For the Better attending to, and looking after the Catholics”

It is with these words, written in 1875 to the Bishop of Beverley by Father Charles James Locke, priest of the Secular Mission at Elsecar, that the history of St. Joseph's parish begins. In that letter, the only one extant written by Father Locke which refers to Wath-upon-Dearne by name, he seeks approval for a scheme proposed by Mrs. Margaret Cadman of Cross House, to convert a billiard room in her garden, accommodating approximately

fifty people, into a chapel where the Catholic community might meet and hear mass. We do not have the Bishop's reply to Father Locke's urgent petition, but it is clear that his priest's cautious optimism that Margaret Cadman's generosity might lead to something more permanent eventually, was justified: three years later, on May Day, 1873, St. Joseph's Catholic Church was opened.

The church was designed by Mr. J.E. Hadfield of Sheffield, the outstanding Catholic architect of the area in the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century. The inspiration of the architecture, like that of St. Marie's, Sheffield and St. Bede's, Rotherham, is to be found in the medieval designs of pre-Reformation English churches.  The building of the church was not financed, as with so many Northern Catholic churches of mid-Victorian England, by the heroic devotion of the Irish Poor, who had come into the new industrial areas in search of employment on the railways or in the mills and mines, but rather by the magnanimity of two wealthy English families, living in Wath-upon-Dearne. The beneficence of the Cadman and Nicholson Families is recorded by several printed sources and is evident throughout the church, in the splendour of the stained glass. Beyond the wall plaques and inscriptions, however, memorials of their piety and devotion, little tangible evidence has come to light, that would define their influence upon, and involvement in, the evolution of the parish during its difficult early years.

Margaret Cadman's patronage of the church recalls the generosity of several ladies of her position and generation, towards All Saints Church. The suggestive parallel is hardly surprising in the light of her husband's Anglicanism and the social circles that she would have moved in. It is obvious, however, that Margaret Cadman's spirituality went beyond any kind of fashionable posturing as ecclesiastical patroness, for her good works

of the active life extended beyond the material to include the catechising of the children on Sunday afternoons. The exemplary life of Margaret Cadman received its most fitting tribute in the continued devotion by her immediate descendants to St. Joseph's, and by the probable conversion of Fredrick Smelter Cadman, who appears to have been reconciled to the Church before his untimely death.