Missing windows see light after 25 years
Reporter: Janice Barker
Date published: 28 July 2008
A SADDLEWORTH super sleuth has saved two priceless stained glass windows from a demolished Oldham church.
The windows were originally part of two pairs in St Andrew’s Church in Middleton Road, Westbourne, installed in memory of the Oldham engineer Fred Rothwell.
With his brother, Tom, Fred founded the Eclipse Machine Company and made sewing and knitting machines, bicycles and cars at the turn of the 20th century.
Fred died in 1914, not long before Tom, and the windows were dedicated to his memory in 1921.
They were designed by his architect son-in-law Herbert Heywood whose best-known commission is the Garden Suburb estate.
St Andrew’s Church — which stood where Oldham Way crosses Middleton Road — was demolished in 1981, but the windows were saved and languished in a Birmingham workshop for almost 25 years.
Fred’s great-granddaughter, Julia Dawson, mentioned them to her vicar, the Rev John Brocklehurst of St Thomas’s Church, Delph.
He told her that records of the disposal of contents from redundant churches are held at Manchester’s Central Library.
And Julia was able to track the windows to John Hardman and Co in Birmingham, stained-glass specialists whose clients include the Houses of Parliament.
That was four years ago, and she has now secured the necessary permission from the Church of England and paid for the windows to be restored.
Last week, they were dedicated in a short ceremony at St Thomas’s with 11 of Fred Rothwell’s great- grandchildren present, and Julia’s mother, Marion Schofield, who was 97 the previous day.
Julia, who was christened at St Andrew’s where her parents James and Marion were married, said: “By a series of coincidences, an inquiry through the Solihull Tourist Information Centre and a measure of good luck, I traced the windows . . . or what remained of them.
“Stained glass windows can be dismantled and the glass used for repair as well as making new ones.
“Incredibly they still had a label attached with the words, St Andrew’s, Oldham.
“Best of all, the dimensions of the two windows adjacent to the font in St Thomas’s, which have always had plain glass in them, were such that these two panels fit exactly.
“It is amazing that what is probably the most delicate part of St Andrew’s Church is still surviving after all this time.”
Pictures: ANTHONY MILLER
