Wanstead, 1870 - 2010

In 1917, towards the end of World War I, Father W O’Grady, Parish Priest of St. George’s in Walthamstow, recognised that one of the great needs of Wanstead, was the education of Catholic children. He acquired a house in Cambridge Park, and began his search for a Community of Religious women.

Because of the decline of its once flourishing Industrial School in East London, the Commercial Road Community had Sisters available for Wanstead. The Community purchased the property for £2,000 and the new Convent was blessed by Bishop Ward of Brentwood on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, 1917 when the small Community took up residence. The Superior was Mother M. Catherine Fitzgerald.

Soon St. Joseph’s Convent School was opened for 19 pupils in one room in the Convent. Numbers increased rapidly and new classrooms were built with the help of money lent by a kind friend. In the meantime, as St. Joseph’s was in a different diocese to the Mother House in East London, Bishop Doubleday, Bishop Ward’s successor, expressed the view that the Convent should become autonomous.

As the number of pupils and Sisters increased, more building took place, including accommodation for Boarders. By the early 1930s and on into the 1960s, in response to pleas from neighbouring parishes, the Community opened Branch Houses in Stanford-le-Hope, Canvey Island and Chadwell Heath which was the last Branch House founded. Later it was given to the diocese as a House of Prayer and other Houses were closed due to the fall in vocations.

But fewer Sisters didn’t stop the Wanstead Community. They moved into the Mission fields in Koru, Kenya where they helped to establish a Secondary School for Girls (1971) – laying the foundations in education and medicine so well, that by 1985, the whole complex was handed over to a native Congregation and the Sisters then helped to establish similar missions in Kakuma (Turkana Desert) and Barkorwa, (Kisumu), spreading Mercy far and wide from Wanstead.