65. John Hopkinson: a Nonconformist Mayor

On the day that John became Mayor, he told his fellow councillors and aldermen that he had been asked if he planned to attend the traditional Church of England service in Manchester Cathedral.  His answer to this question was picked up by newspapers as far away as Aberdeen – this is from the Aberdeen Evening Express of 10 November 1882

A Nonconformist Mayor and Union amongst Christians

Mr Alderman John Hopkinson, who was yesterday elected Mayor of Manchester, is a prominent member of the Congregationalist body in the city.  At the meeting of the Council yesterday, he said he had been asked by friends if he intended to go to the Cathedral on Sunday.  In connection with this matter he could not forget a recent occurrence at Bristol, where for the first time the clergy of the Church of England sent a deputation to the Congregational Union to offer to the members of that Union, his co-religionists, a fraternal greeting.  As his own individual and humble response to the desire thus expressed for more union amongst Christians of all denominations, he did intend to go to the Cathedral on Sunday.  The announcement was received with applause.

John's faith and his membership of the Rusholme Road Chapel were, and always had been, central to his life.  He was known as a Congregationalist, and this determined how he saw the world and how he was seen by other people.  His faith guided his decisions and his behaviour, and his membership meant that a significant proportion of his time and money was devoted to the chapel.  In fact, both he and Alice would have liked him to spend more time on the church than in the Council chamber.  Alice wrote to him on 2 October 1876

I think the town gets too much out of you.  I would rather the town had less and the church more

And he replied two days later

I should like, with you, to give the town less and the church more.  Yet somehow I feel as if I could do the one work better than the other.  And both are necessary to be done by someone.  And at present I feel I have some power for good in reference to things. [1]

As a Congregationalist he was far from unusual in Manchester, where Nonconformity was dominant.  When in 1844 a member of the Manchester Athenaeum translated two articles [2] from the Revue des Deux Mondes by Léon Faucher, economist, journalist and French politician, he annotated Faucher's comment

Manchester contains more Methodists, Quakers, and Independents, than adherents to the Established Church

with the footnote that out of 137 churches and chapels, the Church of England had only 39.

Gateway to Lancaster Castle
1890-1900

This was a time when all matters of religion were thoroughly discussed in the press.  Doctrine, practice and theology within denominations were important matters, as was religious affiliation.  

The Manchester press in the year of John's mayoralty carried detailed reports of the long-running case of the Anglican vicar of Miles Platting, who spent 12 months imprisoned in Lancaster Castle rather than remove the candles from the altar, stop kneeling during the prayer of consecration, stop using the sign of the cross towards the congregation, and give up all the other actions which his parishioners considered "false doctrine and deadly error".  (Lancaster Castle was used as a gaol for centuries).  

It wasn't unheard of for priests and ministers to move from Established Church to Nonconformist chapel and vice versa, and high profile conversions to Catholicism attracted attention.  There were chapels, churches and meeting houses whose message of meaning and comfort particularly attracted the working classes; there had once been Mormons (see this story from North Yorkshire), though most of them had left for Utah by the time John became Mayor.  

The references to God in the speeches of John and his fellow councillors in the Council chamber might give us the impression that Manchester was a uniformly Godly city.  But they knew only too well that this wasn't so.  On Sunday 30 March 1851 an Ecclesiastical Census had been taken which had been an unexpected disappointment to churches and chapels across England and Wales.  It was a bad blow to the Church of England to realise just how popular Nonconformity had become, but it was a blow to them all to realise that, in the words of the census report, "a sadly formidable proportion of the English people are habitual neglecters of religion".  Taking into account age, infirmity, work and so on, it had been estimated that 58% of the population were free to attend worship, but it turned out that nearly half of this 58% didn't.

Friedrich Engels wrote in 1845 in The Condition of the Working Class that

The working man does not understand religious questions, and does not trouble himself about it. . . . All the writers of the bourgeois are unanimous on this point, that the workers are not religious and do not attend church.

Léon Faucher in 1844 described the middle class families on Mosley Street "walking along in silence, and with a reserved and formal attitude, towards the churches and chapels" while the workers loitered about waiting for the pubs to open.  He thought this was because the "bigoted Puritanism" offered to the working classes left them "sunk in an immoveable stupidity" and turning to drink, as the "sombre and gloomy aspect" of the religion offered to them addressed "neither the senses, the imagination, nor the heart".  (He evidently did not encounter Primitive Methodists, who were generally working class and used to walk in procession through the streets to their services singing hymns which were set to popular tunes).  

Since the 1840s John had been among the many people who had devoted a great deal of their time to trying to remedy this godlessness.  In addition to his devotion to his professional work and his commitment to his public duties, John had been a Sunday School teacher since he was a teenager and since the age of 28 he had been a deacon, an office he only resigned because of the move to Bowdon.  He had been invited to be a superintendent of the Sunday School in 1864, but when he suffered a breakdown in health in 1869 and his brother-in-law Dr William Harrison advised him to cut back on his work, he had to resign.  But I can see he returned to it because he is named in the Manchester Evening News of 10 June 1878 as one of the superintendents in the Whit Monday procession of that year.  The Whit Walk was the great Lancashire Sunday School carnival and thousands of excited children took part, with bands and banners and ribbons and white dresses – in 1878, it was under heavy rain.  Even today some towns still hold their Whit Walks. 

