80. "Our childhood in the provincial, middle-class, Victorian, Puritan home"

Alfred Hopkinson can barely have remembered 39 Rumford Street where he was born and lived until he was four.  For him, the family home – the house where he and his brother John spent "our childhood in the provincial, middle-class, Victorian, Puritan home" [1] – was 12 York Place, one of 32 comfortable middle-class homes with gardens standing in a select cul-de-sac.  John and Alfred weren't part of the move to spacious Grove House in 1874 because by then they were both married men.  Grove House was the home of the younger ones' teenage years.

In Alfred's memoirs there are a few little snippets of life in the nursery.  And we can see the constant presence of babies in this anecdote from his granddaughter Mary Hurst 

I remember Grandfather once saying that there were no safety-pins in his young days and babies' napkins were always stitched on

The Crimean War (1853-56) even affected the nursery, to Alfred's puzzlement

I remember wondering what was meant by the large red letters in the nursery, "V.R.", and by the great flag waving from my grandfather's house in Skipton [2]

But before long, tales of heroism and gallantry in the War fired the boys' imaginations.  They re-enacted the Battle of the Great Redan and the French storming of the Malakoff tower with bricks on the nursery floor.  They knew all about Florence Nightingale, "the Lady with the Lamp".  They had Lord Tennyson's poem 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' by heart "almost as soon as it was published", said Alfred. [3] They were learning poetry when they were very small – it was published in Maud and Other Poems in 1855 when John was six and Alfred was four.)

The stories from the Crimean War blended with the tales of adventure and derring-do that they loved.  They skipped most of The Story of Hedley Vicars: The Christian Soldier, which they were given to read on Sundays.  It is an improving tale of a young officer, transformed by the Bible into faith and courage and finally to his death in battle.  They just read the bit where the young Captain repels the attack on the British trenches. [4]  They liked Robinson Crusoe but preferred the 1821 Swiss spin-off, The Swiss Family Robinson, with the family of boys and their parents making a home on an island in the middle of nowhere.  Even better was R M Ballantyne's Coral Island, which came out in 1857 when John and Alfred were aged 8 and 6, and in which all the heroes are boys, shipwrecked together on an uninhabited island.  And of course they loved Charles Kingsley's The Heroes, newly come into the bookshops when John was six, with its exciting stories of Perseus, the Argonauts and Theseus. [5]

Hiawatha from Project Gutenberg

Listening to their mother's reading of Sir Walter Scott's long poem The Lady of the Lake was an inspiration to another game.  "We rehearsed the duel between Roderick Dhu and James Fitz-James," wrote Alfred, "raiding kitchen and store-room for suitable weapons." [6] 

Their father used to read the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to them, and they acted out scenes from The Song of Hiawatha, which had come out in the same year as The Heroes. [7]

In the evenings their parents would read aloud to them.  Alfred wrote

The more I look back on those old days in our Manchester home, the more I am struck with the wide range that was covered by the reading aloud which we had in the evening [8]

They listened to travel books and to stories of missionaries such as John Williams  (killed and eaten by cannibals in the South Pacific).  They particularly liked the adventures and the pictures in Dr Livingstone's Missionary Travels, which they called The Lion Book. [9] They listened to chunks of Samuel Smiles' Self Help, published in 1859,and his 1862 Lives of the Engineers, which had the extra interest that their father knew some of the men featured in the book.  They listened to The Recreations of a Country Parson by A K H Boyd, which is described by its current publishers as "reflective and often humorous".  (Its first chapter is 'Concerning the parson's choice between town and country').[10]

They thoroughly enjoyed it when their father read to them in the Lancashire dialect, reciting to them from the work of Ben Brierley and Edwin Waugh.  Waugh's most famous poem is 'Come Whoam To Thy Childer an' Me'

Aw've just mended th' fire wi' a cob;

Owd Swaddle has brought thi new shoon;

There's some nice bacon-collops o'th hob

An' a quart o' ale posset i'th oon;

Aw've brought thi top-cwot, doesto know

For th'rain's comin' deawn very dree;

An th' har'stone's as white as new snow;—

Come whoam to thi childer an' me

(You can hear it recited and sung on You Tube).  Dialects have slowly become less broad and even then John Hopkinson found his children couldn't understand the work of the 18th century poet and caricaturist John Collier, who wrote under the pseudonym Tim Bobbin. [11]

On Sundays, newspapers and secular literature were put away.  The children knew the Bible very well, and were familiar with The Pilgrim's Progress from their earliest days, but, Alfred said

Naturally we skipped some of the long theological discussions and they were never forced upon us. [12]

Milton was read on Sundays and they knew Paradise Lost which seems to have filled their imaginations

I do not think we read or, if we did, that we derived any harm from the long disquisitions in Heaven, but we thoroughly admired the magnificence of Satan [and] had vivid pictures of Moloch and Belial and Beelzebub. [13]

Their mother was passionately attached to poetry and it was poetry that most deeply impressed Alfred 

I shall never forget and can still repeat much of the poetry which I thus heard read seventy years ago ... Next to Milton and Scott the poets best known to us were Wordsworth and Coleridge and Cowper.  Probably if we had tried to read Wordsworth's longer poems to ourselves the result would have been a failure, but as read aloud by my mother I shall never forget the impression made by The Excursion [14]

Middle-class families in those days followed current affairs very closely and the children were told of great events in the news, suitably edited.  Little Liberal and Nonconformist children, they were all for freedom – "imbued", Alfred remembered, "with the desire for national freedom all over the world". [15]

(His niece Katharine Chorley wrote that the Hopkinson brothers "shared the Liberal sympathy for the struggles of oppressed peoples for freedom" – excluding the Irish nationalists – but that they didn't "include in the sweep of their generous indignation the economic serfdom on their own doorsteps".[16])

They followed the struggle for Italian unity and Garibaldi was their hero.  They were delighted when Austria ceded Venetia to Italy.[17]  They collected foreign postage stamps and pasted into their collections examples from the little European states that were disappearing so fast – the Austrian stamps used in Lombardy and Venetia, stamps from the Papal States, Tuscany, Sardinia and the tiny kingdoms of Germany, and they looked up the countries on the maps at home and learned where they were.  In the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 they took the Prussian side partly because they were Protestants.

