priory which did not form part of the
Prior's Half, namely, Coundon, to the north-west of
Coventry, and Willenhall, a detached hamlet on the
south-east, which at least for a time in the medieval
period were both served by their own chapels, those
of St. Chad and St. James. Their distinct ecclesiastical identity was revived in the 19th and 20th
centuries in the creation of two modern parishes,
St. Thomas, Keresley-with-Coundon, and St. John
the Divine, Willenhall. (fn. 55)
In a number of charters granted in the 12th
century the priory was acknowledged by the lay
lords of Coventry, the earls of Chester, to be the
mother church (fn. 56) not only of their chapel of St.
Michael in Coventry itself, but of the chapels on their
estates extending over a wide area round, most of
which probably formed part of the Earl's Half
though its bounds seem never to have been precisely
defined as were those of the Prior's Half. Fourteen
such chapels are listed in the earls' grants and
confirmations, one of which explains their status
as that of 'lesser chapels' dependent on the 'greater
chapel' of St. Michael. (fn. 57) Five of the chapels were
later included in St. Michael's parish; these were
Spon, a suburb at the west end of the town, the vills
of Bisseley (later called Shortley), Pinley, and
Whitley, which lay to the south-east of Coventry
between the Sherbourne and the Sowe, and Keresley,
a detached hamlet lying beyond Coundon. Whoberley, an indeterminate locality to the south-west of
Coventry, was mentioned among the chapels of St.
Michael's in these 12th-century lists, but seems later
to have been part of the neighbouring parish of
Stoneleigh. (fn. 58) The rest of St. Michael's parish was
made up of the earls' park of Cheylesmore, due
south of the town, (fn. 59) two other localities - Asthill
and Horwell - in the same area as Whoberley and
equally ill-defined in extent, (fn. 60) and two more detached
parts: Caludon, lying to the east of Coventry
between Wyken and Stoke, one of the Chester lordships which was not mentioned in the 12th-century
grants and was probably a later settlement, (fn. 61) and
Broad Oak Waste, part of the earls' wood of Hasilwood, lying north of Harnall and bounded on the
other three sides by Foleshill and Stoke. (fn. 62) There
was a chapel at Spon by the end of the 12th century,
when it became a leper hospital, and chapels also at
Caludon and Pinley about the mid 13th century, but
both of these seem to have fallen into decay before
the end of the Middle Ages. Otherwise nothing is
known of the buildings of medieval chapels in the
parish. (fn. 63) In the parochial expansion and reorganization of the 19th and 20th centuries Keresley became,
united with Coundon, a separate parish in 1848, but
Broad Oak Waste was absorbed in the creation of
St. Mark's parish in 1869, (fn. 64) and Caludon was divided
between the parishes of Stoke and Wyken in a
regularization of ecclesiastical parish boundaries in
1923. (fn. 65)
The other eight chapelries that were listed in the
12th-century charters - Ansty, Binley, Exhall,
Foleshill, Shilton, Stivichall, Stoke, and Wyken -
might also have included Allesley, an estate of the
earls of Chester, which was a chapelry of St.
Michael's until about the mid 13th century when
it became an independent parish. (fn. 66) The rest, with
the exception of Ansty and Shilton which for a time
in the 15th century claimed to form a separate
rectory, (fn. 67) were dependent chapelries of St. Michael's
until after the Dissolution. The dates at which these
chapels were originally founded is not known, since
their presence in the 12th-century lists is the earliest
evidence of their existence, but three of them -
Ansty, Shilton, and Wyken (and also Allesley) -
are said to have been built as refuges for the poor
during the civil war of Stephen's reign (fn. 68) and were
therefore probably of later date than the other five.
Only Wyken church preserves a substantial amount
of its 12th-century fabric, but the present church at
Ansty may also show some features of the original
building and a Norman font survives at Foleshill.