His son Alfred described his father's working week: 

It was the regular habit to go early in the morning to business and stay till late with a break for mid-day dinner, and the partners themselves did much work of a kind which would have been as well done as a matter of routine by others.  I remember one of the heads of a firm which has become one of the most financially successful within living memory saying in his old age: "I believe I have spent half my life doing routine work which would have been better done by a clerk at thirty shillings a week"

On Sunday morning, however, in spite of his hard work all the week, my father regularly started early to go to the Sunday School and conduct a large class of grown-up men.  The school opened at nine, and was something totally different from most of the ordinary Church Schools as known in the South of England.  People grew up attached to the school, and there were cases in which the grandparents attending the senior classes brought their grandchildren to the infant class [3]

Notes

[1] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910 (1948) ed. Mary Hopkinson and her niece Lady Ewing, with a Preface by Sir Gerald Hurst, K.C., p. 64

[2] Published as Manchester in 1844: Its Present Condition and Future Prospects (London: Simpkin Marshall and Co., 1844)

[3] Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C., LL.D., Penultima (1930) pub. Martin Hopkinson Ltd, p. 112-3

64. John after the mayoralty: the Art Gallery & the Socialists

John was active on the Committee of the Art Gallery, which was going from strength to strength.  The new Museum in Queen's Park and the Art Gallery were, reported the Manchester press in July 1884, filled with treasures from local collections and loans from the Committee members, while Sir Philip Cunliffe-Owen and the staff of the South Kensington Museum had been of great help and many of the most interesting exhibits had come from their storehouse.  

On 23 September 1885 John wrote to Alice with encouraging news

Our Art Gallery exhibition receipts are going on well – about £120 for the two weeks more than the same period last year.  Our police returns again show a great and most satisfactory diminution in drunkenness and other offences.  I am having graphical representations made of the statistics of a number of years – which I expect will quite bear out my optimist views of the improvement in these respects of the morality of our citizens  [1]

The culmination of his work was in 1891, by which time he and Alice had been obliged to leave their rented home at Grove House on Oxford Road because the Whitworth Institute had bought the freehold and wanted to begin work on turning the house into an exhibition hall (which became the Whitworth Art Gallery & Manchester Museum; the field next door became Whitworth Park) [2]

So John was travelling in to Manchester by rail from his new home 'Inglewood', one of the villas and mansions springing up in Bowdon, which had become a popular Cheshire commuter village.

On 21 March 1891 the Manchester Courier reported the opening ceremony of the Manchester Arts and Crafts Exhibition.  John, who was chairman of the Art Gallery Committee

occupied a central position on the gallery overlooking the main staircase, and he had on his right hand the Mayor of Manchester (Alderman John Mark) and Sir Philip Cunliffe Owen, of the South Kensington Museum

This exhibition was a new departure, John explained – to encourage young designers and, as they had done before, make the exhibition free to the public:

Hitherto they had endeavoured to do something to cultivate the taste of the public by the purchase of the pictures which adorned the permanent gallery, and also by the various exhibitions which had been held.  But the present exhibition was intended to be an educational step.  It was intended to give an opportunity to the numbers of young people connected with the various schools of design and other institutions of cultivating both the eye and the hand.  They had not exercised a great amount of selection because they thought that would defeat the object they had in view, which was to show what was being done among the young people of the city.  Those whose works were considered of sufficient merit would receive the City Council medal …

The Art Gallery Committee have, with wise discretion, decided that the exhibition should be entirely free.  (Hear, hear).  It was the people's art gallery, and it was the committee's desire that the people should enjoy it, without let or hindrance.  (Applause)

The South Kensington Museum had loaned many of the best exhibits, Sir Philip Cunliffe Owen explaining to the guests that "he trusted that the educational resources of the museum would never be entirely confined to the metropolis, but that they might always be shared in by the country generally".

But it was the press report of an event at the Art Gallery a few years earlier that is most revealing of the different undercurrents of society at the time.

John and his colleagues on the committee had always believed that the Art Gallery was an important public good.  As the Manchester Courier of 4 September 1886 reported, the committee "were anxious that the benefits of the institution should be extended as far as possible to the poorer classes."  

And so free admission on certain days was the obvious answer.  On the afternoon of Sunday 4 December 1887 the Gallery's Autumn Exhibition was free to visit.  The next day the Manchester Courier reported that between two o'clock and eight o'clock there had been 6,618 admissions.  John and other committee members were there, lending the visitors catalogues, "all of which were returned in good condition"

A larger number of children than usual was noticeable yesterday, but the respectful demeanour of all classes exceeded any previous experience of the officials.  It was observed that many of the crowd passing along the street in the afternoon with the Social Democrats turned into the gallery, and apparently found its bright and cheerful interior more alluring than the damp atmosphere of the yard of Albert-street police-station. 

Henry Mayers Hyndman
(1842-1921)

Outside in the wet streets, the Manchester branch of the Social Democratic Federation were marching.  The Social Democrats had been founded in 1881 by Henry Mayers Hyndman who had been inspired by the works of Karl Marx to become a socialist.  Marx and Engels actually kept away from Hyndman, but William Morris and Eleanor Marx became members.

The Federation's weekly newspaper Justice had called the day before for simultaneous demonstrations across the country.  Their report spoke of  the Conservative Prime Minister Lord Salisbury's "aristocratic hatred of the people" and the "tyrannous Government".  "Success to the Social Revolution!" was the cry

The Tory Terror has now begun in real earnest, and it is no fault of the present government that Social-Democrats and Radicals were not butchered wholesale in our streets on Sunday, November 13th.  Meanwhile, the miseries of the unemployed are entirely neglected by ministers, and not a single step has been officially taken to help our suffering countrymen

According to the (Conservative) Manchester Courier of 5 December 1887, there were about 24 Federation members marching behind their red banners from Nelson Street to the Albert Street police station yard, which the police had made available to them after making it clear that a mass demonstration in front of the Town Hall would not be countenanced.  

The Courier thought that about 2,000 men and boys gathered to hear the speakers and that most of them were there out of curiosity.  The Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, which picked up the story on 6 December, put the figure at "about 400 unemployed" with "large numbers of sightseers".  The SDF's own Justice on 10 December claimed 6,000 or 7,000 people were there.  

The crowd, the Courier said, dwindled during the meeting which lasted a couple of hours until dark, with a drizzling rain falling on them all the time.  