They had been thrilled by Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which came out when young John was three, and Alfred always remembered one breakfast-time in April 1861 when he was not yet ten years old

I shall never forget the serious look on my father's face when he read at breakfast one morning that the first shot had been fired at Fort Sumter in the American Civil War [18]

They followed the course of the war on a map and, like good Lancashire Liberals, supported the North

In spite of the misery caused in Lancashire by the blockade of the Southern ports and a natural leaning to the weaker side, and though all admired the fine characters of such men as Stonewall Jackson and Lee, we wished success to the North.  When told that Lincoln had proclaimed the liberty of the slave, though only schoolboys, we received the news with the keenest joy [19]

(Alfred heartily approved of the use of maps in education from an early age, as an aid to imagination and memory – he himself knew all the counties of England, Scotland and Ireland, the Provinces of France and Spain and the cantons of Switzerland before he was eight years old. [20])

Their father followed scientific developments with keen interest and he talked about them to his children.  So they learned, for example, of the laying of the Atlantic cable (finally successful in 1866) and how the first telegraph contact with the USA was made.  As they walked in the hills and countryside, he encouraged their interest in natural history.  "Thus we learned," wrote Alfred

to know every British butterfly and carefully collected a number of specimens; some which we wanted were added by a workman – a fitter in my father's works – who lived in a back street off Rochdale Road, Manchester, and had a wonderful collection of British moths and butterflies which he had himself found [21]

But surely the most distinctive features of the Hopkinsons' house were the children's workshop in the cellar and the little science lab in the attics.  His daughter Mary remembered

We learned from Father the use of tools and he planned a workshop for us in the cellar at York Place and had it fitted with a joiner's bench [22]

One of John's sayings, according to Alfred, was 

Do not complain of your want of tools and material.  The best thing to train a boy is to give him a penknife and let him see what he can make with it [23]

His children were able to do practical science in their own home, as Alfred explained:

In a small storeroom at the top of the house he collected some apparatus that would be helpful to us: a glass cylinder and rubber for generating electricity; the Leyden jar that was charged from it; a stool with insulating glass legs, on which we sometimes stood and our hair was uplifted as the cylinder revolved; magnets, a few retorts, test-tubes, blow-pipes, and chemical reagents which we were encouraged to use, and other simple appliances, including cog-wheels, which we fitted to a crane and so lifted our toys from basement to attic. [24]

Young John and Alfred used to amuse themselves up in the storeroom – in John's case, of course, it was to lead to much greater things.  When they needed a galvanic battery (a voltaic cell), the battery cells were cast in the firm's works and young John went there "to wind coils for galvanic machines".  Their new device was very popular at bazaars in aid of the chapel or Sunday School:  

Someone clutched each of the handles of the machine and then a circuit was formed of young men and maidens, and sometimes old people too, taking hands, which were vigorously and affectionately squeezed under the influence of the galvanic current which was made stronger and stronger as long as the arms and fingers could bear it. [25]

All of this is from Alfred's account, and his memories were of course of the long-ago happy times he spent with his elder brother John, lost so suddenly and appallingly in the dreadful accident in the Alps in 1898.  Their youngest brother Albert wrote in his obituary of Alfred in the Alpine Journal [26]

One of the most charming traits in Alfred's character was his loyalty to and admiration for John. 

There was a gap in age of 23 months between the brothers and they appear constantly as a pair in the edited letters and Alfred's memoirs.  

Alfred had the misfortune to cut his heel rather deeply with a mussel shell yesterday.  Johnnie carried him home from the place where the accident happened.  The lads are very true to each other [27]

wrote Alice to John from Sunderland Point in 1862.   

We have a couple of depictions of the older children.  In a letter from about 1857, a friend wrote to Alice

How I should enjoy one of our quiet chats.  I want to hear how young Johnnie's idiosyncracies develop themselves, what has become of the picture boy's wild luxuriance, how Nellie grows in word and deed, the pranks of merry mischievous Charles and what of the fair pale Alice.[28]

(The "picture boy" is Alfred)

A few years later, on 7 March 1861, Alice described her children to a "beloved friend":

You know that I have now eight children, seven on earth and one in heaven.  I will give you, as well as I can, a family picture.

John is now eleven and a half; he has been at a boarding school near Manchester during the past year.  We sent him from home hoping that he would be benefited in health by the change.  The result has been a very decided improvement.  He is a dear loving boy, intelligent and industrious; he makes very satisfactory progress in his studies.  His manners are rather brusque, but he is a true honest lad.  Oh how I long to see him give his heart to Christ.

Alfred, nine and a half, is a very nice looking boy.  He has good abilities but has not such steady application and industry as John.  He loves fun and has decided poetical taste.  He has often a very serious expression, indeed I cannot doubt that the Spirit often works in his heart.

Ellen, a little over seven, is an interesting child, both in appearance and character.  She is a very thoughtful, very sensible, dear child.  She loves the name of Jesus, she has such sweet thoughts I often learn from her.  Oh pray that these sweet blossomings may be the precursors of fruit to be hereafter borne to the praise and glory of God.

Charles, over six, is a simple hearted loving child, very quiet, loving and kind.

Then comes my little Ally, my little glorified one.  It is now nearly three years since this lovely flower was transplanted.

Mary Jane, three and a half, comes next.  I often call her "little sunshine"; she has such a bright, beaming face.  She is an amusing child, full of humour.

Edward, a year and nine months, is a noble looking little fellow; curly hair, expressive eyes and altogether nice features.  His character is not yet developed sufficiently for me to form an opinion.  He is now a very observant child.

Then comes baby (Elizabeth Lilian).  She is a sweet baby, a household pet.[29]

After Lily would come Gertrude in May 1862, Albert in October 1863 and May in December 1864.  Lastly came the baby William Henry who died soon after birth in September 1866, and everyone's pet, little Harry, who was born in 1868 and died in 1877.  

Such large families each have their own dynamic, in play, in alliances and in competition.  I don't know whether the Hopkinson children generally paired off together or which children were particularly close to each other.  Ellen Ewing tells us that by 1864 the children were dividing into  groups of "elder ones" and "little ones" and that Alice wanted Charlie, who was three years younger than Alfred and five years older than Edward, to spend as much time with the elder ones as possible.  

Alfred at about 16
& Albert aged about 4

Older children are generally far more involved with their younger siblings than in smaller families, as we have seen with Ellen and Mary who were surrogate mothers to little Harry.  Alfred introduced Albert, who was twelve years his junior, to the books he had loved himself, Albert remembering that he

taught me as a small boy to love the stories of classical mythology and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey became an early delight.  Kingsley's Heroes and Cox's Tales were made special favourites. 

(Cox's Tales was Tales of Gods and Heroes by the Revd G W Cox, which was published in 1862 when Alfred was eleven).  

We only have a few glimpses of the younger children together.  On 11 April 1865 Alice wrote to John about 18 month old Albert

John and Alfred are amusing themselves with Albert, lifting him in and out of the dining room window.  They seem quite to enjoy the jolly little fellow[30]

On 19 May 1865 she wrote

The chicks are all out except Edward; he set out for school but returned making some complaints against Nelly and Charley.  Believing the little gentleman to be chiefly in fault, I am administering a little punishment, confining him to his room for the afternoon, employing him in dusting, doing sums, etc.  I think it will prove a correction for the future [31]

(Edward was six, Nelly was twelve and Charles was eleven)

Edward and Charles in 1867 or 1868

Notes

[1] Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C., LL.D., Penultima (1930) pub. Martin Hopkinson Ltd, p. 78

[2] ibid. p. 13

[3] ibid, p. 13

[4] ibid., p. 14

[5] ibid., p. 57

[6] ibid., p. 6

[7] ibid., p. 7

[8] ibid., p. 76

[9] ibid., p. 76

[10] ibid., p. 10

[11] ibid., p. 72

[12] ibid., p. 65

[13] ibid., p. 63

[14] ibid., p. 63-4

[15] ibid.. p. 18

[16] Katharine Chorley, Manchester Made Them, pub Faber & Faber Ltd (1950), p. 235

[17] Penultima, p. 15

[18] ibid., p. 15

[19] ibid., p. 16

[20] ibid., p. 19

[21] ibid., p. 109

[22] 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. XVII

[23] Penultima, p. 228

[24] ibid., p. 99

[25] ibid., p. 100

[26] Alpine Journal, May 1940 Vol. LII, No. 260

https://alpinejournal.org.uk/Contents/Contents_1940_files/AJ52%201940%20101-124%20In%20Memoriam.pdf 

[27] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 36

[28] ibid., p. 29

[29] ibid., p. 33

[30] ibid., p. 44

[31] ibid.

