Walter Hook
Walter Farquhar Hook (March 13, 1798 – October 20, 1875), was an eminent Victorian churchman.
He was the Vicar of Leeds responsible for the construction of the current Leeds Parish Church and for many ecclesiastical and social improvements to the city in the mid-nineteenth century. His achievements, as a High Churchman and Tractarian in a non-conformist city are remarkable. Later in life he became Dean of Chichester.
Hook was born in London on 13 March, 1798, and educated first at Tiverton, then Winchester College, and Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated in 1821. On taking Holy Orders, he served first as a curate at his father's church, at Whippingham on the Isle of Wight, later as vicar at Moseley, Birmingham, and, from December 1828, vicar of the Holy Trinity Church, Coventry.
His support for the ideals of the Tractarians exposed him to considerable criticism, but his "simple manly character and zealous devotion to parochial work gained him the support of widely divergent classes", according to the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.
This was nowhere better demonstrated than in Leeds, which invited him to be its Vicar in 1837. The city was undergoing rapid expansion as one of the seats of the early industrial revolution; much of the commercial drive for which emerged from non-conformists. The established church in the city was a minority denomination – even to the extent that some of the parish church's churchwardens were dissenters. One of his earliest acts was to arrange for the rebuilding of the church, to be paid by the church rate levied by the city authorities; this in the face of understandable objections from the non-conformists, who objected to a statutory levy which funded a – for Leeds – minority church. Hook went on to drive through the division of Leeds into 21 parishes, each with its own church; and to foster the building and support of some 30 schools. His interest in the education of children was not without controversy - this at a time long before the Education Acts of the late nineteenth century, and at a time that such bills as the "Ten Hour Act" seeking to limit the working hours of children were being considered. Hook's insistence on the necessity of education and the duty of society in this respect, to some extent, went in the face of some of his richest parishioners. Equally, his success in his endeavours and popularity amongst the people of Leeds reflect the fact that he reflected the Zeitgeist - the spirit of the age – by re-establishing the interest of the church in the affairs of the people of the city.
The Parish Church remains as a physical legacy of Hook's work, being an early, important and influential high church gothic revival design.
Hook retired from Leeds to take up the Deanery of Chichester in 1859, and died and was buried in the city's cathedral in October 1875. A memorial to Hook was built in the Leeds Parish Church, and in 1903 a statue was erected to him in City Square, in the company of a select few other leading fathers of the city.