The SDF speakers were calling for the authorities to provide useful and productive work for the unemployed at fair rates of pay by carrying out local improvements to roads and paths, levelling Moston Tip, making a playground and gymnasium on St Michael's Flags, and demolishing the unhealthy buildings in that area.  They could build "healthy artisans' dwellings, to be let at the cost of maintenance alone".  The speakers called for the Poor Law Guardians to relax the severity of the tests applied to able-bodied unemployed men wanting "outdoor relief" – which is to say, financial support without being obliged to go into the workhouse.  They called for the government to establish an eight hour day in government employment, only use firms paying trade union rates, and make it compulsory that railway, tramway and omnibus companies should only work an eight hour day.  "Work for all and overtime for none" was their cry.  

There were fiery speeches

better to die fighting with sword in hand than to die like rats in a corner … They had been law-abiding so long, and had acted in an orderly and peaceable manner for such a length of time, that they were getting tired of it.  If the Government and the authorities would not listen to their cry for work and for justice, and not for charity, they might yield to a stronger movement hereafter.

Because, despite John's optimism, there were people who did not trust the employers and who thought the ruling classes did not have the interests of the workers at heart.  They didn't share John's sunny view as he ended his term of office as mayor that

There was much poverty and hardship, but on the whole it was well borne, and it was well met by the helpfulness of the rich and of the poor

Their emphasis was on the physical needs, not the moral and spiritual needs, of the poor.  This was becoming a pressing need as economic conditions worsened.  Ellen Ewing tells us that there were many accounts of philanthropy in the letters to and by John and Alice, from friends, children and grandchildren.  She mentions young John lending £2 to one of his workmen so he could escape from the "thrall of his victualler" – he owed £1 to a shop on account which meant he couldn't leave that shop "as they would be down on him" – and making him promise not to buy on credit any more.  John's view was robust

The co-operative stores, which strike at the root of the evil, will do more for the labouring classes than all temperance and such like societies put together [3]

We remember John senior and Lord Shaftesbury touring the Manchester streets to spot drunkards – perhaps there had been interesting family discussions about temperance.  Young John clearly simply couldn't imagine how the poor could become addicted to drink.  His sisters, meanwhile, did their best to help their Sunday scholars when families got into trouble.  Their cousin Mary Tubbs was taking food to the poorest quarters of Plymouth. [4] But the Social Democrats and the Radicals saw the problem in terms not of charity but of social justice and rottenness in the whole economic system.  

From 1870 Great Britain had begun to face the inexorable challenges coming from the rise of the United States and Germany.  Severe unemployment had followed the global financial Panic of 1873, Trade Unionism had been expanding from the early 1870s and, though it would be temporarily checked in the trade depression of the mid-1880s, it would recover and grow, aided by socialist activists.  1889 would see the great Dock Strike in London, in which Cardinal Manning played a key role as mediator, and the 1890s brought turmoil in industrial relations.  

Luckily for John, he never saw the shattering of his dreams of progress.  He died before the "Great Unrest"  , the violent labour upheavals in the decade before 1914, and he and Alice were both gone before the outbreak of World War One.

Notes

[1] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910 (1948) ed. Mary Hopkinson and her niece Lady Ewing, with a Preface by Sir Gerald Hurst, K.C., p. 89

[2] cf. Manchesterhistory.net

[3] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 68

[4] ibid.

63. John after the Mayoralty: sewage & fires

 

Manchester Town Hall council chamber in 1877

Sewerage for the people of Manchester was the responsibility of the City Corporation and thirteen other authorities covering areas around the city.  A major sewerage scheme was essential but it had proved impossible to carry on with all the authorities working together, so the Corporation had decided to go it alone.  It would build two deep level sewers which would intercept the existing sewers before they discharged sewage into the rivers, and it would build a treatment works at Davyhulme where the first sewer met the Ship Canal.  The treated effluent would then be available to raise the height of water in the Canal.   To do this, it would apply for powers to borrow £490,000.

This plan was vehemently contested – it was too expensive, the proximity of sewage works would ruin people's homes and the property prices – and feelings ran high.  John and fellow Congregationalist Alderman Joseph Thompson (1833-1909) were the promoters of the scheme in the Council and they came in for some vicious attacks.  We can see this in these excerpts from the Manchester Courier of 5 October 1888 reporting the words of the lawyer who represented the Council before the Local Government Board inquiry into the application

What earthly motive had anybody connected with the Corporation to stake their character and honour to win a victory in the matter at all?  What did they gain by it?

John Hopkinson and Joseph Thompson had 

given time and trouble to the scheme, and they had been assisted by the surveyor, Mr Allison.  What earthly interest, save the public good, had those three gentlemen to serve? … The scheme was for the interests of Manchester … It was not an attempt which brought them honour or fame … they had been attacked as if they were pickpockets.  The inspector even had been threatened with all sorts of pains and penalties if he dared to recommend this scheme … It was said the sewers were too large.  Would they have them lessened?  Was it not better to consider all contingencies, and prepare for hundreds of years to come?  The population might increase to a very large extent, and as sewers went under streets and houses it was very desirable that they should be built to last practically for all time …

Meanwhile John was still deep at work on the Manchester Fire Brigade.  On Thursday 17 June 1886, the Manchester Courier reported that on Tuesday evening rumours had spread that the Town Hall was on fire.  Hundreds of people rushed to see the sight, but it was only two steam fire engines undergoing experiments.  They had come from Messrs Merryweather, the celebrated fire engine makers, and the new machine was being tested against the old one while Alderman Hopkinson and hundreds of spectators watched.