79. "Beautiful in character": John's sister Mrs Ellen Tubbs

Mrs Ellen Tubbs, the wife of the Revd George Ibberson Tubbs, was John's eldest sister.  She was the girl who had the presence of mind to stop him when he was in a great temper as a little boy and was shouting, "I will kill you.  I will kill you".  Ellen took up the carving knife and said "Do it, John."  She had never had any trouble with him after that.  

George Ibberson Tubbs
by Joseph William Cobb
CC BY-NC Reading Museum

Her niece Mary Hopkinson remembered her as being "beautiful in character, most gracious and refined in manner and very sweet in appearance" [1] and her sister-in-law Alice revered her.  On 21 January 1887 Alice wrote to her daughter Gertrude, who was staying with Aunt Ellen

I feel so glad you should have the privilege of intercourse with the dear Aunt … but you must not put your Mother in the same class.  Dear Aunt has advanced to higher forms in Christ's school whereas your Mother is still in the ABC class, so slow to learn [2]

In Alice's hour of need in September 1875, when Ellen and Mary were struck down with scarlet fever, and Ellen died, it had been Ellen Tubbs who stepped in and took the younger children to Southport and away from infection.  Ellen knew all too well about loss and death, her "higher forms in Christ's school" were reached through pain.  By the time she took the children to Southport she had lost five of her children: a little girl aged 6, two babies, and her eldest son and daughter as they began their adult lives.  

We don't know how well the Hopkinson children knew the Tubbs children.  The little girl that Ellen lost and the two babies were her third, fourth and fifth children and, had they lived, would have been much the same age as Alice's eldest six children.  Ellen's eldest Charles Malan Tubbs was born in 1841 and was eight years older than young John Hopkinson, and his sister Mary Ellen Elizabeth was born in 1843.

In 1861, 20 year old Charles went out to India as an ensign in the 33rd Foot, the Duke of Wellington's Regiment, a commission bought for him by his father.  Three years later Mary married Lieut Henry Reeves, a young assistant political agent on the Bombay Staff, and went with him to India where he had himself been born.  In early July 1865 the post from India brought her parents the news that she had given birth in Ahmedabad to a baby boy on 5 June.  

Then came grievous news.  On 12 August 1865 the Berkshire Chronicle tells the story

The last Indian mail brought the sorrowful intelligence of the sudden death by cholera, of Lieutenant Charles Malan Tubbs, of Her Majesty's Bombay Staff Corps, eldest son of the Rev G I Tubbs, of this town, in the 24th year of his age.  Separated so widely from his family, it has afforded them much comfort to know that he was most affectionately cared for and tended by his brother officers, and that everything was done for him that kindness could dictate.  He died very peacefully, beloved and esteemed by all who knew him.  Most of the European residents followed him to his grave in the Surat Cemetery, a lovely spot, shaded by tamarand trees, where he rests in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.

Young Charles had died on 4 July 1865, a few days short of his 24th birthday,  and been buried the next day.  And then, a week later, George and Ellen Tubbs heard that Mary Ellen had died of cholera at Ahmedabad on 11 July.  Her husband Harry Reeves had not let his young wife lie on her own in foreign ground so far from home.  He had her coffin taken at once to Surat – the new railway linked the two places – and she was buried beside her brother.  She was only 22 years old.  Her baby was baptised Henry Oliphant Reeves in Ahmedabad a week after his mother's death, but he died of severe diarrhoea before he was two months old and was buried at Surat.

The following May, a tablet to the memory of Charles and Mary was erected in the chancel of St Mary's Episcopal Chapel in Reading – "Lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided".  It was the gift of members of the congregation to their minister and his wife "as a testimony of sincere regard for the deceased, and an expression of deep sympathy with their parents".  

Eleven years later Ellen would hear of the death of her niece Edith Annie Tubbs out in India.  

Ellen Tubbs' daughter Alice Louisa was three years older than young John Hopkinson.  She was married by the time Ellen took the children to Southport when the Hopkinson were stricken with scarlet fever, and she might even have been out in Australia, where her second child was born.  Her husband William Gardiner was an Australia merchant, a director of the Australian Mutual Shipping Company.  From the description of Alice Louisa in the report of her marriage in the Berkshire Chronicle of 25 June 1870, she took after her mother.  It described her as a Sunday School teacher and visitor among the poor whose "kind disposition endeared her to many".  Back in England, she and William and their children lived from the 1880s in considerable style and comfort in a country house with extensive grounds outside Redhill in Surrey.  

Ellen and George Tubbs' youngest, born between Lily and Gertrude Hopkinson, was Harry Theodore Ibberson Tubbs.  He too went out to Australia.  He lived at Hillgrove Station in New South Wales, married, had a daughter and was appointed magistrate before coming back to England, where he worked as a builder's merchant and an insurance manager.  He died in 1912 aged about 50.

A couple of years older than Harry was Cyril Bazett Tubbs, Ellen’s fifth child.  He was an architect by profession, with a private practice.  But this wasn't his only occupation – while his cousin and contemporary Edward Hopkinson was designing the electrical equipment for the first London tube line, Cyril was for nearly 40 years the general manager, surveyor, architect and director of the London Necropolis Company.  This curious institution, a railway line for coffins and mourners, deserves a proper explanation.

London Necropolis Terminus
at 121 Westminster Bridge Road

The problem of the appallingly overcrowded and insanitary graveyards in London – depicted so horrifyingly at the time by Charles Dickens in Bleak House – had been answered in 1852 when the company created the largest burial ground in Britain, the Brookwood Cemetery near Woking.  A mass removal of centuries of burials in the City was carried out and new interments began to take place out in the countryside.  

Now burials could be both dignified and sanitary.  The Necropolis Company’s own private railway carried coffins and mourners – separately, the dead and the living were kept apart – on the hour-long journey by First, Second and Third Class tickets to the cemetery.  

This was described as a "vast and silent 'City of the Dead'" by the Surrey Advertiser of 14 April 1902 in its lengthy description of the opening of the company's new offices, mortuary chambers and railway station at 121 Westminster Bridge Road.  They had been designed by Cyril and had every modern convenience, being lit by electricity and with the various departments connected by their own telephone system.  

Mourners entering through Cyril's handsome gateway would find themselves in a lofty glass-roofed, white-tiled hall.  At the far end they would see the wrought-iron staircase that led to the railway station, where an oak-panelled private chapel awaited them, together with several waiting rooms.  These were "quietly but artistically fitted up" said the Surrey Advertiser – obviously First Class was the most dignified and artistic – and from there the mourners could be led to their own carriages.  There was no undignified scuffling and no risk of mourning parties becoming entangled.  Once at Brookwood, the mourners would alight either at the North Station (if it was a Nonconformist burial) or the South Station (if Anglican).  A licensed bar was waiting for them at both stations.  

