History of the Church by Fr Mcloughlin
Written on the 25th Anniversary of the parish in 1986, and the day of Consecration.
Wimbledon Common Parish began its life on Sunday, September 9th, 1961. Bishop Cowderoy visited the new parish, blessed the little church at No. 11 Yelverton and said mass for the people.
Archbishop O’Hara, the Apostolic Delegate on Parkside, entertained the Bishop, his secretary, Fr Peter Strand, and Fr P. A. Mcloughin, the newly appointed resident priest-in-charge to lunch. Fr Liam Carson, secretary to the Apostolic Delegate, was the photographer of the day.
The Parkside area, as this neighbourhood was then known, was a part of St. Joseph’s Parish, Roehampton. Fr Francis Kelly SJ and his assistant, Fr Vincent Bywater SJ, tirelessly served the Parkside area as it developed in the fifties. Roehampton Parish was in the care of the Jesuits in those days. The whole of the valley at the back of the HOme of Incurable was in St. Thomas’s Parish, Wandsworth, with Augustus Road and Beaumont Road a boundary with Roehampton Parish. Canon John O’Friel, then parish priest of St Thomas’s, suggested that Sutherland Grove was a more realistic boundary for the new parish. the three roads, Girdwood, Skeena Hill and Combermartin, were incorporated into Wimbledon Common Parish.
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