And progress on the fire engines was very satisfying.  On 10 October 1891 the Courier reported the latest testing, carried out in front of the Town Hall

Merryweather fire engine of 1896 [H. Zell]

The two new steam fire engines which have just been supplied to the Manchester Fire Brigade were tested on Thursday in Albert-square, in the presence of a number of members of the City Council and a large gathering of the public.  The engines have been built for the Corporation by Messrs Merryweather and Sons, of London, and are very light in proportion to their power, and are specially suited for the work of protecting the numerous mills in the hilly portions of the Manchester Fire Brigade area.  

At a works test, before Superintendent Tozer, each engine raised steam from cold water to 100lb pressure in less than nine minutes (the boilers having a full amount of water at the start and not being filled up as the pressure rose), and single jets were thrown with enormous force 235ft horizontally.  Each engine then threw two jets 200ft., and afterwards four jets were projected 150ft simultaneously.  The machines have all the latest improvements, having been specially built under the supervision of Mr Alderman Hopkinson, C.E. (chairman of the Fire Brigade Committee), Mr Malcolm Wood (Chief Constable), and Mr Tozer (chief of the Fire Brigade).  

Manchester now possesses five 'Greenwich' steamers of a combined pumping capacity equal to 14 of the London Fire Brigade steamers.  The new machines are handsome in appearance, the hose boxes being painted vermilion, fine-lined and varnished with 'Manchester Fire Brigade' in gold and colours written on each side, while the machinery, which is of brass, copper, steel, and gun metal, is highly-polished.  A special box is provided on each engine for a 'Tozer' handpump, and hose and accessories are carried, as well as the driver, engineer, and firemen.  The pumps are guaranteed to deliver 450 gallons per minute; but at the trial each engine delivered over 500 gallons, thus showing that the makers have amply fulfilled their contract.

Photograph of the council chamber is from https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/photos/item/MTH01/01/007

62. "I feel ready to do or enjoy everything that comes to me here": after the Mayoralty

After leaving office John remained as active as ever in civic affairs.  

In the middle of March 1884 he went again to Parliament as a witness for Manchester's case for the Ship Canal, speaking before the House of Lords Committee.  There he gave, quite unwittingly, a good deal of amusement to everyone.  

Punch's view on 7 October 1882:  Manchester-sur-Mer
Manchester is dipping her toes in the canal
while the rivers Irwell, Irk, Medlock and Cornbrook play around her

Sir Bosdin Leech, cotton merchant and the financial director of the Ship Canal, describes the moment in his History of the Manchester Ship Canal. [1]

John was explaining his idea of a main sewer built along the bank of the Ship Canal to take Manchester's sewage out to tidal waters. 

He was telling the Committee the figure he had been given for the number of WCs involved, said that "Eleven thousand was the number of water closets put into his mouth."  

The amusement was, wrote Sir Bosdin, "accentuated by the witness being unconscious of having said anything out of the way."  

Manchester finally succeeded in 1885 against Liverpool's fierce opposition.  Queen Victoria came to open the Ship Canal on 21 May 1894 amid great excitement. [2] 

John was there, riding in the procession in a carriage with Sir Bosdin.  They were nearly in an accident – "one of the horses kicked and got its foot entangled in the front of the carriage, which had to be abandoned" and they had to get out and walk from Platford's Hotel in Stretford Road to the docks, "dodging amongst the crowd as best they could, and arriving only just in time for the ceremony" [3].  Eventually, the Port of Manchester was able to live up to John's hopes and become Britain's third busiest port.

It wasn't only the work in civic improvements that John found fulfilling.  On 17 November 1884 he wrote to Alice

Yesterday and today I have had long conversations with people in great distress or difficulty – one a civil engineer, the other a lady.  The telling of their tales of trouble seemed a marvellous relief to both.  And I was able to send both away in better spirits with very little expenditure beyond time and feeling. The first was, I believe, at the far end of desperation, quite a stranger.  Why he should come to me I don't know.

The same quality of humility and surprise in a talent he had found unexpectedly in himself can be seen too in this comment about his work in connection with the Rusholme Road Chapel.  He was asked by a grandmother to get her grandson admitted to Nicholls Hospital, the boys' refuge in Ardwick (the buildings are now part of Manchester City College)

Today I have a Grandmother from Rusholme Road wanting to get her grandson to Nichols Hosp:  Father dead.  Mother wicked, gone away.  Found it easy to help her.  I am quite satisfied now that Providence was right in not letting me gratify my longing to live in the country.  It would have been every way a more selfish life, and perhaps on that account, in the long run, a less enjoyable one.  I begin to feel that gray hairs, business ways, and a bit of sympathy mixed together, do constitute a sort of talent which it would be criminal to leave unused.  And that being so, I feel ready to do or enjoy everything that comes to me here. [4]

It was in about 1888 that Ellen Ewing notes the appearance "in the Father's accounts of his work a certain slightly aggressive self-assertion, new to him and amusing unless due, as is possible, to declining health".

She quotes a letter he wrote to Alice on 20 October 1888

I could only write you a few lines in the interval of a strong debate in which Barton and myself were against Mr Smith.  I got into a bad temper and was very impatient.  He is the least lucid intellect I have ever met with in a professional man of experience.  To fix a thought or train is like driving a nail into a bag of wool.  However by patience this morning we got to understand each other [5]

I think this argument took place in a work matter and that Barton is a fellow engineer, referred to by John in a letter of 25 November 1884 with details of Mrs Barton's success with her hens [6].  But Ellen Ewing's next example from a letter to Alice in 1888 is definitely from John's rôle as an alderman

We have had a grand fight in Council today, of which I must give you full particulars tomorrow.  I roused myself up towards the end of the debate and got it hot and gave it hot to Mr Clay, to the satisfaction of my friends, some half of whom told me afterwards, that it was the best speech I had made for years.  Some tried hard to shut my mouth but I insisted on being heard and was supported strongly by the majority … I wish you had been in the seat of distinguished strangers.  If you had been at my coat tails I fear you would have exercised a sinister influence and cooled my temperature … Perhaps, after the excitement, I am rather upset internally now [7]

This is very probably connected to the long-running saga of a botched improvement scheme for the Victoria Hotel, in which the Improvement Committee lost control of both project and costs and was slammed by a report in 1886 by the Manchester Ratepayers' Association, which hinted darkly at corruption in the Council.  The Association was very hostile to the Council's habit of electing aldermen for life from among their own number, pointing out that aldermen tended to dominate the council's committees, and claiming that were far too cosy.  