It was, said the Surrey Advertiser, "certainly one of the most beautiful" cemeteries in the world and this was Cyril's work.  He had re-ordered the cemetery's layout.  The network of avenues was expanded, named and signposted.  A nursery was established for the sale of plants and wreaths.   There were areas set aside for Parsees and Muslims, there were chapels and plots for Catholics, Nonconformists, Anglicans.  Bodies such as the Oddfellows, the Chelsea Pensioners, the Swedish Church in England, all had their own plots.  An "Actors' Acre" provided for the people of the stage.  Brookwood catered for all London.  

(Nowadays, the cemetery is a Grade I listed Historic Park and Garden.  The ruins of the railway platforms can still be seen, and a short section of the old track.  Cyril's entrance gateway to the terminus at 121 Westminster Bridge Road still stands, but the railway station was destroyed in the Blitz.)

Cyril had a very successful career [3].  In 1901 when he was 42, the census shows that he and his wife and baby were living in Buckinghamshire and the household included a cook, housemaid, nurse, butler, footman, coachman and groom.  When Cyril died in 1927 he was of course buried at Brookwood – his cousin Alfred Hopkinson was listed as one of the chief mourners.

When Gertrude Hopkinson was staying with her aunt and uncle in 1887 to have severe treatment on her throat, George and Ellen were living about fifteen minutes' walk from George's chapel at 'Mansfield' in Coley Avenue, Reading, a road of large detached houses.  George became a well known figure, so identified with the chapel that it was still called Tubbs's for years after his death, and described by his obituarist in the Berkshire Chronicle of 6 May 1893 as "a very able and eloquent preacher, a thorough Churchman of the Evangelical school".  

After 37 years there, he retired and they moved to a recently-built villa on Sea Road in the new spa resort of Boscombe on the South Coast.  George died there in 1893 aged 80 but he was buried 75 miles away at Brookwood – I expect Cyril had bought a family plot.  When Ellen died in 1900 aged 82 at her daughter Alice Louisa Gardiner's home in Surrey, she too was buried at Brookwood.  She had outlived five of her children.  She and her brother John were the last of the Hopkinson siblings.

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. xvii

[2] ibid., p. 77

[3] See
https://architecture.arthistoryresearch.net/architects/tubbs-cyril-bazett  
https://architizer.com/blog/practice/details/designs-for-the-dead/

78. Family ties: John's younger sister Mrs Alice Wills

John Hopkinson's younger sister Alice made the most socially advantageous match, marrying into the Wills tobacco dynasty of Bristol.  Indeed, her sister-in-law Alice Hopkinson had found the smartness and wealth of the Wills family rather too imposing when she stayed with them in 1865, and the neatness and the correctness of the children rather intimidating when they were on holiday together in 1863.  

Henry Overton Wills III (1828-1911)

I think Henry Overton Wills III probably met Alice through his business contacts with her brother John.  He and Alice were much the same age, but unfortunately we have no photographs or means of knowing how pretty she was, and no record of her character.  She is mentioned on several occasions in Ellen Ewing's account, taking in some of Alice and John's children while they go to Paris in 1855, going on a strenuous hike with John and young John and Alfred in the Lake District in June 1857, and joining the Hopkinsons at Penmaenmawr in July 1863. [1]

In 1871 Henry and Alice were living in a large semi-detached villa called 'Downside' in Clifton, in an area developed to attract Bristol's wealthy elite.  As time went by, and Henry grew even richer, they moved to even more comfort and privacy.  By 1881 they lived at Redland Knoll, a large comfortable villa standing in its own small park – which included an aviary, according to the OS map.  (I think the villa can be found on Blenheim Road, but the parkland is built over and the villa divided into separate dwellings)  Later Henry bought a small country estate outside Bath called Kelston Knoll outside Bath.

OS map 1883: Redland Knoll
National Library of Scotland

But in the late autumn of 1881 Alice fell ill.  She died at Redland Knoll at the age of 54 on 4 December 1881 from nephritis and angina.  Her 25 year old son Harry, who had been with her as she died, registered her death.  So Alice never had the happiness of seeing her brother John become Mayor of Manchester – but nor did she live to see the death of three of her sons.

Alice and Henry had seven boys:  George Alfred (later Sir George, Bart.); Henry Herbert ("Harry", whose wife Mary was the sister of Albert Hopkinson's wife Olga Cunliffe-Owen); Maitland; Henry Overton Wills IV; Walter Melville; Arthur Stanley (who married Hilda Dewhurst); and Frederick Duncan.  George was born in 1854 and was the same age as Charles Hopkinson, while Frederick was born in 1865 and was two years younger than Albert Hopkinson. 

I think the Wills and Hopkinson sons must have known each other pretty well, particularly as young men.  They evidently shared the same passion for mountaineering and three of the Wills sons, like three of the Hopkinson sons, were at Cambridge.  John Hopkinson had been at Trinity College several years before Maitland Wills arrived.  Walter Melville Wills went up to Emmanuel College in 1880, presumably just missing Edward Hopkinson, but was joined there by Albert Hopkinson two years later.  Albert and Arthur Stanley Wills were up at Cambridge at the same time but at different colleges – Arthur went to Trinity.

Their joint fondness for Norway must have meant that the Hopkinsons and Wills spent time together.  Even before Henry Overton Wills bought the Aak estate after Alice's death, he had been visiting Norway.  When John Hopkinson wrote in 1882 to the Revd James Griffin about the great question of accepting the Manchester mayoralty, he mentioned that 

Charles is my right hand here in business.  He and Mary go on Saturday to join their Uncle Wills in Norway [2]

And John and Alice had themselves spent a holiday touring Norway in June 1881 – this was the occasion when their son Charles scolded them so thoroughly for cutting short their trip.  I think Henry Wills had retired from business by this time.  The Bristol Times and Mirror of 5 September 1911 wrote after his death

He withdrew from active connection with the great business of W D and H O Wills more than 30 years ago for reasons of health.  For a considerable part of the time of his retirement Mr Wills spent the summer seasons in Norway, where he had a beautiful home.  He delighted to receive friends there, and indeed anywhere so long as he was able.... Mr Wills was one of Bristol's merchant princes, and one of the most worthy

Henry Overton Wills was in Norway in April 1885 when the news reached him that his third son Maitland had died at Aber Falls (Rhaeadr Fawr) in Eryri National Park (Snowdonia).  Maitland was 27 years old, articled to Bristol solicitors, and out on a short walking holiday with a younger brother and a barrister friend.  He had simply lost his balance as he came down by the waterfall, fell and rolled over the side of the precipice into a pool fifty feet below.  He died at once.  (The jury returned a verdict of "Accidental Death," and recommended that Lord Penrhyn should place boards on the path to warn people about dangerous places.)  

The Bristol Mercury of 8 April 1885 reported that Maitland had narrowly escaped death once before when he and one of his brothers had been climbing together.  The brother felt a piece of the rock beginning to give way beneath his footing 

he had just time to call out "Maitland, the rock is coming down," when a large mass became detached, falling precisely where that gentleman was.  Happily, a bush was growing near the spot, and by springing at and grasping it the young mountaineer contrived to escape being carried down to and crushed at the bottom

And the newspaper was quick to point out that people were talking about an earlier tragic accident in the Wills family.  In 1883 Henry's brother Samuel Day Wills had lost his 15 year old son Walter, who had been found dead on the beach at Newquay by a coastguardsman in August 1883.  The Express and Echo (Exeter) of 18 August 1883 reported that they could only think that he had fallen from the side of the cliff while attempting a climb.

