How St Francis Church became Monyhull Church
The Revd Siôr Coleman first took his role as a Free Church Chaplain at St Francis Church in Monyhull Hospital in 1986. He worked alongside a Roman Catholic Chaplain and the full time Chaplain, the Revd Dr Brian Easter, who’d been there for 25 years and had been a very influential part of the staff team.
There were 400 people still resident in the hospital when Siôr first went there, but just 12 years later, the hospital was closed and the residents resettled into homes in the community. All the buildings were demolished, apart from the church and the grade 2 listed Monyhull Hall, which was used as an admin building and staff accommodation when part of the hospital.
Siôr still leads services for the Learning Disability community at what is now Monyhull Church on Sunday mornings and when asked about the changes said:
“In some ways my role hasn’t changed because of the pioneering work that Brian Easter did. He saw that his role was to offer friendship. One of the challenges that he encountered was that people who lived at Monyhull had perhaps become numbers rather than names and as a result of that he felt it was really important to be known to everyone on first name terms; he was Brian to everybody.”
One of the main problems identified with institutional care was that with people living in such numbers and with such low staff to patient ratios, it was almost impossible to provide a service that catered to all the individuals’ needs. This contravened their human rights to be treated in accordance with their wishes. However, what Siôr learned from Brian Easter was: “... that the people with whom we worked at Monyhull were people whose humanity was incredibly important. It was not that it should be protected, but we should so respect it that we could learn from them.”
This was a message that he has promoted through his own writing, saying “I have recently written a piece called ‘Givers or Receivers’. I thought I was a giver, but in the thirty or so years that I have been working at Monyhull, I have become a receiver.”
Many of the people living there were quite able and talented in many fields, so should never have been in an institution, but, regardless of this, all had lived through some trying times: “There were some extraordinary people who had lived all their lives there and for whom it had been challenging. In the old days, you’d have a ward with upwards of fifty people there and the only privacy was afforded by the curtain that was suspended between each bed.”
The idea of transformation (that people could change dramatically under certain circumstances) became evident to Siôr when he took his newly born daughter to Monyhull. One woman who normally “swore like a trooper” suddenly showed a completely different side to her, challenging the prejudices that he’d had previously.
The way that his friends at the church reacted to each others’ actions also challenged Siôr’s thinking on how well other people in society treated each other. After one incident in which a resident arrived at church very angry and threw a cup at him whilst at the altar, extinguishing a candle, but not harming anybody, Siôr and Brian noted two things. He burst into tears, so Siôr hugged him until he calmed down and then he just took his usual seat between his friends, who moved up for him. They didn’t judge him and he left his anger behind, leaving church in a much happier frame of mind, rather than carrying it with him.
He concludes: “I suspect in more ‘normal’ churches people would come to church angry and they’d pray about it but not leave it there. After church they’d go back and pick it up again and take that anger and resentment home, without having dealt with it.” This feeling about what can be learnt from his friends at Monyhull has been a very powerful one ever since.
As well as Brian Easter, Siôr, who is somewhat of a railway enthusiast, is very proud of the fact that he was also preceded by a more famous clergyman, Revd W Awdry, author of the Thomas the Tank Engine books. In those days (1940-1946), rather than the 400 residents of the 1980s, there would have been more like 1,400 and the church would have been packed. Men and women were very strictly segregated then, so church would have been one of the few places they were allowed to sit together in the same building, albeit on opposite sides. The Reverend’s sermons would also probably have been rather less accessible to the residents than some of his books may have been, because in those days they did not use images or signing to help relay the messages as they do today.
Over time, in order to treat everybody the same way and “acknowledge we’re all equal before God” services have changed quite a lot. Siôr will ask members of the congregation to help him lead the signing for songs, bread and wine is given in a way that everyone can receive it, prayer books have colour pictures. In an action which Siôr believes makes a subtle but profound statement, at funerals the head of the coffin is put nearest the altar (a position normally only used for priests) to demonstrate his conviction that his congregation is a “priesthood of all believers”.
Services are often attended not only by former residents of Monyhull, but former members of staff, too.
Pastor Colin Tamplin was the minister of a congregation that was then called the South Birmingham Evangelical Church, which was looking for a new venue to meet on Sunday evenings in 1995. Brian Easter offered them the evening use of the chapel and they started coming there while the hospital was still open.
Colin had grown up locally and was aware of the myths about the place, as well as the fact that children used to call each other ‘Monnies’ at school as a term of abuse, but honestly reflected that he had no idea what it would be like in practice to worship on the site.
He remembers that there were several residents who would come in while they were having their services, especially Fred, who everyone at the hospital remembers because of his talent for playing the organ. “They were different characters, who behaved in different ways, often very quiet, although sometimes would make comments during the services, but we accepted that was our neighbourhood and they were to be welcomed.”
A couple of times, the heating had broken down in the chapel, so they moved the services over to the hospital social club, where, much to Colin’s amusement, hung pictures of John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe; faces that he certainly hadn’t preached in front of before!
In 1998, the hospital closed down and demolition of all the buildings around the church began. Colin came to an agreement with the NHS Trust and planning authorities about taking over the church building, with the proviso that there would be community provision for the new estate, and also that those who remained from the hospital in the newly built bungalows would have a chaplaincy building nearby where they could still go to worship.
Nowadays, there has been a fair amount of landscaping done, but in the time of the hospital, Colin remembers that everything was on the same level, with buildings all around them, including administrative, social and residential facilities. The density of development increased dramatically when the housing estate was built, but quite a large amount of green space remains, as that was one of the most prominent features of the hospital.
Sadly, Colin remembers: “We began to find after the buildings had been demolished and we were here full time from 2000 former residents would come back onto the estate, walking around and looking quite disorientated. It seemed that they were missing what they had had here.”
The church at the time of the closure of Monyhull was also very different to how it looks today. There is a new community hall and associated rooms, which were completed in 2014, providing some great spaces for community events, including the celebration event for our project on the history of Monyhull. The main chapel itself is also very different: the organ has been removed as has the divider up the middle which provided a room at the back that could be hired out. The divider included a large graphic of old testament scenes including an “anatomically correct” Adam facing the congregation, as well as scenes depicting the life of Christ and St Francis after whom the church was named. For practical reasons the divider was removed - providing a much-needed doubling of the capacity of the chapel for the new Monyhull Church.
Although Monyhull Church owns the chapel, it is still used by the chaplaincy of the South Birmingham Learning Disabilities team. Volunteers from the new church help out at the residents’ services and Colin says: “We’ve always felt an affinity with people with Learning Disabilities. There’s been a warmth and a welcome to people like that in the congregation and partly that’s because of the heritage we feel we have. The fact that we have links both with the new community and the existing community has been very much part of our identity.”
Colin retired in 2017, but the church continues to have strong links between the new team and the Sunday morning services led by Revd Sior Coleman.
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