"Hello Father Do You Think You Could Help My Family Find A House?"
Hundreds of Bristol families were helped with finding a home thanks to the original initiative of Canon Gerald Rodgers who has just celebrated the 60th anniversary of his ordination as a Catholic priest.
He arrived from Ireland in the early 1950s and spent the 1960s at the now long closed Pro Cathedral in Clifton.
It was here that Fr Rodgers, who now lives in retirement in his last parish, Holy Family Church in Patchway, set up an Irish Club as a home from home for the growing number of his young fellow countrymen who had flocked to the West Country to work.
It was a time of major civil engineering projects including the Hinkley and Berkeley Power Stations and the carving of the new M5 through Somerset and beyond.
But Fr Rodgers could never have dreamed just what was to follow when a young Irish man approached him at the club one night and explained that he was getting married and did he know anything about buying a house.
"I didn't but I knew a man who did and he was Fr Casey who had launched a housing aid society in London and who in turn went on to become Bishop Casey of Galway while the organisation he founded eventually grew into Shelter," he said.
"Fr Casey asked me to get together a group of professionals including, a solicitor an accountant, an estate agent, mortgage broker and a bank manager together with an architect and surveyor.
To my surprise over 70 volunteers turned up to hear Fr Casey speak and on that very night we formed a Bristol Catholic Housing Aid Society to help young people and families find or keep a roof over their heads.
There was so much demand for help and advise with housing issues, including dealing with pending homelessness and unscrupulous landlords, that our work load just grew and grew.
We were really just acting as a shoulder to cry on and it soon became obvious that most people simply wanted their own homes and that we would have to become property owners. So that was then we founded the Bristol Family Housing Association.
Families were encouraged to save £5 or more which they handed over when they came to our meetings on a Friday night.
We invested their money and when they had saved enough for a deposit we organised a mortgage and gave them £100 towards furnishings," he explained.
I remember going to see one young couple with six kids who were living in not particularly suitable rented accommodation in Kingsdown and had been saving up for a holiday in Ireland," recalled Fr Rodgers.
"I asked them if they would rather have a holiday or put their hard earned cash towards a home of their own which they later agreed to do," he said
Again such was the demand that the association began building homes on church land in Swindon and Taunton and on sites around Bristol but in the end, owning and maintaining property and collecting rents all became too much for a group of volunteers.
So in the late 1960s they handed over their housing stock and became part of the new Bristol Churches Housing Aid Society of which Fr Rodgers became a founder and board member,
By the time he retired from the society it had a housing stock of well over 600 properties having developed large sites behind the Colston Hall and all the way up Park Row and in other parts of the city.
And the Catholic Housing Aid Society known as CHAS, which he launched all those years ago, is still going as an interdenominational housing advisory service.
Looking back on his housing activities over the years Fr Rodgers said they had all grown from a parish priest's responsibility not only for the spiritual needs of his parish but also for their pastoral care and well being.
"There were so many people we came across in those early days who were uncertain or unsure about buying their own home and were often afraid to take the plunge but once they had made contact with our wonderful team of volunteer professionals, all became possible," he said.
After leaving Bristol's Pro Cathedral in 1968, Canon Rodgers, who was born in Scariff, County Clare in Ireland, was made Parish Priest at St Anthony's Henbury where he worked for ten years.
Then after a brief spell in Cheltenham, he became Parish Priest at Holy Family Church in Patchway where he remained until his retirement in 1998.
Even now at the age of 84 people will stop him with the words ‘Hello Father do you remember how you helped my family find a house?'
Source: http://www.cliftondiocese.com/hello-father-do-you-think-you-could-help-me-find-a-house