52. John Hopkinson, Councillor & Alderman

John also threw his energies into civic work.  It was almost certainly the state of the River Medlock that spurred John to stand as a City Councillor, and the story of how he achieved his objectives shows his tenacity, his clearness of vision and his ability to get the other councillors to take steps.

He had tried three years earlier to get the council to do something about the state of the Medlock in 1858 but nothing was done.  So the river was one of his earliest priorities after he had been elected unopposed as councillor for St Luke's ward in the council elections in the autumn of 1861.

Councillor Hopkinson "felt it his duty to bring this subject up again", wrote the reporter from the Manchester Courier on 11 January 1862.  John described the state of the river.  

The Medlock was obstructed by a bank of rubbish which had been building up over many years at the end of Riley Street.  It was known as Barnes's Oyster Bed because it was mostly made up of oyster shells from a nearby market stall.  Above Jackson Street (more or less under today's Morton Laboratory) people dumped domestic rubbish – broken mugs, old tin pots, and so on.  The tin cans filled up with debris and sank like stones to the bottom of the river, which was now silted up to a depth of about 3 feet.  In some places the original river bed was 7 feet under.  The Hulme Street tunnel (where the loop in the river was culverted – the area between the river and the railway line to the north being known as Little Ireland) should have been 12 feet high but it was only 8 feet above the water line.  The bridge at Downing Street only had 4 feet 9 inches clearance and in the flood of 1857, the water was 2 feet 6 inches below the arch.  The next flood would bring disaster.  

He showed the councillors diagrams of the bridges, and explained his suggested alterations for carrying away surface water.  He suggested clearing out the river bed and protecting it from future rubbish.  The council had the power to do this, but it hadn't acted.  Scores of people were fined for obstructing the streets but only one had been fined for obstructing the Medlock.

Councillor Neil said this had been raised before, the fault was with the owners and they ought to bear the cost.  Alderman Bennett recommended that Councillor Hopkinson should "get up a memorial of owners of property on the river, asking the Council to obtain the conservancy of the river".  John replied that he had done just that in 1858 and that the owners who didn't throw rubbish in the river had the right to be protected from the ones who did.  He had got an estimate for the work from one of the council's most experienced contractors.  The councillors gave in, and the resolution was passed.

It didn’t produce immediate results but John didn't give up.  In February 1863 he presented the council with another report on the river.  Finally, in September 1864, the council accepted a recommendation from the rivers committee that had been set up under John’s pressure, and the work was carried out.  The Corporation's professional advisers had suggested a relief tunnel.  John supervised the much less expensive option which he advised and which the councillors accepted.  By clearing the river bed, building retaining walls, fencing the banks to stop rubbish being thrown in, replacing fixed weirs with tilting weirs, and persuading and helping the property owners to bear their share of the costs, John's obituary in the journal of the Institute of Civil Engineers noted [1], the council got the result it wanted and the frequent floods were much reduced.

In July 1872 there was the most appalling storm over Manchester.  Rain fell so heavily for more than 13 hours that in many places the Medlock had risen by more than 21 feet.  The water tore through the City Cemetery next to Philips Park and washed some 60 bodies out of their graves in the Catholic section of the cemetery, strewing them along the river's course.  The Times of 15 July 1872 reported that 

the flood found its way into … the machine shop of Messrs Wren and Hopkinson, which was flooded to the height of two stories … A large quantity of water escaping from [the Gorton] reservoir swept over the populous village of Fallowfield, flooding the turnpike road to the depth of several feet, and filling and damaging the cottages of the poor, besides doing much other damage

The damage to the large factories was, according to The Times two days later, estimated at £40,000 and 

Besides this, many thousands of workpeople are thrown out of employment.  The scenes in the houses in the low-lying neighbourhoods near the river are described as most pitiable, almost all the inhabitants having been flooded out and deprived of their furniture.