In 1899 Henry and Alice's fourth son died.  Henry Overton Wills IV was an architect and a married man with children – his uncle the Revd George Ibberson Tubbs had conducted the ceremony in 1884 – when he died after a year of serious illness following blood poisoning.  He was 40 years old. 

Henry Overton Wills III was in his late seventies when his youngest son Frederick Duncan died at Chester, and his sister-in-law Alice Hopkinson had been a widow for four years.  What Alice made of the circumstances of Frederick's death, we can only imagine.  It was reported in the Exmouth Journal of 19 May 1906

In a great crowd of people struggling to reach the turnstiles and to enter the Roodee on the Chester Cup day was a well-dressed, gentlemanly man, about 40 years of age.  Immediately he got out of the crush he fell and expired.  Dr Lees, of Chester, was summoned, but life was extinct.  There was no one with deceased to identify him, and the only clue was the return half of a railway ticket from Llandudno to Chester.  A substantial sum of money was found in his pockets.  Later the body was identified at that of Mr Frederick Duncan Wills, of Brian Mellard, Ashley-road, Altincham, a member of the firm of W D and O Wills, tobacco manufacturers, Bristol.  Mr Wills had gone to the races from Llandudno, where he had been staying, and the struggle of getting on the course had obviously put too great a strain upon his heart

Henry Overton Wills III aged 82 in 1911, enormously wealthy and a philanthropist on a grand scale.  He had funded Bristol University and was its senior Pro-Chancellor.  Four of his seven sons survived him.  But the mountains had not finished with the family – in 1925 Walter Melville Wills' 28 year old son Harold, an antique dealer, died in 1925 in an avalanche when ski-ing in Switzerland.

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., pp. 25 & 27 & 38

[2] ibid., p. 80

77. Family ties: John's "earnest" sister Mrs Elizabeth Rooker

Meanwhile, by 1871 John's sister Elizabeth and her husband Alfred Rooker had also moved out of town into the country outside Plymouth, where they were Mary and Charles Tubbs' nearest neighbours.  

Their house 'Mount View' was very comfortable indeed as befitted Alfred, who was a man of considerable importance in the town.  The 1932 advertisement for its sale on the death of the last of their family describes a detached house standing in nearly 4 acres of land and reached by private road and carriage drive.  It offered their little family – father, mother and two daughters – three reception rooms, a library, a billiard-room, ground floor domestic offices, two bathrooms, six bed and dressing-rooms, and maids' rooms.  The idyllic picture was completed by the "beautifully-timbered grounds, terraced on the south front, together with Greenhouse, Stabling, and 4-roomed Cottage".  (Visitors to Plymouth will, I think, find the houses of Hartley Road and Kingsland Gardens Close on the site.)

Alfred Rooker (1814-75)

Alfred Rooker was a Plymouth solicitor and the sort of man whom nowadays the press would call "Mr Plymouth".  He was made a member of the Corporation without either standing for election or representing any ward, and was immediately elected Alderman in 1848 and was Mayor in 1851.  

He was enormously active in every field of civic and charitable life in the town.  He even stood for parliament in 1871 at his friends' urging, but he was defeated at the ballot.  He was the major force behind the building of Plymouth's new Guildhall and so, when the Prince of Wales came to Plymouth for its opening, Alfred was chosen to be Mayor for the second time and the Prince was his guest for lunch at 'Mount View'.

He was, wrote his niece Mary Hopkinson, "always a standby in the family – a valuable helper to our Father in regard to money matters which had to be settled regarding his sisters and himself". [1]  Elizabeth herself was an indefatigable correspondent.  She was also rather jealous of John's attention.  When he was courting Alice she was very insistent that John made time to write to his sisters too

since you are able to pop over [to Skipton] now and then, I cannot allow that it is needful for you to spend much time in writing also – this portion must be devoted to us I think [2]

She wrote to him frequently to tell him of personal matters, family news, and details of family life in letters that Ellen Ewing found long-winded and sententious.  She sent Alice, newly returned from honeymoon, one of her "customary little homilies"

We must not expect your lot to be perfectly exempt from trials; for, during our earthly pilgrimage, the cloud will sometimes obscure the brightest path; but, as far as human forethought can devine, there is every prospect of yours being a truly happy home [3]

In her early years of marriage Elizabeth was so active in her voluntary work that her health suffered and, wrote John to Alice in September 1856, Dr Kidd told her 

she must be content to live like a lady – give up committees, receive no company but dear friends – take no thought for her house, let servants take care of the children, get her husband to buy a carriage ... lie down half the day – and then he had no doubt in twelve months she would be as strong as ever [4]

Looking in the later press, I find she was still busy in the 1880s, supporting a bazaar to raise funds for the Convalescent Home at Knackersknowle, subscribing to the Devon and Cornwall Homoeopathic Dispensary, running a stall at the bazaar for the Sherwell Chapel schools, and acting as treasurer of the local auxiliary of the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Jews.  When she died in 1887, the minister of the Sherwell Congregational Chapel spoke of her as 

one of the most earnest and successful teachers in the Sunday-school in Norley-street.  Although compelled through feeble health to discontinue that good work she afterwards began a mother's meeting, which, with a daughter's help, she had ever since continued 

and, speaking of "her tender sympathy and true kindliness", he described how

her hearty sympathy went out, and her cheerful help was given to Christian work in all directions [5]

We can see her very earnest and rather ponderous style in her response to the academic successes of young John and Alfred, writing on 31 December 1868

oh, darling Alice, my prayer is that this year may witness to the consecration of all those noble powers to the service of their Lord and Master.  May every earthly honour be crowned by a yet greater blessing, being sanctified and laid with a grateful heart at the feet of Him who justly claims a large and rich return of the talents committed to their care and trust [6]

One of her earliest fields of work was in the Emigration Society, in which she was deeply interested.  

Millions left Britain during the 19th century and early 20th century.  The Liverpool Maritime Museum website says that it is estimated that between 1830 and 1930 over 9 million left from Liverpool alone.  Plymouth was already a major emigration port by the 1840s, and by 1898 well over 200,000 people had left from there.  The ladies of Plymouth had been quick to respond to the need for support for the women emigrants – for them, the long journey out to Australia was fraught with physical and moral danger.  We can see the problems in a letter written to Charles Dickens by Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell on 8 January 1850. [7] 

This is a little over a year after the death of his sister Fanny Burnett and her little boy Harry, and Mrs Gaskell reminds him that she had some years earlier asked Henry Burnett to ask Dickens for a prospectus for the wealthy philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts' Refuge for Female Prisoners.  Dickens had replied that he didn't think that such schemes could work unless combined with a scheme of emigration, as Miss Coutts' was.  Mrs Gaskell was now trying to get help for a young girl in the New Bayley Prison in Manchester whose sad little story is a vivid reminder of the story of the very many women who were by far less fortunate than the Hopkinson girls.  

