Origins of St Theodore's 

Priests associated with St Theodore

St Theodore's Church

Until the early 1930s at least one parishioner regularly did the walk to and from Goudhurst for Sunday Mass. As she lived to be 103, it cannot have done her any harm.

In 1935 Lady Millicent Moore (widow of Sir Norman Moore, an eminent physician and medical historian) came to the village and provided an oratory at her house, "Little Shepherds" in the High Street. In November of that year Mass was said for the first time in the oratory, the congregation shared between Goudhurst, the travelling mission and a Jesuit priest from Farm Street in London. Lady Moore died in 1947, but another benefactress had arrived in the person of Mrs Muriel Lewis, who took up residence at "Brooksden", in the High Street (now the veterinary surgery). Mrs Lewis had a paying guest, Father Allan, a retired priest from Lowestoft, who now said daily Mass at "Brooksden", with Benediction on Sunday afternoons.

One former resident recalls going to "Confession", in a small room not usually associated with spiritual comfort! Father Allan became a respected figure in Cranbrook; it is no small degree due to his personality that local resentment towards the Church, amounting at times to open hostility, disappeared.

These makeshift arrangements were a great blessing, but thought was constantly being given to a more permanent establishment. One or two sites for a church were considered, but financial stringency prevailed until Mrs Lewis gave the parish the site for the present church and priest's house. Father Allan, who died in 1953, left a substantial sum towards the building costs. Mass was said for the first time in the new church on 28th November 1958. 

The Chapel of Our Lady and St Joseph, Benenden

In the 1920s a travelling mission was providing Mass at the Benenden Chest Hospital. A local Catholic, Mrs Scrymsour-Nichol arranged with Goudhurst for Mass to be said in the garage of her home on New Pond Road, which she had converted into an oratory. In 1931 she had the present building erected on part of her land, designed and built by Messrs Colt of Bethersden.

Colts, founded in 1919, specialised in timber framed houses. A contemporary newspaper article described it exaggeratedly as “built in the early English style of which examples are to be found in Gloucestershire.” The cost was about £450 and it was originally intended that a school and priest’s house would be erected on the one-acre site. The church is now a chapel-of-ease to St Theodore, Cranbrook