The problem was that committees handling technically involved projects needed experienced and committed men to understand the practical background and to carry them through.  As a result Manchester allowed committees to nominate their own members for re-election each year, so membership of committees often changed very little, and members became fiercely loyal and took criticism badly.  Combined with the changing expectations in standards in business and civic life, this was bound to attract public criticism.  The Victoria Hotel scheme saga ran and ran, acrimoniously . [8]

John was never personally criticised in the saga but he was very touchy when the Improvement Committee was accused and he took very badly any imputation against his character – he couldn't afford not to, as such imputations would be a threat to his professional standing and livelihood.

So in April 1886, we have Councillor Chesters-Thompson moving that the committee should provide a complete inventory of the furniture owned by the Corporation in connection with the Victoria Hotel and passing on a complaint from a tradesman that his lower tender for the work had been rejected before the fixed date for the tenders to be in.  "He wished to know if that statement was true – whether such a thing could be – and if it were true, then there had been no greater scandal in the wide world".

John, the recently appointed chairman of the committee, snapped back that "Mr Thompson had made a charge against the committee of conduct which he called scandalous" and launched into a something of a diatribe.[9] Mr Chesters-Thompson countered that he hadn't said that he believed the allegation.  Finally John accepted the position – but, probably rather grumpily, said he still wanted to know who had made the "scandalous" statement against the committee.

On 5 May 1888 the Manchester Courier reported a meeting at which John went head to head with Councillor George Clay, a builder, over a special report which featured the Victoria Hotel saga.  This time it was Mr Chesters-Thompson who calmed things down.  He said he thought he could throw a little oil on the troubled waters

He would suggest that they should shake hands in the matter – that Alderman Hopkinson should say to Mr Clay, "If you will withdraw your report I will withdraw those aggressive remarks I made and the letters I wrote to the papers on the subject of the improvement".  (Hear, hear)

Alderman Hopkinson said he acceded with pleasure to the appeal made by Mr Thompson (Hear, hear)

Mr Clay said he was also ready to withdraw the report (Hear, hear)

It seems that Council meetings had definitely become more heated and John's forthrightness had become more aggressive.

But there was major work still to do for the Corporation.  Especially in the noisome matter of sewage and the rivers.

Next:  63. John after the Mayoralty: sewage & fires

Notes

[1] Sir Bosdin Leech, The History of the Manchester Ship Canal from its inception to its completion with personal reminiscences by Sir Bosdin Leech, in two volumes, (1907) pub. Sherratt & Hughes (available online 

https://ia801608.us.archive.org/23/items/historyofmanches01leecuoft/historyofmanches01leecuoft.pdf 

Vol 1 p. 215

[2] History of the Manchester Ship Canal, Vol 2, p. 208 et seq.

https://ia801608.us.archive.org/23/items/historyofmanches01leecuoft/historyofmanches01leecuoft.pdf

[3] ibid., p. 212

[4] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910 (1948) ed. Mary Hopkinson and her niece Lady Ewing, with a Preface by Sir Gerald Hurst, K.C., p. 88

[5] ibid., p. 96

[6] ibid., p. 87

[7] ibid., p. 96

[8]  The Victoria Hotel saga is covered extensively by Pamela Mary Nuttall in Corruption in Municipal Government in the late Victorian Period, (1871 – 1902).  Thesis submitted to University of Huddersfield March 2019

https://pure.hud.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/71701519/Nuttall_THESIS.pdf  

[9] Manchester Courier, 15 April 1886

61. "The past year had been one of the happiest of his life": 1883

John had found the Mayoral year exhilarating, writing at one point

I feel rather a contrast between my condition and circumstance this night and last night – now a dirty collier, then an honoured guest.  Tomorrow the wheel turns again.  I shall, under the discipline of life, soon be ready for the Workhouse or a Throne [1]

He had turned down the offer of serving a second year in office, because it cost too much in lost time at work and unavoidable expenses.  When Ellen and her brothers and sisters went home to London after the Christmas holidays, their governess spoke rather disparagingly about how rich their grandfather must be.  Ellen's sister eight year old Alice (a strong-willed girl who was thought "difficult") put her right noisily – Grandfather couldn't be rich because when they offered him the Mayoralty again he had turned it down on account of the expense.[2]  Even children as young as John and Evelyn's had noticed the small household economies of John and Alice's incongruously large and spacious home at Grove House.

The Manchester Evening News of 9 November 1883 reported the Council meeting at which John handed over office to the new mayor, Philip Goldschmidt.  John expressed his thanks for the "loyal support and uniform courtesy" shown him by all the Council members and the help given by the permanent staff, and he spoke movingly of the public of Manchester 

the manifestations of confidence by the citizens of all classes outside the Town Hall had been so constant and so cordial that he might truly say that the past year had been one of the happiest of his life (Applause).  

During that year he had found any old friendships had been strengthened and many new ones made which "it would be his delight to endeavour to render permanent".  His aim in office had been to promote 

true sympathy and co-operation between the City Council and the officers and the citizens themselves, to cultivate among the high and the low, the rich and the poor, the sense of citizenship, and the duty which each owed to the rest.  

He felt there had been some progress in important matters, but not as much as the most hopeful among them had wished.  He thought there were local government reforms that would be well worth considering – making the city and parliamentary borough co-extensive, having one authority for all purposes, with uniform taxation and assessment for education, police and poor law administration.  "Uniformity of rating and unity of authority" within the city "had now come within the range of practical politics (Applause)".

