h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This nice little Entry A3851165 has a section on St James Church, Thrapston, which has links to the Washington family. I need to check, but I think the flag mentioned here may still reside in the church (but it might be in the town office).

It's only a small nugget but there you go

That's great. Thank you for that JulesK.

First posted in A564699, which is an edited guide history about the cotton industry in Stockport, Cheshire, and principally about the Houldsworth family, who used money from their cotton mills to create a "model community" in Reddish. Reddish is slap-bang on the county border between Lancashire and Cheshire; as it is north of the Mersey it technically belongs in Lancashire and Manchester, although local convention places it in Stockport and Cheshire.

Among other things, the Houldsworth family money endowed a church for the Reddish community - I first wrote these notes in the reply forum to A564599.

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It should be worth saying here that Reg Houldsworth is not the only nod "Coronation Street" has made in the direction of the Houldsworths and their Reddish.

Houldsworth family money also enabled the construction and dedication of St Elizabeth's Church, an Anglican edifice whose spire co-dominates the Reddish skyline. This spire can be seen from miles away, and the church itself is a grand and imposing building that seems out of place in a district of Stockport which, sadly, is moving socially downwards.

(Some cities in the UK, including Manchester, boast smaller cathedrals...)

This church, on the corner of Leamington Road and Houldsworth Street, faces the Mill and is well worth a visit by people with an interest in Victorian mock-Gothic eccleasiastica.

And the Coronation Street link? The church and grounds have been used for location filming for Coro; various Street weddings have "happened" in this Church, with filming taking place both inside (there is a grand and imposing interior) and outside, where the backdrop of Northern terraces places it firmly in Coronation Street Country.

Granada's location fees go to Church upkeep, and the current vicar is seen on TV playing the organ during Street weddings; he is not at all worried that his Anglican church is used to represent Weatherfield's local Catholic church!

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There is an interesting footnote to St Elizabeths' story, in that the church has made nationasl news in the late 1970's and early 1980's for "showers of mysterious cash" from the heavens.

"Fortean Times" probably preserves the full story, but the incumbent vicar claimed to have been walking in the church grounds, to be assailed by money not so much thrown as floating down from the heavens above, bending, if not breaking, the accepted laws of gravity as if it were being carried down by invisible hands.

Thids happened not once but several times over a period of two years: the money was always current British currency, never notes, but amounts of about £5-£10 a time in coin of 50p and below.

The vicar took this as miraculous invention on the part of St Elizabeth (aunt of the Virgin Mary and mother of John the Baptist)and assurance the money problems faced by the Church would soon be reconciled.

(St E's was always High Anglican - so high it made the RC look like presbytarian iconoclasts)

While the mystery was never solved, it may be worth noting that this particular vicar had to retire on health grounds in the early eighties, and the showers of coins were only co-incidentally witnessed by others - there is a local suspicion that a shrewd minister was drawing free publicity to the Church's cashflow problems so as to solicit more orthodox donations from devotees of the Saint ewho had been shown the way by Her personal attention.

but that miht be cynical and deflate the romance of miracles happenining, in a Northern English churchyard, in the first few years of Margaret the Terrible's reign in the early 1980's...

St Elizabeths Reddish:-

a useful general link

http://encycl.opentopia.com/term/St._Elisabeth's_church

That's fascinating, raining money indeed. And coins as well, in slow motion. Quite a striking image. We'll see if we can find out a little more about what happened to the vicar on the internet. Nice post.