The Black Virgin of Willesden

As the Revd David Clues walked down Church Road in Willesden, in the deprived, multicultural London borough of Brent, he could see two men facing up to each other on either side of the four lane carriageway that leads from his 10^th century church towards Harlesden.

The argument was becoming heated. He recalls: “They were shouting, actually yelling at each other -- language I’d never heard before, and I thought I’d heard it all. As I drew alongside the one on my side he drew a bread knife and gestured with it. It actually ran across my stomach. I stopped dead, but he looked down and said ‘Ooh sorry father’ and put it away.”

Clearly, St Mary’s is not your typical place of pilgrimage. The picturesque Anglican church, dating from 938, is more suited to a serene English village than the busy roundabout on which it sits. Its graveyard backs on to the Church End Estate – not so long ago the murder capital of Europe, Fr David tells me.

But the church is home to a statue of the Our Lady of Willesden, and to a holy well. Each May, Fr David, his congregation and fellow pilgrims take an icon of our lady – the statue is far too heavy -- and process through the notorious estate behind the church.

“We had 110 pilgrims this year,” he says. “We go through the Church End Estate, which is still a place where knife and gun crime and drug abuse is endemic. It is a part of our reaching out. We cause great interest. People part to let the procession through and make the sign of the cross.

“We take balloons and let them go – having balloons is a way of getting noticed. This year the innovation was having prayer cards tied to them, and I put my website and email address on them to tell the person finding the balloon that we would be praying for them.”

In doing so, the pilgrims have revived a tradition of pilgrimage that, before the Reformation, saw many Londoners take a Sunday afternoon trek up the Harrow Road to St Mary’s at Willesden. Most famous among them was St Thomas More. More made his last visit in 1534, shortly before his imprisonment in the Tower to await trial for refusing to swear the oaths of succession and supremacy, for which he was beheaded in June 1535.

The saint knew Willesden well. His stepdaughter Alice was married to Sir Giles Alington, a wealthy local landowner, and More’s two daughters were married in Alington’s private chapel.

The origin of the shrine is obscure. The book Our lady of Willesden by Nicholas Schofield relates that the first mention of pilgrimages came in the thirteenth century, and water from the holy well was said to be particularly good for the eyes. There are mentions of a vision of Our Lady near an oak tree in the churchyard and the appearance of a spring, but little more is known. There are no recorded miracles, nor a martyrdom.

But, according to church records from1249, there were two statues, one ornately jewelled and decorated, blackened, it is believed, by candle smoke and incense and known as the Black Virgin of Willesden. It was burned in the garden of Thomas Cromwell’s house in Chelsea when the shrine was suppressed in 1538.

The revival of veneration at St Mary’s is recent. Open air processions were reintroduced in 1903, and a statue of our lady, later gilded, placed in the church in 1911. Interest was heightened further in the latter decades of the last century. A new statue of the Black Virgin, in blackened lime wood, was carved in 1972, and the well was rediscovered in 1997 –  before that it had been declared insanitary and capped off.

Today, bottles of holy water are dispensed from the vicarage door. Water is also piped from the well in the vicarage garden into the church. At first, water was drawn from the dank basement by bucket, and I go down the steps to the eerie, dark and flooded cellar for a look, but now it is pumped up to a slightly incongruous garden centre water feature that Fr David would like some day to replace. “But it does the job” he says, twisting the tap to release a trickle of water.

The holy well is once again a draw: “I am always getting calls from people saying do you have the well and can I get the water from it?”

But St Mary’s is not the only place in the borough of Brent at which Our Lady of Willesden is venerated. Walk a mile or so down Church Road – which follows the old pilgrimage route, so you will be walking in the footsteps of St Thomas More -- into Craven Park Road and then Nichol Road and you come to the Catholic National Shrine to Our Lady of Willesden, which is actually in Harlesden.

Here there is also a statue of the Black Virgin. Fr Stephen Willis explains that it was carved from the bough of an oak tree that overlooked the shrine at St Mary’s in 1892. “The statue is our link in to the history,” says Fr Stephen.



Here there are two main pilgrimages a year: “In May we have a street procession, we go to one of the local schools, Jesus and Mary School, and in October a torchlight procession through another part of the parish.”

Yet, despite their close proximity, the two shrines do not join together in venerating Our Lady of Willesden. “There was a period of ecumenism in the Eighties,” says Fr Stephen, “but now they are separate.”

Nevertheless, the revived Catholic tradition is a rich one. Once a Catholic presence had been re-established in the area in 1885, the goal was to build a great shrine to our lady where pilgrimages could once again flourish. The first took place in 1894, the present shrine church with its large side chapel to Our Lady of Willesden was opened in 1931 and, to mark the Marian Year of 1954, declared by Pope Pius XII, a great pilgrimage was organised.

Fr Stephen says: “Ninety-four thousand pilgrims crowded into Wembley Stadium for a Marian pageant where the statue of the Black Virgin was crowned by Cardinal Bernard Griffin. Infact she already had a crown, carved in the wood, and that had to be cut off so that Our Lady and the bambino could be crowned with flowers.

“Then the statue was drawn through the streets on a litter from Wembley to here.”

Like Fr David, Fr Stephen sees his role as one of outreach, and says it is not at all inappropriate that a pilgrimage to Willesden and Harlesden will not be a serene, bucolic experience. “A pilgrimage to Willesden was a gritty, grimy affair in the Middle Ages and it still is today,” he says.

“This was built to be a shrine church, and that means a greater openness, more outreach than in an ordinary parish. To be the director of a shrine is to be more than a parish priest. A pilgrim church is more open. This is the only church around here open all the time, from 8.30am to 8pm.”

This church too has been visited by a saint. St Josemaria Escriva, founder of Opus Dei, was a frequent pilgrim in the 1950s. At the millennium the church was made a centre of devotion for the Holy Year of 2000, where pilgrims could gain the Jubilee Indulgence and, in 2002, the Guild of Our Lady of Willesden was set up under the presidency of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor to revive the shrine as an active sanctuary of prayer for the needs of London.
And yet, as at St Mary’s, I get the feeling that it is a relatively small, loyal band of pilgrims who keep the tradition alive. It seems a shame that their veneration should be divided, with separate shrines, statues and pilgrimages. Particularly when you learn of the close personal bond between the keepers of these Anglican and Catholic shrines.

As father David told me as I left him for Harlesden: “Father Stephen and I were both ordained at the same time by Bishop Graham Leonard.” In one sense their ways parted when Fr Stephen came to the Catholic Church in 1996, and yet in another sense they have been reunited, for they both came to Willesden in the same year, 2003.

Could there be God’s hand in this, I wonder?

Fr David grins: “Very possibly.”