Meanwhile, the gasworks were nearly finished and would certainly be ready for next year's winter, which would enable the council "to deal with the important question of the diminution of smoke and the purity of the atmosphere by the introduction of gas for fuel and gas for power (Applause)"  

It hadn't been the fault of the promoters that the Ship Canal scheme had failed for the moment.   There was a new museum being built in Queen's Park 

to give to the working people of the northern part of the city a place of refreshment both for body and mind (Hear, hear) 

(I believe that now, having been closed for many years, it is used for storage.)  

The Bridgewater Navigation Company had finally recognised its obligation to restore the river to its normal condition in time of flood.  The Art Gallery was a success.   

Despite the depression in trade and the unsatisfactory returns of capitalists, he considered the outlook for the future as bright and hopeful for the city.  Education was growing marvellously, and crime was diminishing.  (Hear, hear).  He was able to say there were no neglected classes in Manchester (Hear, hear).  There was much poverty and hardship, but on the whole it was well borne, and it was well met by the helpfulness of the rich and of the poor; for he knew no class which ministers more to the wants of the poor than those who were nearest the poor (Applause).  

The insight which the past year had given him into the higher life of the city made him more than ever hopeful of the future.  Great riches might not be attained, as formerly, by individuals.  Probably wealth was more evenly diffused, but the accumulation of wealth and the growth of luxury might be a nation's decay.  For 44 years they had been labouring, supported by a noble army of workers outside, that the people of the city should be healthy and happy, wise and good.  Their labours were not without result.  He had the fullest faith that God, the giver of wisdom and lover of concord, who had, beyond all question, blessed their labours in the past, imperfect and fitful as they had been, would still bless them in the future if we pursued them in the spirit of trust in Him and of self-abnegation, if their aims were worthy and their motives pure.  (Applause)

Next:  62. "I feel ready to do or enjoy everything that comes to me here": after the Mayoralty

Notes

[1] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910 (1948) ed. Mary Hopkinson and her niece Lady Ewing, with a Preface by Sir Gerald Hurst, K.C., p. 82

[2] ibid., p. 86

60. Mayor Hopkinson in 1883: from "municipal energy" to the Grand Nautical Bazaar

Later in July 1883, Manchester held its first Building Trades Exhibition in St James's Hall.  (This was a new public hall on Oxford Street; it was demolished in 1909 and replaced by today's Grade II listed St James' Building.)  Organised by a committee mainly of Manchester architects and civil engineers and intended to be an annual event, the aim of the Exhibition was to showcase the latest and newest in building trades' materials and appliances – in building, sanitation, ventilation, paints and colours, architectural decoration, furniture, appliances for smoke abatement, and so on.  It was expected to draw the general public and its opening was celebrated with a conversazione, with music provided by the band of the 3rd Dragoon Guards.  

John and Alice as Mayor and Mayoress arrived at about half past seven and were given a tour, and then John – "standing at the entrance of the Oriental Court", said the Manchester Evening News of 20 July 1883 – declared the exhibition open.  "Especially would they be struck," he said, "with the facility with which many beautiful objects were now reproduced so as to be placed within the reach of classes of society who years ago could never have dreamed of having such objects"

On Thursday 23 August, John and his daughter Mary went to a very different event – the fourth annual athletic festival of the Manchester City Police and Fire Brigade.  

It was beautiful weather for the several thousand people who had gathered to watch the fun in the Pomona Gardens which lay beside the River Irwell in the fresh air to the west of the city, an island of beautiful gardens and pleasure grounds, now long lost and hardly remembered [1].  There were competitions for putting the shot and throwing the hammer.  There were flat races, three-legged races and bicycle races.  The crowd's favourite were the tugs of war – police and firemen teams against teams of soldiers from the 24th Regiment (South Wales Borderers) and the 3rd Dragoon Guards – in both matches the soldiers won.  There were fire engine drill competitions and a demonstration of a new "steamer" which could throw a stream of water to the height of the highest building in Manchester.[2]

The previous year, the Mosley Street premises and fine art collections of the Royal Manchester Institution had been transferred to the Corporation on the condition that for the next 20 years the council would spend £2,000 a year on art.  This they did enthusiastically – and John was for years on the Art Gallery Committee.

The Mosley Street building, newly renamed the Manchester Art Gallery, had its formal opening on 31 August 1883 by the Liberal politician Lord Carlingford, who was head of the government department with the task of promoting science and art.  It was reported at length in the Manchester Courier of 1 September.

Eminent gentlemen – the high sheriff, bishops, academics, aldermen and councillors – gathered in the Mayor's Parlour of the Town Hall.  Among them was Sir Philip Cunliffe-Owen of the Kensington Museum, who became a friend of the Hopkinson family.  John, Lord Carlingford and the High Sheriff of Lancashire led the procession along Princess Street, past the crowds lining the route, to Mosley Street. 

'The Shadow of Death'
by William Holman Hunt

John gave the history of the art gallery and told of how it had been hoped that valuable pictures would be donated for the public benefit – and that this had indeed already happened.  Sir Joseph Whitworth had presented five important works by William Etty.  Mr William Agnew MP (Liberal member for Lancashire South-East) had indicated that he and his late brother's executors would give Holman Hunt's 'The Shadow of Death'.  Mr W A Turner was to give 'The Golden Gate' by Val Prinsep.  Manchester was showing that 

What had been done in London at the cost of the nation they thought they might do, in their own way, at their own cost, for their own good. (Hear, hear).  

Their aim was for all classes to improve themselves by contemplating and studying beautiful things.  They were convinced that the more they studied 

those forms of beauty which were the common property of all the less selfish they would become, and the more disposed to sink the individual to the citizen.  (Hear, hear)  They were weary of the too costly luxuries of the policemen and the inspecting officer.  They had a strong longing coming over them to have something to see for their money when they had spent it.  Wickedness, ugliness, dirtiness, offended now more than they used to do.  They groaned under the hideousness of these burdens, and were determined to free themselves from the load, and to do it by the united effort of all.

