Old Oscott, is now most associated with Cardinal John Henry Newman, a prominent Anglican and later a Roman Catholic priest of the 19^th century who was beatified by the Pope in 2010. Now part of Kingstanding, Old Oscott has been an important centre of English Catholicism since the 18^th century.

The district takes its name from an unknown Anglo-Saxon called Osa whose ‘cot’ or cottage stood here over a thousand years ago; Osa is known to have been a nickname for Oswald. His cottage is likely to have been a small farmstead at the foot of Old Oscott Hill where a small stream, Oscott Brook wound down to the wide fertile valley of the River Tame. (The brook was culverted after World War 2.) By the time of the Norman Conquest, Oscott lay within the extensive manor of Handsworth.

Born about 1652 in Oscott House, Andrew Bromwich was a member of an old Catholic family in Staffordshire. Trained for the priesthood in Lisbon, Bromwich was one of the last English Catholic priests to be tried for treason. Condemned to death in 1679, he was ultimately released and he returned to the family estate at Oscott. On his death in 1702, his house and lands were bequeathed to support a priest locally. In 1752 the Roman Catholic bishop, Thomas Hornyhold, Vicar Apostolic of the Midlands had the old house rebuilt as his residence and this plain Georgian building survives. The bishop never lived here however, and the house was used as Catholic girls’ school and priest’s house.

A simple chapel was added in 1778 after the passing of the Papists Act which eased earlier restrictions on Catholics. Because of subsequent alterations, little now survives of this chapel.

School and Seminary

With the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1791 allowing Catholics to open schools, a group of local Catholic gentry established a school here for their sons with a seminary for trainee priests known as Oscott College. It was the first Catholic seminary to be set up in this country since the Reformation.

Bishop John Milner, Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District, was instrumental in altering and extending the building from his appointment in 1803, notably in 1809 with the addition of a 3-storey wing built at right-angles to the original block to which it was later linked with a cloister. There were then 35 boys on roll. Milner renamed the college as St Mary’s and set up the first Sacred Heart Chapel in England in 1814: this has remained a focal point of the site ever since. The chapel is designed in a light gothic style and has stained glass by the noted Birmingham glassmakers, Egintons.

With continually expanding numbers of trainee priests, it was decided in 1827 to build a new ‘Oscott’ college on farmland some 2 miles to the east at the junction of the Chester Road and what is now College Road. Much of the finance was provided by the Earl of Shrewsbury, who generously funded many Catholic projects in the Midlands, including the building of St Chad’s Cathedral in Birmingham.

Thus in 1838, the place known as Oscott for a thousand years became Old Oscott in distinction to the New Oscott.

John Henry Newman and Maryvale

Old Oscott was home to the Blessed John Henry Newman from 1845. Oscott College was dedicated to St Mary and it was Newman who dubbed it Maryvale, a name by which the site is still known.

Born in London in 1801, the son of a wealthy banker, Newman underwent a conversion to evangelical Christianity while at Great Ealing public school. He entered Trinity College, Oxford at the age of 16 and was ordained into the Anglican priesthood, later being appointed vicar of the university church of Saint Mary the Virgin, where his inspiring sermons proved very popular with the students. Newman’s views on Anglicanism began to change and it was here that he and others set up the Oxford Movement with a vision that the Church of England was a Catholic church alongside the Church of Rome and the Orthodox Church and with a mission to restore pre-Reformation traditions in the Anglican church, many of which were retained by the Roman Catholics. Newman finally found that he could not square the circle and was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1845.

While studying in Rome for the priesthood, he was attracted to the concept of an oratory, specifically that of St Philip Neri. This was a congregation of ordained priests and lay brothers who did not take vows as monks do, but worked together in a similar way. His ambition was to create an English Oratory.

After his confirmation at (New) Oscott College in 1845, Bishop Wiseman offered Newman and his followers the use of the old Oscott College buildings which were still in use as a Catholic school. Newman was ordained priest in 1847 at St John Lateran, the Cathedral of Rome, and spent the next months studying the history and traditions of the Oratory to see how they could be adapted for his home country. His vision was not of a rural retreat but of an Oratory in a city where he felt he could make most impact. On his return to Maryvale, he carried with him a papal brief to establish the first Oratory in England which was to be in Birmingham.