This girl was the daughter of an Irish clergyman who had died when she was two.  Her mother had never taken an interest in her, had remarried, and then left the child with a foster nurse.  When she was six her uncle found her a place in a Dublin school for clergy orphans.  At about the age of 14 she was apprenticed to an Irish dressmaker in Manchester of great reputation, but the dressmaker's business had failed and she had to dismiss her apprentices.  She found the girl a place with the woman who had taken over her business, but this "profligate" woman had connived in the girl's seduction by a surgeon who had visited the house when she was ill.  Her letters to her mother went unanswered, so she went into the Manchester and Salford Female Penitentiary.  But she was tricked into leaving it by a woman who conned her way inside so as to look for girls to trick into prostitution.  Despairing, suicidal, having pawned all her clothing, in the end the girl was caught stealing and been put in gaol.  Mrs Gaskell was keen to help her emigrate to Australia to have the chance of a fresh start, and the uncle was paying the cost.  

But the account of common emigrant ships is so bad one would not like to expose her to such chances of corruption; and what I want you to tell me is, how Miss Coutts sends out her protegees? under the charge of a matron? and might she be included among them? I want her to go out with as free and unbranded a character as she can; if possible, the very fact of having been in prison &c to be unknown on her landing. I will try and procure her friends when she arrives; only how am I to manage about the voyage? and how soon will a creditable ship sail; for she comes out of prison on Wednesday, & there are two of the worst women in the town who have been in prison with her, intending to way-lay her, and I want to keep her out of all temptation, and even chance of recognition. Please, will you help me?

Miss Coutts sent suggestions, including writing "to the Plymouth Ladies" – their existence was news to Mrs Gaskell, she had never heard of them before.  (In the event, Mrs Gaskell was able to find people to escort the girl to London and for a respectable couple to take the girl to South Africa)

This was the sort of problem that Elizabeth and her colleagues were dealing with.  Their Society provided matrons to go out with what could be a very mixed collection of young women, so as to keep them in order and out of mischief, with supplies of needlework and knitting to keep them usefully occupied, and ideally to teach reading and writing and scriptural instruction.  A grateful letter published in the Salisbury and Winchester Journal of 23 March 1850 tells an encouraging tale of

four respectable young women (two of whom were orphans) who were sent by the same ship; and as it exhibits what is to be hoped in the rule on board these well-ordered ships rather than the exceptions which have lately attracted so much attention, we give it insertion 

The letter praises the food and the officers, and explains that

the ladies at the depot gave us many useful things – a bag full of books for useful instruction, a quantity of slates, pencils, writing-books, work-bags, cotton for knitting, and have sent on board likewise a quantity of useful work to keep us employed on our voyage; after which, according to our behaviour, it will be distributed among us

(Work being knitting or sewing – they often seem to have made sun bonnets, which they would find useful in Australia)

The matrons had to keep daily diary entries and one, which can be read online, is the account of an exhausted matron's fifteen week voyage from Plymouth, arriving in Sydney on 1 April 1857.  She endured many sleepless nights as keeping order among the girls was a constant battle.  One of the girls was particularly difficult and had an unerring ability to stir up trouble among the others.  There was bullying, fights, mass hysteria in the bad weather, and a girl who had managed to conceal her pregnancy gave birth on board.  The poor matron wrote [8]

Their tempers talents religion & disposition are so varied that it requires something more than normal strength to keep any order among them

In August 1874 Alfred Rooker's civic career reached its peak.  The future Edward VII was to open the Guildhall and Law Courts, the new civic building for which Alfred had campaigned and had worked so hard.  (The Guildhall was destroyed in the 1941 Plymouth Blitz, but restored after the War)

Plymouth Guildhall, by Sergei Gussev

The Prince of Wales arrived in Plymouth by train while his suite travelled by the Royal yacht 'Osborne'.  The streets of the town were planted with trees, hung with flags and decked with triumphal arches and the crowds were out for a grand procession through Plymouth among the cheering people. 

 

There was a Masonic event the next day on a grand scale, much ceremonial visiting of civic sites and local charities, and then – surely the key moment for all the extended family – lunch with Mr Rooker at 'Mount View'.  Surely Elizabeth was there as well, though not mentioned in the press reports, and perhaps the Rooker daughters Alice and Marian were there too.  Alfred then joined the Prince, the mayor of Devonport, the chief naval and military authorities and the Prince's suite for dinner on board the Royal yacht.

This was the year that Alfred decided to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.  He was now 60 years old and his career had been deeply satisfying and successful.  He and Elizabeth, with 27 year old Alice and 23 year old Marian, left Plymouth for the Mediterranean on 3 December 1874.  They were travelling between Damascus and Baalbek when Alfred fell ill with "Syrian fever" on 22 May 1875.  He was carried in a litter to Beirut where he died on 27 May.

The Western Morning News' coverage on 11 August 1875 of Alfred's funeral takes up two and a quarter columns.  The reporter wrote of the painful suspense of the delay in getting the body to England.  The days needed for its embalming, the baffling winds, the commercial exigencies, which took up so much time.  The huge procession at the funeral, beginning with a large number of the Plymouth police, the six carriages of family and close friends (John Hopkinson was with his sister Elizabeth in the first carriage, Alice was in the third carriage with Charles Tubbs and his second wife Isabella), the Mayor and Corporation, the Borough officials, the Guardians of the Poor, the School Board, Sunday School teachers and scholars, gentlemen from Devonport, members of the Plymouth Working Men's Association, members of the Sunday School unions, the missions and congregational unions and chapels, doctors, lawyers, pressmen, members of the Plymouth Institution, the Plymouth Mechanics' Institute, the boys of the Grey Coat School … It was nearly half a mile in length, and the blinds of nearly every house on the way were drawn, many of the town's shops partly closed, and the Board schools closed for the day.

This was the heyday of civic pride and competition, often expressed in statues.  Alfred's colleagues on the Corporation and his friends in the town subscribed to a memorial.  They had raised nearly £1,400 in a month, and they applied for leave to put up a statue to Alfred.  The Council decided that this should stand in Guildhall Square showing him as Mayor with a chart of the Guildhall in his hand.  It was unveiled on 20 September 1878 and must have been destroyed in the Blitz, which left the Guildhall in ruins.  (I realise that Alice Bragg said in her autobiography that Alfred had put up a statue to himself – this really was not so [9])

A month after attending Alfred's funeral, John and Alice were struck with tragedy themselves when their daughter Ellen fell ill with scarlet fever and died at the age of 21, and their daughter Mary was dangerously ill.  At the same time John will have been supporting by letter his sister Elizabeth Rooker, now a widow at 55.  

Elizabeth lived on at 'Mount View' with her daughters for another 12 years.  She died on 2 March 1887 during the spring when John and Alice were in such great anxiety over their daughter Gertrude's health and the painful treatment for her deafness.  Elizabeth was buried with Alfred in the Rooker family tomb in Ford Park Cemetery, where her mother Alice Hopkinson had been buried in 1852.

The two Rooker daughters lived on at their family home for the rest of their lives.  

As girls they had gone with their parents on holiday to Llangollen in 1859 where they were joined by their uncle John Hopkinson and cousins 10 year old John and 8 year old Alfred.  Alfred and Marian (who must have been known, at least in her childhood, as May) were the same age, and John wrote to Alice on 20 June 1859

May took to Alfred at once last night, shewed him the pictorial bible, asked him many questions and then amused us greatly by her report – 'Well, I see you know pretty much' as she obtained satisfactory replies [10]

So it seems that Marian had her mother's forceful character.  