Sir Philip Cunliffe Owen said that he had long been interested in what Manchester was doing and he reminded them "that British art owed a great deal to the munificence of the merchant princes of Manchester (Hear, hear)".

Sir Philip Cunliffe-Owen
(1828-94)

Sir Philip first appears in the Manchester press in January 1874 at the opening of the Society for the Promotion of Scientific Interest in Manchester – the Kensington Museum was active in loans and advice to towns and cities across the country.  Not only did Sir Philip become a friend of the family, but his daughter Olga married John and Alice's son Dr Albert Hopkinson on 22 Oct 1891.  (Readers of Ferdinand Mount's engrossing book Kiss Myself Goodbye: The many lives of Aunt Munca will like to know that the Sir Hugo Cunliffe-Owen who features there was Olga's brother.  So Philippa, Sir Hugo's daughter and wife first of Denis McDuff and then Archie Baring, was Olga's niece).

On the afternoon of Saturday 1 September, John, Alice and Mary went back to the Boys' Refuge in Strangeways in a party of dignitaries including the local landowner and politician Lord Egerton of Tatton and his wife and daughter, to be shown round the new building by Mr Leonard Kilbee Shaw [3] , one of the founders of the refuges and a dedicated campaigner for children's rights.

The last big event of the Mayoral year for Alice seems to have been the Grand Nautical Bazaar held in St George's Hall, Liverpool in aid of Liverpool Homes for Aged Mariners.  From mid-August the Manchester newspapers had been carrying advertisements for the Bazaar, calling for contributions to be brought to the Town Hall with the enticing line "The Mayoress of Manchester has kindly consented to Preside at the City of Manchester Stall". 

St George's Hall, Liverpool,
from the southwest by Dave Root

The Grand Nautical Bazaar "on board a magnificent Atlantic liner in St George's Hall" was indeed a grand affair.  There was music from the band of Scots Guards, the choir of the School for the Blind, the band of the 'Indefatigable' and the band of the Seamen's Orphanage.  There was theatrical entertainment from the actors and singers then performing in Liverpool.  The Great Organ was played, and Mlle. Lottie Adelina de Lara "the marvellous child pianist" performed.  Eleven years old, she had been giving public recitals from the age of six and would go on to become a classical pianist and composer, having trained in Frankfurt, studied with Fanny Davies and Clara Schumann and become a friend of Brahms.  She played for Dame Myra Hess at the famous lunchtime concerts in the National Gallery during World War Two.  

The Bazaar had many patrons, including the Dukes and Duchesses of Westminster and Abercorn and the Earls and Countesses of Derby and Sefton, and it lasted from the 9th to the 12th of October.  The Mayors of Liverpool, Manchester, Oldham and Birkenhead took it in turn to declare proceedings open – John's turn was on Wednesday 10th at 2 o'clock.  As the Manchester Courier of 11 October reported, it was a great success

The bazaar was opened at two o'clock in the afternoon by the Mayor of Manchester, who, speaking from the bridge of the 'St George,' said he was there to simply perform a neighbourly act and to express his sympathy and kindly feeling towards the noble object they had in view … The sale of goods then commenced.  The hall was crowded to an almost excessive degree during the day, and the theatrical entertainments were especially well patronised.

John's sister Ellen Tubbs wrote to Alice during this unique year in her life

You are an astonishment to me.  How you are brought through everything and do honour to your position!  [4]

No wonder Ellen was astonished, if Alice's usual day was spent – as seen by her granddaughter Ellen Ewing at Christmas 1883 – "generally lying on a sofa and carefully protected by her daughters from unwelcome intrusions of any description".  [5]  But perhaps she was then still recovering from all the unaccustomed excitement and socialising and didn't feel strong enough to engage with five young children.  After all, in June 1881 she had been strong enough to go with John on the tour of Norway, and she wasn't yet sixty.

Next:  61. "The past year had been one of the happiest of his life": 1883

Notes

[1] Life in the Mouse House blog

https://mousehouselife.wordpress.com/2023/10/25/escape-to-pomona-island/ 

[2] Manchester Times, 25 August 1883

[3] for more on Leonard Kilbee Shaw, see the Together Trust Archive website

[4] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910 (1948) ed. Mary Hopkinson and her niece Lady Ewing, with a Preface by Sir Gerald Hurst, K.C., p. 82

[5] ibid., p. 85

59. The "Poor Man's Earl": visit of Lord Shaftesbury in 1883

Early July 1883 brought to Manchester a man whose visit must have meant more to John and Alice and their daughters than any other event of the mayoral year.  This was the 82 year old Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury – the "Poor Man's Earl".  

Burdened by age, frequently intense physical pain, a lifetime of depression and steadily increasing deafness, Shaftesbury drove himself on to meet all invitations.  

He had been asked to come to Manchester to speak to a mass meeting of children and, because of his enormous popularity among the working people, the engagements had multiplied. He had wished his reception to be "as private as possible", wrote the Manchester Times on 14 July.  But this was defeated by his popularity.

John met him on the afternoon of Saturday 7 July at the London Road Station (now Manchester Piccadilly) and drove him northwards to Francis Street in Strangeways, where he laid the corner stone for a major extension to the Central Refuge of the Manchester & Salford Boys' and Girls' Refuges [1].  The building was being enlarged with a swimming bath, workshops and dormitories so that it could take 120 boys.  This was the headquarters of the organisation set up in 1870 by two philanthropist businessmen and Sunday School teachers to provide homes for destitute and homeless children – in 1883 they had 13 homes and looked after over 300 children.