John's son Alfred, who was 21 at the time, wrote in his memoirs of being involved in distributing relief among the poor

The rooms in some of the houses in low-lying districts had been flooded up to the ceiling with a mixture of mud and water, including even a few corpses that had been washed out of a cemetery adjoining the river.  Back-to-back houses were common.  One cheerful and fine-looking Irishwoman I remember was scrubbing her husband's trousers.  Her house consisted of one room far below the level of the street from which it was approached by a steep flight of stone steps.  It had no window except into a tiny flagged entry, and there was a deposit of three or four inches of foul black mud on the floor.  She seemed fairly cheerful under the circumstances and grateful for a very small sum to help in replacing some bits of bedding and furniture.  Owing to the action of my father and other members of the Corporation obstructions on the old river have been removed and such flooding is no longer possible . [2]

John's passionate and outspoken determination on the subject of flooding and the poor can be seen again in 1874, two years after the great storm, when a report on drainage was before the council.  He suggested the report be referred back to the committee, wrote the reporter from the Manchester Courier on 10 December 1874, so they could consider not only how to deal safely with storm water from the valleys of the Medlock and the Irk, but also "the complete interception of the drainage of the city":

He did not understand why those persons who, because they were high and dry themselves, and lived in the wealthier quarters of the town, had no sympathy with the poorer portion of the population who were obliged to live in the valley of the Medlock.  If they had seen the results of the last calamity with which those poor people were visited, he believed the council would be more ready to proceed with this work.  It was not simply the houses of the living that were invaded by the last flood, but the dwelling-places of the dead. 

From water, he moved on the supply of gas.  When the Parks Committee made problems about building a new gasworks on Bradford Road near to Philips Park, the reporter from the Manchester Evening News of 1 March 1871 reported that John said 

The question remained – Were they to have gas?  If they had not new gasworks, they would in a few years be in darkness.  ("No, no.")  This winter the supply was reduced to such an extent that, had the pressure not been reduced, the street lamps would have gone out in another hour.  He argued that it was the interest of the Council to make gas; that there was need for a further supply of gas; and that the works need not be a nuisance. 

Perhaps his visit to Paris in 1867, when he wrote home to Alice

I should like to apprentice a few of our town councillors or aldermen here for a few years.  London and Manchester might well take a lesson 

played a part in his firm belief in the possibilities of local government.  At one council meeting the Manchester Times of 5 October 1872 reported him saying that

He had wide ideas, however, as to the province of corporations, and held that they might do for the public anything which they could do better than the public themselves, and he quoted as examples parks, libraries, cemeteries, the provision of water and gas, and abattoirs.

He supported the Liberal party in Parliament and Manchester's Liberal MPs.  Gerald Hurst, who evidently read some of the original letters, mentions in his Preface several political events that featured in letters which were not included in the edited edition and are now lost: Disraeli speaking in the Free Trade Hall in 1844, John Bright in 1845 and hearing the exiled Hungarian revolutionary and statesman Lajos Kossuth speak at Bradford in 1850 [3]

His son Alfred's memoirs Penultima give us one vivid picture of John at election time.  Alfred was six

John Bright in 1870s

 years old when he saw his father campaigning for John Bright the Radical and Liberal MP, a great orator and promoter of Free Trade in 1857.  

I saw my father on the outside of a four-wheeled cab, with red handkerchiefs flying, driving voters to the poll for Bright and Gibson.  I can never forget how he came home in the evening, sad and bitterly disappointed, because the great man whom we all admired so much had been rejected by our city. [4]

Bright lost his seat because, in the teeth of public opinion, he had waged an impassioned opposition to the Crimean War.  (Gerald Hurst mentions the family celebrating the National Fast Day on 21 March 1855 called by Queen Victoria because of terrible losses in the Crimea; this is from another letter which has not survived).

In the Manchester Courier of 7 December 1882 we see another example of John's support of the Liberals.  At a rather riotous meeting on 16 Jan 1882 when Jacob Bright MP and John Slagg MP addressed their constituents, John moved a resolution "expressing approval of the policy of justice, freedom, and peace pursued by her Majesty's Government, and confidence in the Liberal members for the city".