All the chapels so far mentioned, together with the
chapel at Sowe, an estate which had been one of the
priory's three ancient endowments, (fn. 69) remained
under the ultimate domination of the priory during
the Middle Ages. All were appropriated in 1259; the
priory in most cases provided the chaplains which
served them, and held the great tithes. After the
Dissolution the incumbents begin to be described as
vicars and the livings as vicarages. It was probably
at this period also, when the tithes passed into the
hands of various lay owners, that the boundaries
between the newly-independent parishes were first
defined. Disputes over parochial status and parish
boundaries still arose, however, as at Stivichall in
1591 and at Stoke in 1669. Some of the smaller or
poorer benefices continued to be held together:
there was one priest serving Wyken and Stoke in
1535, Wyken was being held with Sowe in 1593,
and was held with Binley from the end of the 17th
century to 1919, by which date the parish population
was beginning to rise rapidly; Sowe and Stoke were
held in plurality from 1669 to 1778 and thenceforward as united benefices until 1884; the ancient
ecclesiastical connexion between Ansty and Shilton
seems to have been maintained from the 17th to the
19th centuries, when they were frequently served
by one incumbent or by a vicar at Ansty and a
chaplain or curate at Shilton, and the benefices were
formally united in 1884. At Stivichall also, and at
Wyken, incumbents were called perpetual curates
until 1868, after which date they were officially
styled vicars, and Stivichall, the last of the parishes
round Coventry to be invaded by suburban housing
development in the years before the Second World
War, was held with a succession of other livings
between 1900 and 1930.
Until 1734 there were only the two parishes and
two parish churches in Coventry itself, but in that
year Spon Street ward in St. Michael's parish was
assigned as a new parish to the church of St. John
the Baptist, Bablake. The church had formerly been
attached to the medieval College of Bablake and,
after the Dissolution, had been used for sermons
and lectures. In 1734, to save it from current neglect,
it was made a parish church by Act of Parliament
with the headmaster of the Free Grammar School
as its rector.
Apart from Christ Church, which was built in
1830-2 as a chapel of ease to St. Michael's, the
earliest modern churches in the area of Coventry
were built in the 1840s: in 1841 St. Paul, Foleshill
Road, and St. Peter, Canterbury Street, to cater for
the increased population of the weaving districts in
the south and west of Foleshill and in Harnall; (fn. 70)
and in 1849 St. Thomas, Albany Road, for which a
parish had been created in 1844 to serve the district
growing up between Spon Street and the Butts. In
1869 two more churches were consecrated and two
new parishes created: All Saints, to serve the Spitalmoors district developing north of Far Gosford
Street, (fn. 71) and St. Mark, Bird Street, to share with
St. Peter's the responsibility for Harnall and the
district north of Red Lane; and in 1874 St. Nicholas,
situated further out of Coventry along Radford Road,
was consecrated as a chapel of ease to Holy Trinity.
With the exceptions of St. Paul and St. Nicholas
most of these new churches of the mid 19th century
had been concentrated in the suburbs of the growing
city, but there was also some church building in
remoter areas at this period. Another church of St.
Thomas was built in 1847 in the hamlet of Keresley
to accommodate those who were then moving out
from Coventry to country houses in Keresley and
Coundon. In 1859 a mission church of Sowe parish
was opened in Lenton's Lane to serve the district
round Hawkesbury Colliery, (fn. 72) and in 1874 a third
church dedicated to St. Thomas, then a chapel of
ease to the parish church of St. Lawrence, Foleshill,
was consecrated at Longford, a suburb in the north
of the parish.
In the 1860s St. Michael's Church had set the
example of opening mission chapels - one in Red
Lane, which was later closed, and a second in Whitefriars Lane - in outlying or particularly needy parts
of its parish, as had also Sowe parish church. At the
turn of the century several other churches opened
similar missions chiefly in the poorer parts of the
suburbs: the first to do so was St. Mark, in 1894, in
the neighbourhood of Red Lane, followed by St.