Flags, streamers and a dense crowd met the party in Francis Street, and Lord Shaftesbury spoke to the assembly of how, when he first visited Manchester fifty years before, "there was little or nothing of this description being done".  But now he 

found the inhabitants of this great city more active perhaps than those of any other part of the world in every operation which was for the honour of God and for the welfare of man.

That evening there was a great meeting in the Free Trade Hall so that representatives of some 75,000 Lancashire workpeople could present him with an address in gratitude for his work for them.  It was an audience mostly of working men, and all but one of them were too young to have taken part in the early battles.  He spoke to them, reported the Manchester Courier of 9 July, of the progress that had been made in the 50 years since he had first come to Manchester.  He wouldn't dwell on the miseries of the past 

None of them knew what it was.  They might have heard of it in history, and by narrative, but it passed all description … He remembered the first thing he did when he came to Manchester to examine for himself, was to go to the gates of the mills and see the workpeople and children coming from their labour.  The children came along slowly, with eyes cast to the ground, and looking as if they had just been disinterred 

He had come back ten years later, when the Factory Act was in operation, and "out rushed the children in rivalry as to who could run the swiftest". 

He spoke with pride of one prediction which had been fulfilled, 

The Lancashire men of that day said to him:  "We have been called seditious and disaffected to the Government of the country.  We are not so.  We only seek our rights, and if the Government will only do justice to the operative classes loyalty will be as strong in Lancashire as in the palace at Windsor."  And so it had been.  (Applause)

Lord Shaftesbury stayed that night in the State Apartments of the Town Hall, and in the morning he and John went to the service in the Cathedral – Shaftesbury was an eminent Anglican Evangelical – and he was shown round the restoration work.  

That night he went with John to the poorest quarters of the city to see more evidence of Manchester's improvement, a subject so dear to John's heart.  As the Manchester Evening News of 9 July 1883 reported, John explained at the City Mission on the following afternoon that

For three Sunday nights he had been – and last night he took Lord Shaftesbury with him – on a journey of exploration.  His object was, on those three successive visitations to the humblest parts of Manchester, to see if he could find a drunken man, and he had not yet succeeded.  (Cheers)

On the afternoon of Monday 9 July, John and Alice went with Lord Shaftesbury to Newton Heath, north-east of the city centre.  The Anglican City Mission had arranged for Lord Shaftesbury to speak to the workmen of the Newton Heath carriage works of the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway Company.  They held a weekly mission service there on Wednesdays with an average attendance of 700 but, while the works brass band played to fill the time before Lord Shaftesbury's arrival, it could be seen that there was a much larger crowd than usual and almost of them were workmen.  

John presided at the meeting, and after the service Lord Shaftesbury spoke to the workmen.  He told them that he did not hesitate to say that he had among the working men of England "some of the best, truest, and most beloved friends he had ever had in the whole course of his existence.  (Cheers)."  He praised the railwaymen "on whose sobriety, skill and good conduct the limbs and lives of thousands and hundreds of thousands of the people depended" and he hoped they would keep campaigning for "their perfect rights, times of recreation, the rights of mind and body.  He looked upon them as a most invaluable body of men." 

That evening, the Town Hall was filled with children.  Some 2,000 children from the ragged schools and the Barnes Home Industrial School filled the gallery of the Great Hall.  The bands from the Ardwick Green and Barnes Home Schools played.  There were 1,500 members of the Children's Humane Society in the body of the hall and the general public sat under the galleries and wherever there was space.  An organ recital filled the time before the meeting began.  There was a choir of 500 on the platform, ready to sing hymns.  John, Alice and Mary were all there to see Lord Shaftesbury presented with an address by "Four Little Children".   It was a demonstration of children's gratitude for all that he had done and the huge assembly was there to remember his work for the young chimney sweeps and factory hands and in the cause of the ragged schools.  As Lord Shaftesbury reminded them in his address, these ragged schools were needed to teach them "domestic habits and affections" so that children could reach the stage where they could benefit from the board schools, the schools provided by the state.

There was another section of Manchester society that wanted to express gratitude to the Earl.   William Aronsberg, optician and instrument maker, born in the Russian Empire and Manchester's first Jewish magistrate, had written to Lord Shaftesbury after the visit.  In his letter, printed in the Manchester Courier of 11 July, he wrote of his gratitude for Shaftesbury's "great influence and indomitable perseverance along with the late Archbishop of Canterbury" in relief of suffering Jews in Russia: "it was mainly by your lordship's instrumentality that I was enabled to send such opportune relief to my persecuted brethren".  They owed to Lord Shaftesbury the Saturday half-holiday for Jewish factory operatives.  

Workers in factories, members of co-operative bodies, children whose lot has been rendered more endurable by your foresight and kindness, all assemble to testify what they owe to you. 

The newspapers do not record when Lord Shaftesbury left Manchester for London but before he left we know, from Gerald Hurst's Preface to Ellen Ewing's book, that he presented two of John and Alice's daughters with Bibles [2].  His experience of deafness must have struck such a chord of familiarity in Alice, and perhaps she could discern his tendency to serious depression.  Age and infirmity did not prevent him driving himself on, and on the afternoon of Wednesday 11 July he was to be found hard at work again, presiding over the second annual meeting of the International Arbitration and Peace Society in the Westminster Palace Hotel in London.  

Shaftesbury died two years later, on 1 October 1885.  The nation insisted on his burial in Westminster Abbey and for hours the pavements on the route were filled with the poor, with costermongers, flower-girls, boot-blacks, crossing-sweepers and factory hands, waiting to see his coffin go by.

Next:   60. Mayor Hopkinson in 1883: from "municipal energy" to the Grand Nautical Bazaar

Notes

[1] For more on the Refuges see 

the Children's Homes website

Architects of Greater Manchester 1800-1940

[2] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910 (1948) ed. Mary Hopkinson and her niece Lady Ewing, with a Preface by Sir Gerald Hurst, K.C., p. ix