Creation of the Fund

The Number 1 Trust Fund was created in 1909 by ten priests and fifteen laymen. Funds that were donated were held by the ‘Beneficiaries’ (as the founders and their successors were known) on a moral, rather than a legal, trust. The Beneficiaries appointed the Fidelity Trust Ltd (a company formed in 1908) to act as managing trustee.

The Fund was created by a deed of conveyance by the leading Anglo-Catholic layman Athelstan Riley to the Fidelity Trust Ltd of property that he owned in Little Petherick, Cornwall. One of the two Directors of the Fidelity Trust Ltd in whose presence the deed was sealed was Henry Hill, a former businessman who, as Secretary of the English Church Union, was another of the catholic movement’s leading laymen.

Of the twenty-five founders of the Fund, named as ‘Beneficiaries’ in the Third Schedule to the original deed of conveyance, the priests included Walter Frere (Superior of the Community of the Resurrection, Mirfield), Darwell Stone (Priest Librarian and soon to be Principal of Pusey House, Oxford), William Trevelyan (Principal of Liddon House, London), the vicars of St Barnabas, Pimlico, and St John the Divine, Kennington, and two fellows of St John’s College, Oxford.

The laymen included the second Viscount Halifax (President of the English Church Union), the ninth Earl of Shaftesbury (later President of the English Church Union), Lord Edward Spencer-Churchill (President of the Society for the Maintenance of the Faith), the Anglo-Catholic ecumenist W. J. Birkbeck, and the Anglo-Catholic architect John Ninian (later Sir Ninian) Comper.

There was a strong aristocratic element. Among the original Beneficiaries, lay and ordained, were three peers, the future Duke of Argyll, three younger sons of peers, a baronet, and the heir to a baronetcy, as well as a knight and two future knights.

The Fidelity Trust Act 1977

In 1967, in the light of a High Court decision of 1954 in relation to another trust, questions were raised as to the legality of the appointment of successors to the original Beneficiaries and hence about the continuing validity of the arrangements governing the Fund. The 1954 decision was re-affirmed in another case in 1973, and in 1976 the Company therefore obtained a High Court order empowering it to promote in Parliament a private bill that became the Fidelity Trust Act 1977. This validated the previous appointments and provided that

‘As from the passing of this Act the Number 1 Trust Fund shall be held upon trust to apply the capital and income thereof –

1. for the purposes (whether specified by the Donors or not) which accord with the wishes (so far as ascertainable and still capable of being put into effect) of the Donors (so far as those purposes are charitable) so that the same may be applied in the manner in and for the various charitable purposes for which the Number 1 Trust has hitherto been applied;
2. subject to the provisions of paragraph (a) above, for such other charitable purposes, being purposes connected with the Church of England as defined in the Statutes of the Woodard Corporation dated 31st August, 1974 and set out in the schedule to this Act, as the trustees for the time being of the Number 1 Trust Fund may from time to time determine.’