Thomas, Albany Road, in 1895, for the district of
Spon End and Chapel Fields, St. John the Baptist
in Spon Street, and St. Peter in Sackville Street,
both in 1900. More mission churches and mission
rooms were established during and after the First
World War, in Wyken and at Holbrooks in Foleshill,
in particular for the benefit of munitions workers,
who were then being settled in the city. In order to
keep pace with the rise in population after the war
new parishes were assigned in the 1920s and 1930s
to some of these mission churches, which were
themselves eventually replaced in most cases by
permanent buildings. Such parishes were created at
Earlsdon in 1922, where a mission church of St.
Thomas had been opened in 1913, at Chapel Fields
in 1926, and at Holbrooks in 1935. In 1930 a parish
was assigned to St. Anne, Acacia Avenue, a building
which had been given to St. Michael's after the war
for use as a mission and which was then re-equipped
as a permanent church.
The building of new permanent churches and
church halls in the developing districts of the city
throughout these years was enthusiastically promoted by two successive bishops, Lisle Carr (1922-
1931) (fn. 73) and Mervyn Haigh (1931-42). The first to
be built under the Coventry New Churches Scheme (fn. 74)
put out by Bishop Carr was St. Alban, Stoke Heath,
in 1929, a mission church of Wyken parish which
itself became a parish church ten years later. St.
Alban's was followed by the parish churches of St.
Barbara, Earlsdon, in 1931, and St. Mary Magdalen,
Chapel Fields, in 1934. (fn. 75) Fresh appeals were
launched by Bishop Haigh in the 1930s. These
resulted in the building, in 1936-7, of St. James,
Fletchamstead, a mission church of Westwood
parish, in an area which had recently been taken into
the south-west of the county borough, (fn. 76) and St.
Martin, Finham, in the conventional district
previously served from Stivichall. (fn. 77) In 1939, before
the outbreak of the Second World War put a
temporary stop to all further activity, there was a
spate of new places of worship: the parish churches
of St. Luke, Holbrooks, and St. George, Barkers
Butts Lane, Radford, which replaced a church hall;
a mission of St. Nicholas in Links Road, North
Radford; and the hall churches of St. Catherine and
the Holy Cross, built to serve respectively the
housing estates at Stoke Aldermoor and round
Caludon Castle. (fn. 78)
The greatest loss among the churches in Coventry
during the air-raids of the Second World War was
that of the cathedral of St. Michael in 1940. Several
churches received superficial injury which did not
interrupt the continuity of worship in them; five
others - Christ Church, St. Luke, Holbrooks, St.
Margaret, Walsgrave Road, St. Nicholas, Radford,
and St. Paul, Foleshill Road - were severely
damaged or totally destroyed. Most of them were
restored or rebuilt in situ, but Christ Church was
replaced in 1958 by a new church further out of the
city on the Cheylesmore estate. Post-war church
extension has, as before, followed the growth of new
housing areas, notably on the outskirts of the city:
St. Chad, Hillmorton Road, situated on the municipal housing estate at Woodend, (fn. 79) and St. John
the Divine, Willenhall, on the Manor House estate,
were both consecrated in 1957, and St. Francis,
North Radford, replacing the earlier mission in
Links Road, in 1959. On the west side of the city,
where there had formerly been one parish church
(St. John the Baptist, Westwood), St. Oswald, Tile
Hill, was opened in 1957 and St. Christopher,
Allesley Park, in 1960, and in 1964 the responsibilities of St. John the Baptist in the area were
further reduced by the creation of a new parish for
St. James, Fletchamstead, and of a conventional
district for the small daughter church of St. Stephen,
Canley. Three of the new churches - St. Chad, St.
John the Divine, and St. Oswald - were planned
by Basil (later Sir Basil) Spence, the architect of the
new cathedral. By using a simple design, largely
carried out in glass and concrete, he managed, at the
bishop's request, to limit the total cost of building to
the £45,000 currently available from diocesan
funds. (fn. 80)
The outstanding features of Coventry's recent
ecclesiastical history have been the near-complete
destruction of the old cathedral in 1940 and the
process of building the new, (fn. 81) which culminated in
its consecration in 1962. At the time, the burning of
the cathedral, on the night of 14-15 November,
took on a significance throughout the country and
abroad which made the ruins an appropriate place
from which to open the Commonwealth Broadcast
at the following Christmas. The first open-air
services were held in the ruins at Easter 1941.
