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2nd church
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 (left) First permanent church on current site
By 1919 the Catholic population had grown to 26, Fr Vendé had celebrated his first wedding and burial in the town and had started the Mission in Downham Market (1915), but his health was beginning to fail, so he moved to become Chaplain at Oxburgh Hall. However, he didn’t stay long there and he moved on to Cornwall, where the Canons had an Abbey, and he died there on 17 January 1924.
He was replaced by Fr John Malone . Life for the early missioners must have been difficult, with shortage of money, few parishioners and incomprehension from the local people. Fr Malone wrote to the Bishop saying he had just finished "my first Sunday’s work. I feel very lonely and desolate, but I shall try to shake off that feeling and shall do my best for the spread of the Church in this ‘no-man’s land’ ". He soon started a series
of lectures on the Faith but “attendance was very poor. " What can be done
to wake up the sleepy Swaffhamites?" he wrote. However the new ‘temporary’ Church to seat 120 was built in 1920, and it was opened and blessed by the Bishop on 22nd August, Fr Vendé returning from Oxburgh for that occasion.
After three years, by which time the Catholic population was 51, Fr Malone
too was replaced, this time by Fr Jerome Esser, O Praem, of Tongerloo Abbey in Belgium. He was in residence at “The Presbytery, Woodside” in September 1922; and indeed Fr Malone must have found his work an uphill task, for Fr Esser reported that on his first Sunday in Swaffham "there were 7 people for Holy Communion and 18 in all at Mass including the Priest. At the Evening Service there were 20 - 25, and the offertory for the day was 8/2½d [41p]". The discrepancy in numbers between those at Mass and at the Evening Service could be accounted for by the congregation being mainly working people (domestic servants, labourers and so on) who could only get time off in the evening.
When Fr Esser left in 1923, he was replaced by the first Priest to remain for any length of time in Swaffham. He was Fr Constantine Ketterer, of whom, though he remained until 1933, nothing further is known, for he failed to keep up the “Mission Book” begun by Fr Vendé and from which much of the information of the early days is derived. Fr Burrows replaced Fr Ketterer and stayed until 1938 to be followed by Fr Barker. In 1941 he was succeeded by Mgr Squirrell, who went on to greater things at St John’s in Norwich in 1945. Then came Fr Flanagan only to die suddenly within a year while in Ireland, and then Fr Hillier who had just been released from being an Army Chaplain. It was only in his time, in 1948, that electricity was installed in the Church.
During that time, of course, was the Second World War, which brought the arrival of the RAF and its camps, as well as the USAF and the Poles in camps such as at Feltwell and Bodney. Watton, too, was for some time served from Swaffham. These arrivals made a difference to the life of the Parish: for example between 1939 and 1942 there was an average of 4 weddings a year. But in 1947 there were 14, of which 11 were between Poles. The number of Baptisms, however, did not alter appreciably! Some families who arrived in the area through service in the RAF locally are still active in Parish life. |
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