Alice died at the age of 43 in April 1890 after a life of devoted voluntary work.  The Western Morning News of 9 April 1890 reported that there were "representatives of the Bethel, the Friendless Girls Aid Society, the Industrial Girls School, and of several similar associations in which Miss Rooker in her lifetime took so earnest and liberal an interest" at the funeral and listed among the family mourners her aunt and uncle the Revd and Mrs Tubbs of Reading and "Mr Hopkinson".  

Marian lived until she was 80 years old, dying after several years of illness on 8 November 1931.  She had joined the Sherwell Congregational Church in 1868 and at her death was second on its membership roll.  In his funeral address the minister described her, the Western Morning News reported on 14 November 1931, as 

a noble soul with unwavering character … in her youth Marian Rooker intended to be a medical practitioner, but an accident prevented it.  

So she had hoped for a career.  We don't know what prevented it; perhaps the death of her father.

The minister's address continued

She was the most human soul one could meet, and dabbled in mathematics and Greek as hobbies.  In early days she contributed much to the service of Sherwell Church, which was dear to her, and a definite proportion of her income she set aside for God's work.

How much good Miss Rooker did in a quiet way and how much help she rendered privately would never be known.  She held strong theological views of the more conservative school; would that more of the moderns had her intensive evangelical fervour

The floral tributes included one from the Principal and Mrs Murray of Exeter – this was Nelly Hopkinson, elder daughter of Marian's cousin Alfred, and her second husband Dr John Murray, who was principal of the University College of the South-West (now Exeter University).

The Rooker family tomb
in Ford Park Cemetery, Plymouth, courtesy of Julia&Keld @ findagrave.com

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. XXII

[2] ibid., p. 10 

[3] ibid., p. 13

[4] ibid., p. 26

[5] Western Morning News, 14 March 1887

[6] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 52

[7] See

https://www.enotes.com/topics/elizabeth-gaskell/criticism/criticism/jenny-uglow-essay-date-1993  

http://victorian-studies.net/EG-Letters-CD.html

[8] https://mhnsw.au/stories/on-this-day/chaperones-diary-1857-fitzjames-voyage-to-sydney/

[9] Crystal Clear: The Autobiographies of Sir Lawrence and Lady Bragg, ed. A M Glazer and Patience Thomson (2015), pub. OUP

 

[10] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 30

76. Family ties: Mary Tubbs' widower & children

Six years after Mary's death, in July 1872, Charles remarried.  His second wife was Isabella Thompson from Workington in Cumberland.  She had been with Mary when she died and had registered the death for Charles.  We don't know why she was living with the Tubbs family at the time.  She was 26 years old and must have been a visitor, governess or possibly even a nurse.  She was 23 years younger than Charles and they had a daughter together in 1874.  

By 1881 the family had moved to a rather smaller house called 'Beechfield', which seems to have been newly built in the fields between Charles Tubbs' house 'Mount Athos' and the Rookers at 'Mount View'.

O.S. Mount View & Beechfield, Pennycross
Surveyed 1892-3, published 1896
National Library of Scotland

Charles obviously made a comfortable living, but not enough to stretch to keeping eight daughters for the rest of their lives.  Unsurprisingly they – unlike the Hopkinson sisters – had to go out to work.  At least five of them were teachers: Mary, Eva, Dora, Lilian and Alice.  Their brother Charles Ernest disappears from the records.  I think he probably emigrated.  

Mary, the eldest, was a couple of years older than her cousin John Hopkinson.  She was particularly beloved by her aunt Alice Hopkinson, who would have liked her to marry young John if only they hadn't been cousins [1].  Mary Tubbs became a well-known and formidable headmistress.  She ran, first with a colleague and then with her sisters, a successful prep school for boys on the edge of Plymouth.  We don't know how many boys from the family passed through her hands, but the 1901 census shows that among the 27 boys boarding at 'Mount House' were John and Alice's 10 year old grandson Keith Wilberforce Tribe and Mary's 11 year old nephew Eric Foulger Wills, the son of her sister Eva.

When the school building was closed after a serious diphtheria epidemic, she moved it to her old home, 'Mount Athos' and renamed the house to 'Mount House'.  It was evacuated from Plymouth in the Second World War and Mary's school now a co-educational prep school in Tavistock.  The old building, which had been the Tubbs' home, is part of the Plymouth College Preparatory School.

Mary retired with her younger sister and assistant Lilian to live at 'Byfield' in Mannamead on the outskirts of Plymouth.  There Mary devoted herself to a great many philanthropic organisations, makaing her large garden available for many a meeting and event, until her sudden death at the age of 74.  She had always loved to hear from old boys of her school.

Many of these kept up a regular correspondence with her, among them being some who had achieved success and distinction in high places

wrote her obituarist in the Western Morning News of 31 December 1921, which described her as

A woman of very strong character, she combined this trait with the possession of a kind heart, and although bogus appeals to her charitable nature were speedily found out, genuine cases of distress were never turned away.

Eleven years after Mary's death and long after John and Alice Hopkinson had died, Lilian made the most unexpected marriage in a heart-warming story which attracted the eager attention of the press.  

"After a courtship lasting more than 50 years," wrote the Daily Mirror on 26 March 1932.  "Rumoured to be the outcome of a boy and girl affection," wrote the Western Morning News two days earlier.  Lilian was very well known in Plymouth as an active member of the Sherwell Congregational Church – her formidable sister Mary had become an Anglican – and as a teacher, so it was hardly surprising that the romantic story meant that the church was packed and the police were kept busy outside preventing the crowds from falling under the wheels of passing traffic. 

Friends of the bride told the Western Morning News that 71 year old Lilian was "radiantly happy, and had exercised the greatest care in the choice of her trousseau".  The bridegroom was 69 year old Mr Harold Spencer.

Miss Tubbs, a frail, white-haired figure, was attractively gowned in a two-piece ensemble of soft blue cloth, the collar of the coat finished with ermine fur and tails.  Her black hat was trimmed with a black ostrich plume, which fell gracefully over the crown, and she carried a bouquet of lilies of the valley and white heather, tied with white satin ribbons.  The bridegroom also wore a spray of white heather in his buttonhole.

Harold, according to the reporter, came from Chester and was a lineal descendant of the famous Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser.  They had, I think, six years together which I hope made up for the long years apart.  Lilian outlived Harold, dying in August 1944 at a nursing home in Clevedon in Somerset.

By the time Lilian married in 1932, she had outlived all but one of her sisters.  

Her sister Edith Annie had died long before.  She had gone out to northern India to marry a missionary, the Revd Thomas Insell, in the Mission Church at Mirzapur on 14 December 1876.  She died there four months later.  Dora Tubbs had died aged 42 in 1900.  Alice Tubbs had married at the age of 37 in the church of St Andrew's, Plymouth, where her new husband the Revd Douglas Perceval Hatchard had been a curate for 7 years.  At last he had a wife and a living, becoming the vicar of Keynsham in Someset – but after 8 years of marriage Alice died in the vicarage in 1909.

Angelina Maria Tubbs had died in 1915 in her early 40s.  Kathleen, the baby of the family, had died in 1923 in France at the Pension Rioadet in Hyères.  She was 49.  She and her husband Dr Walter Kenneth Wills had a son and daughter, both in their early twenties.  Ellen Tubbs – who seems to have been the sister who stayed at home – had died in 1928 aged 75.  