Arrangements were also made for the continuance
of worship by the regular cathedral congregation,
but the ruins themselves, which, from that point
onwards and particularly after the war had ended,
were visited by many thousands of people, remained
the setting for ceremonies and services associated
with events of both local and national importance.
These included the enthronement of two bishops,
Dr. Gorton in 1943 and Dr. Bardsley in 1956, and
Dr. Gorton's burial in 1955; the display of the
Sword of Stalingrad in 1943; (fn. 82) a memorial service
in 1944, attended by President Benes, for the
martyred Czech village of Lidice; and the celebration of victory in Europe in 1945, the Festival of
Britain in 1951, and the Coronation in 1953.
It has been emphasized that in the preservation of
the ruins and in the planning of the new cathedral
there were two closely-related aims. One of these,
the provision of the means of interdenominational
worship, arose out of the holding of interdenominational services of intercession in the cathedral in the
early months of the war and was particularly
favoured by Bishop Gorton. A scheme, published
under his auspices in 1944, proposed that the
rebuilt cathedral should include a Christian Service
Centre to be staffed by members of the Free
Churches and the Church of England and, as part
of the fabric, a Chapel of Unity to be jointly owned.
A council of twelve Anglicans and twelve Free
Churchmen was appointed to administer the scheme.
Although there was criticism in some quarters both
then and at a later date, the scheme was supported
by a number of national, as well as local, church
leaders and governing bodies; accordingly the west
crypt under the ruins was equipped and dedicated
as a temporary Chapel of Unity in 1945 and an
appeal for funds to support the scheme was made the
following year. Services and study groups for
various religious and civic associations were held
in the temporary chapel until 1959. In 1960 an
inaugural service was held in the half-completed
Chapel of Unity in the new cathedral at which the
'Stone of Witness' was laid at the entrance, and the
declaration, originally made in 1945, of adherence
to the principle of interdenominational unity was
signed by the members of the joint council. The
plan for the Christian Service Centre had to be
temporarily abandoned in 1947 with the rejection of
the first designs for the new cathedral in which it
had been embodied, but the funds raised by the appeal
were devoted to the building of the permanent
Chapel of Unity. Another feature of this co-operation
between the churches has been the hospitality
extended by the Anglican churches in the city to a
number of small Orthodox and Lutheran congregations which have been formed there since the war.
The German Lutheran church has continued to hold
its services in the Chapel of Unity in the cathedral,
and in 1965 Greek Orthodox rites were practised
in St. Anne's Church, Serbian Orthodox in St.
Saviour's Church, and Ukrainian Autocephalic
Orthodox in St. Mark's Church, and the Latvian
Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Midlands was
using Holy Trinity Church. (fn. 83)
The second aim was that of making Coventry a
centre of international, as well as of interdenominational, reconciliation, particularly between Britain
and Germany. The first steps in this direction were
made at Christmas 1946 with the exchange of
broadcast messages between the provost and a
Roman Catholic priest in the devastated city of
Hamburg, and continued in 1947 with the mission
of friendship from Coventry to Kiel. In the 1950s
services began to be held by the German Lutheran
pastor for the midlands in the temporary Chapel of
Unity for German Lutherans resident in Coventry,
and in 1956 representatives of the German Evangelical Church attended the ceremony at which the
foundation stone of the new cathedral was laid.
Among the gifts made by foreign nations to the
new building were two sums of money - one from
German churches and the other from the German
government - of which the former was to be spent
on the windows in the permanent Chapel of Unity.
The Coventry Cathedral International Fellowship
was also established in old offices under the east
end of the ruins which were converted into
an International Centre. The vestries behind
the east end were rebuilt by a group of German
students as an extension to the centre which was
opened in 1960 by the Evangelical Bishop of Berlin.