Father Tooth and Woodside Convent

Ashburton Library within Ashburton Park is all that remains of Woodside Convent as the mansion, formerly known as Stroud Green House, to which the convent itself was attached, was demolished when Croydon Corporation bought it in 1924.

Woodside Convent was founded in 1878 by its Warden, the Reverend Arthur Tooth, a Church of England clergyman, who had resigned his Kentish living at Hatcham, New Cross, after being imprisoned under the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874. Indeed he was the first to be imprisoned under the Act which vainly tried to outlaw such ritual as wearing vestments, using incense, elevating the Host during Communion and having lighted candles on the altar. Such ritual savoured too much of Roman Catholicism, and clergymen such as Tooth were regarded as undermining the Protestant character of the Church of England and breaking the laws of the Church of England as established by Parliament. For the ritualists, as they were often called, the ritual signified the importance of the sacraments in general and of the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine in particular. Tooth, however, was imprisoned for contempt of court as he refused to recognise the jurisdiction of a secular court over matters he regarded as spiritual. Once a handful of clergymen had been imprisoned, the implementation of the Act was soon abandoned as it was not foreseen that clergy would be imprisoned or that the Act would be so counter productive. Tooth was its first 'martyr'.

Religious orders were also suspect, particularly if they were communities of men taking permanent vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, but communities of women were more tolerated since they could be regarded as sisters of mercy performing charitable acts. Of course women could not then be ordained or celebrate Communion within the Anglican Church. Thus there may have been less likelihood of them seceding to Rome and certainly less scandal if they did. The first permanent religious communities in the Anglican Church were founded under the influence of the Oxford Movement in the 1840s. Those for women soon outnumbered those for men. By 1878 there were approximately ten for men and three times that number for women. They were called sisters or nuns, there being no essential difference in meaning.

The sisterhood Tooth founded was called the Community of the Holy Paraclete, that being a Greek term for the Holy Spirit. It had existed beforehand at Hatcham since 1871, where Tooth had been installed as vicar of St James's in 1868. After his early release from Horsemonger Lane prison, Southwark, in 1877, having been inside for about a month, Tooth could not find and was certainly not offered another living, but, having private means, he bought the eighteen acre estate and its mansion. Stroud Green House had been on sale for some years and was advertised as having vineries, stables, an Italian garden, a croquet lawn, fine timber and an ornamental lake. Father Tooth planned to add a number of buildings but only part of the convent was completed. The date 1882 can be seen on the heads of several of the drainpipes around Ashburton Library.

The sisterhood was small. According to the censuses there were five 'religious' in 1881, ten 'sisters of mercy' in 1891 and eight 'sisters of mercy' in 1901. The 1901 census singles out the Reverend Mother. She was Charlotte Widdrington and she had been a member of the Community since at least 1881. Not all the sisters may have taken permanent vows: some may have been lay sisters.

To Woodside, Tooth brought not only the sisters but also St Michael's orphanage, founded at Hatcham in 1872, for the principal work of mercy the sisters were to be engaged upon was caring for orphans. However these were 'sons of professional men and others in distressed circumstances' and they needed only have lost one parent. The age of admission was from six to nine, but there was also, in the first few years at least, a nursery for the very young. In 1884 was added St Gabriel's orphanage for girls. More adventuresome was the establishment of St Raphael's hospice in 1880 as this was for women who were 'drunkards' or 'inebriates'. It was open for all persons whatever their religious upbringing but the teaching at the hospice was that of the Church of England. The prospectus mentions three classes of persons, ladies of position and education whose fees were open to negotiation, friends of tradespeople paying five guineas a month and poor working class women paying 8d a week. There were also graduated entrance fees. Whether the last class of persons was ever admitted is not clear but it is highly unlikely as the laundry, estimated to cost £800, in which they were to be employed, was never built. Whereas the orphanage prospered, there was never more than a handful of women 'inebriates'. They were meant to be cured by Father Tooth's power of 'auto-suggestion'.