Birmingham Oratory

In 1849 Newman set up the Oratory in a former gin factory in Alcester St, Deritend with seats for 500 worshippers; the building stood adjacent to the site of the present St Anne’s Catholic Church. Three years later, the Oratory moved to its present site on the Hagley Road, Edgbaston. Newman was made a Cardinal by the Pope in 1879. He died on 11 August 1890 and was buried at the Oratory Cemetery at Rednal, remembered as a major figure in English Catholicism.

In 1851 Bishop Ullathorne invited the Sisters of Mercy to establish an orphanage at Maryvale. Founded in Dublin 1831, the Sisters were a society of nuns concerned with the welfare especially of women and children suffering poverty, sickness and lack of education. They set up a single classroom here for their resident orphans, a school which eventually evolved into Maryvale Catholic Primary School and Cardinal Wiseman Secondary School. The Sisters of Mercy left in 1980.

Maryvale now houses the Maryvale Institute International Catholic College which has a wide remit to provide lifelong learning and research in Catholic evangelisation, theology and religious education. The chapel is regularly open to the public for services.

St Mary’s College, Oscott, from which the district of New Oscott takes its name, was first established in 1791 at Old Oscott which is now in the modern district of Kingstanding.

The passing of the Roman Catholic Relief Act allowed Catholics to set up their own schools. Consquently, a number of Staffordshire gentry sponsored a boys’ school at (Old ) Oscott House together with a seminary or training college for priests. At the time this was a completely rural area. Just three men became students at the first Catholic seminary to be founded in England since the Reformation.

In 1803 Bishop John Milner, Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District, began to increase the number of seminarians and extend the building. With 150 boys at the school and 20 priests, accommodation was becoming a problem and the decision was made in 1827 to build a new ‘Oscott’ college.

An equally rural site was chosen at Holdford Farm alongside the Chester Road some two miles east of Old Oscott. A generous donor to the project was the wealthy Earl of Shrewsbury. Known as ‘Good Earl John’, he funded many Catholic chapels and other sites in the Midlands, including Birmingham’s St Chad’s Cathedral.

Oscott College

Designed in a Tudor style by Joseph Potter of Lichfield, the new college building was opened in less than three years, the name, Oscott being transferred to the new site which then became known as New Oscott, with the original site becoming Old Oscott.

St Mary’s College at New Oscott became the central seminary for the Midlands Catholic dioceses and an important national centre of Catholicism. In 1852, the first Synod of Westminster of the re-established Catholic hierarchy took place here with John Henry Newman preaching a sermon entitled ‘The Second Spring’.

Oscott College is built of red brick with stone dressings and designed in the style of an Oxford college with a central tower, quadrangles and cloisters. No sooner was the building finished than the Earl of Shrewsbury called in the architect, A W N Pugin to furnish and decorate the interior. Pugin, a convert to Roman Catholicism, was a prime mover in bringing medieval Gothic back into English religion and had worked with the Earl on other Catholic projects. He completely refurbished the chapel in rich colour and used a number of medieval artefacts brought from the Netherlands when he had toured there with Shrewsbury. Pugin’s precise and detailed work included the pulpit and choir stalls, the reredos and even the candlesticks. Much of the stained glass is by the noted Birmingham firm of Hardman’s.

The Weedall Chantry with its four side chapels was added by Pugin’s eldest son, as was Northcote Hall lecture theatre completed in 1881 by his youngest son, Peter Paul Pugin.

St Mary’s New Oscott, a relatively unknown but remarkable building, also has treasures within it. The museum set up by Pugin, while he was Professor of Ecclesiastical Art and Architecture here, has fine examples of religious art from the 15^th to the 17^th century. The library, on whose walls hang 260 paintings given by the Earl of Shrewsbury, has a collection of 30,000 books including early printed books.

The chapel is open regularly to the public for church services and there is a programme of guided visits to the College.