Only Lilian and Eva Blanche were left by then.  Eva had married in 1887 when she was 33 years old.  

Samuel Day Wills
(1837-1909)

She became the second wife of Samuel Day Wills, the younger brother of Henry Overton Wills III – and Henry was married to Eva's aunt, the youngest Hopkinson sister.  

Alice (née Dewhurst) had not been much taken with the 28 year old Samuel when she stayed with the Wills family in 1865, writing to John, "The young Wills's – Edward and William Henry – never know me, and Samuel very slightly acknowledges the acquaintance." [2]

This was the third of five marriages between the Wills family and the extended family around Alice and John Hopkinson.  The convoluted tale goes like this:

First John's youngest sister Alice had married Henry Overton Wills III in 1853.  Then Alice and Henry's son Henry Herbert Wills married Mary Monica Cunliffe-Owen in 1886 – Albert Hopkinson married her younger sister Olga in 1891.  Thirdly came Eva's marriage to 50 year old Samuel Day Wills.  Fourthly, Hilda Dewhurst married Alice and Henry's son Arthur Stanley Wills in 1890.  Lastly in 1899, Dr Walter Kenneth Wills, a son of Samuel Day Wills from his first marriage, married Kathleen Isabella, the daughter of Charles Foulger Tubbs and his second wife Isabella Thompson.

Samuel and his first wife had seven children, but their third son William had died aged 14 in a fall from a cliff eighteen months before his mother died on Christmas Day at the age of 44.  Eva and Samuel had one son together, Eric Foulger Wills, a schoolmaster, who married and had five children.  Eric was very keen on finding traces of Ancient Egyptian lore and the Osiris cult in the landscape around Bristol and his Egypt in Bristol: A Prehistoric Study embracing the Mendips, South Gloucestershire and Bristol was published in 1937 by St Stephen's Bristol Press Ltd (under the name E F Wills).  Second-hand copies are sometimes to be found but the only description I have seen of the book online simply describes it as "crazy".

Eva outlived Lilian, dying at the age of 91 in February 1946.

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. 58

[2] ibid., p. 47

75. Family ties: John's "sweet sister" Mrs Mary Tubbs

John's sisters had moved away from Manchester when they married.  His sister Mary was the tender-hearted girl who had secretly brought him food when he had been sent to bed in disgrace with no supper.  He was only five and she was eight, and he had managed to fall in a muddy ditch though he had been expressly told not to get his clean clothes dirty.

When their mother died in 1852, Mary had missed her badly.  She was the sister who wrote to Alice 

I cannot tell you how I daily miss her even now and it seems to me that I can never feel so thoroughly at home here as before my dear Mother's death.  Her love did indeed sweeten our lot.  Dearly as I loved her I knew not fully what she was to us until we lost her [1]

Her gentleness can be seen in Alice’s description of her, when she wrote to John on 8 July 1866 after Mary's death

I have been thinking, dearest, it might be for the Glory of God and the education and encouragement of many if you could say something of our dear Mary in a Sunday School address.  Her earnest piety, great prayerfulness, unobtrusive but earnest endeavours to bring others to Jesus, her gentle meek spirit, altogether there was such a sweet savour of Christ about her that it seems as if the perfume of such a life should be shed abroad [2]

Mary had married Charles Foulger Tubbs in 1844.  She must have met him through her brother-in-law George Ibberson Tubbs, as they were half-brothers.  Charles was a dentist and he and Mary settled in Plymouth where he set up practice.  Alice went there herself for treatment in October 1850, and Charles Tubbs took out an old tooth for her.  She wrote to John afterwards

On Saturday I inhaled Chloroform and had the old stump extracted.  I was not wholey [sic] insensible to the pain, but felt neither wish nor power to help myself ... I felt no other effects from the Chloroform than great sleepiness the rest of the day [3]

Charles was keeping properly up-to-date in the latest developments in dentistry.  It had only been in July 1848 that the 29 year old Francis Brodie Imlach had begun a lecture to the Medico-Chirurgical Society of Edinburgh with the striking words

Early in November last, I extracted the first tooth ever drawn from a patient placed under the anaesthetic influence of chloroform

and that was only days after his friend and colleague James Young Simpson had first used chloroform in obstetrics. [4]

A reputation as an up-to-the-minute practitioner in painless dentistry could only be helpful to Charles, and he soon established himself successfully in Plymouth.  This was fortunate as he was to have a very large family.  By the mid-1860s they had moved into the countryside above the town, taking a large house called 'Mount Athos' (its earlier name was 'Athos Villa') where there was plenty of room and good fresh air.  It even gave Charles the scope to do a little farming – in February 1874 he was advertising "ten fine South Ham ewes with fourteen strong lambs" for sale in the Western Morning News.  Their nearest neighbours were the Rookers at 'Mount View', so Mary had the support – possibly sometimes rather overbearing and didactic, it must be admitted – of her forceful elder sister Elizabeth.   

OS. c1854-1863 Mount View & Athos Villa
(National Library of Scotland)

But in 1866 Mary died.  This was the second of two traumatic deaths in childbed that year, a deep affliction for Alice who was pregnant herself.  Lizzie died on 14 May and Mary on 26 June. 

We have lost two sweet sisters; but not lost; we know where they are and would endeavour to rejoice in their joy

wrote Alice to John in her letter of 8 July 1866 [5].  On 30 September her twelfth baby was born and died.  This was the summer when Alice became increasingly unwell and ever more dependent on her 12 year old daughter Nelly. 

Mary died aged 43 at the end of her eleventh pregnancy.  The death certificate shows that something had gone very wrong.  It reads "Extra Uterine Fetation [Foetation] 9 months".  

So she had been pregnant for nine months when she died.  Possibly, as the doctor certified, the pregnancy was abdominal – an ectopic pregnancy that had, very unusually, reached term.  In 1880 ectopic pregnancies had a mortality rate of 72% to 90%.  Or possibly there had been some terrible complication with labour, or the baby had died in the womb and she had not gone into labour but had become very ill, and the doctor had interpreted what he saw on examination as a pregnancy outside the womb.

Only two years earlier there had been a report from St Bart's Hospital in London which contained a discussion of "Missed Labour" (that is, the child dying in the womb and labour failing to come on) and how this should not be confused with a pregnancy in the abdominal cavity, nor with premature labour producing a decomposing ovum.  In those days it was not easy for doctors to distinguish between them. [6]

Whatever had happened, it must have been an appalling situation for everyone.  Charles, now 50, was left with their nine surviving children – the eldest was Charles Ernest, a 20 year old engineer, and then came seven daughters, ranging from Mary aged 19 to Alice aged 2.  

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. XXX

[2] ibid., p. 48

[3] ibid., p. 17

[4] https://publishing.rcseng.ac.uk/doi/10.1308/rcsfdj.2025.5 

Chloroform’s first use in dentistry: the making of an RCS Edinburgh dental president.  Author: Robin Fixter-Paterson

 

[5] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 48

[6] St Bartholomew's Hospital Reports on the causes, diagnosis, pathology, and treatment of Missed Labour, with illustrative cases.  By Robert Greenhalgh, MD 1864

https://darwin-online.org.uk/converted/pdf/1875_AndrewSmithSaint%20Bartholomew%27sHospitalReports_A3355.pdf