The orphanage school was a public elementary school until 1915 and received a grant from the Board of Education. Thereafter it was a private school. Father Tooth claimed to have educated 1400 boys. At Woodside there were three or four dormitories but only one school room. The boys were taught singing, geography, grammar, elementary magnetism and military drill. Their teacher was Frederick N. Wareham and he taught the boys from 1873 to 1916. He was succeeded by a Mr Jaggard. The 1881 census shows that the boys had been born not only in the United Kingdom but in other parts of the world such as North and South America, the West Indies and Africa, indicating that their fathers had probably been in the colonial service or in commerce. In contrast nearly all the boys recorded in the 1901 census had been born in this country. That census records thirty nine and the 1891 census forty five boys as pupils or scholars. There were far fewer girls than boys: twelve girls in 1881 and thirteen in 1901. The girls were taught by a governess. The convent also housed a cook, a matron, a nurse, a dairy maid and also kitchen, scullery and parlour maids. It had a resident gardener but also hired gardeners from outside as it tried to be grow enough fruit and vegetables for its own needs and more.

All these good works gained recognition but not enough for a living to be found for Tooth. He tried in vain to seek approval to buy a chapel in Havelock Road, formerly the gymnasium of the East India College at Addiscombe, put on sale by the Congregationalists, which he intended to turn into a temporary mission chapel, but Archbishop Tait would not give permission as there was another mission chapel nearby belonging to St Mary's. Although Benson, Tait's successor, approved of Tooth's work, Benson was advised by the vicar of Croydon, J. M. Braithwaite, not to make his support too open as it would attract the condemnation of the evangelical press and 'other enemies of religious peace'. Benson assured Tooth that the chapel at the Convent was secure from closure as he held a license under the Private Chapels Act of 1871. A chapel certainly existed in 1878 as another vicar of Croydon, J. G. Hodgson, was shown it by the 'Lady Superior' but he had reservations about the movable crucifix. The purpose-built chapel was opened in May 1883, and 1883 is the date on the weather vane on the library roof. The library still retains several ecclesiastical features including the one cloister completed. At the start Tooth employed a chaplain, the Reverend John Percival Golding-Bird, who, much later and in different circumstances, seceded to Rome.

Tooth faced problems not only from his superiors but also from within the Convent. Charlotte Widdrington left suddenly about 1884 threatening to sue him for libel but what was the cause of the dispute cannot be known for certain as it was settled out of court to prevent the newspapers damaging the sisterhood's reputation, and she returned. It seems to have been about interfering with her authority and entailed some financial loss for Tooth and gave his friends some concern that it might cause Archbishop Benson to have doubts about his character.

Tooth's finances cannot have been in much disarray as, when he sold Woodside Convent to Croydon in 1924 for £20,000, he bought Otford Court with its eighty acres close to the Pilgrims Way above Kemsing, and he also offered £10,000 towards the cost of a shrine to St Thomas at Canterbury to replace the one destroyed at the Reformation. He was disappointed that neither the Anglo-Catholic Congress nor the Diocese of Southwark nor the Archbishop of Canterbury was willing to accept the property as the site of a college. The sisterhood and orphanage continued in existence at Otford but after Tooth died there on March 5, 1931 aged 91 - he was born in 1839 - the sisterhood seems to have been disbanded. At his funeral three sisters, Christine, Grace and Hilda, attended. Grace Evelyn Cowper had been a sister since at least 1881 and was one of the two executors named in Father Tooth's will drawn up in 1926. The other was Sister Ida Miles, who had also been at Woodside in 1881. They were to share his estate, valued at £37,773. Both were in their seventies. St Michael's orphanage became St Michael's preparatory school and that continues to exist. Father Tooth is buried at Elmers End cemetery in Beckenham, a choice seemingly determined by it also being the burial place of the churchwarden from whose house he had been arrested at Hatcham.

Brian Lancaster

[The principal sources for this article are the Benson and Tait papers at Lambeth Palace Library, together with two short biographical memoirs, one by Charles E. Lee published in 1931 and another, anonymously written, in the series 'Heroes of the Catholic Revival' published by the Catholic Literature Association about 1932. The Croydon Local Studies Library holds a manuscript by Susan Lydia Bennett entitled 'Arthur Tooth and Woodside: HIS SCHOOL AND OUTLOOK' written about 1973. Joyce Coombs wrote a full length book, 'Judgement at Hatcham', about Tooth at Hatcham and the proceedings against him, published in 1969.]

For a walk in the Woodside area that takes you past the surviving buildings on the site of the Woodside convent see the next article

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