But Manchester had a substantial Irish population and this was the time of the Land War in Ireland over evictions and rents, and the Liberal government had passed a Coercion Act in 1881 suspending habeas corpus and trial by jury.  An amendment was proposed to protest against coercion and to condemn John Slagg.  Slagg rose to speak and was greeted by uproar – the meeting couldn't continue until "a considerable number" of the angry Irish had been ejected.

In 1885, John's son Alfred stood unsuccessfully as Liberal candidate for Manchester East and naturally John and the family were there to back him.  John wrote on 25 November 1885

Tomorrow, Alfred and some of his family and myself with Mother and some of the girls are to have open carriages and pairs and drive about to the Committee Rooms and polling stations [p 89] [5]

But John did not like party politics intruding into local government, and he was forthright on the subject.  When, in November 1873, four names were put forward for the committee on Free Libraries and Councillor Marshall objected that they were all Liberals and he thought "they ought not to make their committee one-sided", John, reported the Manchester Courier, said

if they were to take Mr Marshall's dictum, political considerations were to have a claim in appointing the committees.  (Cries of "They have.")  He trusted that in making the appointments no invidious considerations would be allowed.

And he was very quick and forceful in dealing with the opponents of the proposed gasworks who had actually gone to the lengths of making malicious and damaging allegations against him, the Manchester Evening News of 5 May 1875 reporting that

Alderman Hopkinson said there was not the slightest foundation for the statements made outside that he had purchased the Bradford site as a private speculation; and, secondly, that having purchased the site, he went to the Gas Committee and got them to take it off his hands.  Throughout the negotiations he had acted as the agent of the Committee

And it was as a member of the Gas Committee that he settled miles of frontier with neighbouring authorities and had a hand in the laying out of the main lines of the Bradford Road works.  The gasworks project, which would triple the gas supply, went ahead and John was asked to lay the foundation stone.  He had given his professional services to the Corporation for nothing and, the Manchester Courier of 13 October 1877 reported, he was presented at the ceremony with a silver trowel and mallet. 

Ordnance Survey map (Lancashire CIV.NE - surveyed 1905-7 and published 1909) Bradford Road Gasworks, Manchester National Library of Scotland 

John put his professional expertise to use again in dealing with providing main sewage and purification works, road widening schemes and new traffic arteries, and campaigning for the Manchester Ship Canal.

It's no surprise to hear, given his own experience with fire, that he took a close interest in the  reorganisation of the Fire Brigade and was chairman of the Fire Brigade Committee.  In fact, he and a scientific friend contrived, but didn't develop, an early form of water sprinkler.  His son Alfred described it in his memoirs

They arranged a sloping glass tube on a pivot, and a marble or disc was held in place at the upper end of the tube by some substance which melted at a low temperature.  If a fire occurred, this substance melted, the marble descended and a lever was released which could either ring a bell or turn on a jet of water. [p 108 P] [6]

(Frederick Grinnell's automatic sprinkler was patented in 1881)

John was in the gathering in Albert Square in October 1891 when two new Merryweather steam fire engines were tested – very light machines in proportion to their power, ideal for Manchester's hilly districts.  The public watched entranced as the engines raised steam from cold water to 100lb pressure in less than nine minutes, and threw enormous powerful jets of water 235 feet horizontally.  John had been one of the men supervising their construction.  The Manchester Courier considered them "handsome" with their shiny vermilion paint and 'Manchester Fire Brigade' in gold on the sides, and they delivered over 500 gallons of water per minute which was more than satisfactory.

Over the years John was on the Watch Committee, the Finance Committee, the Town Hall Committee and the Free Libraries Committee.  He was at different times a city magistrate, the chairman of the Southern Hospital, was on the board of Owen's College, and was a Commissioner of Inland Revenue. 

The highlight of his many years' work for the Manchester Corporation must have been his year as Mayor.

John had been returned unopposed at the council elections of 1864, 1867 and 1870, and in September 1872 when the alderman for All Saints' ward had died and left a vacancy, his fellow councillors had elected him alderman by 31 votes to his opponent's 24.  He would be an Alderman of Manchester for the rest of his life.  (The point of Aldermen, under the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, was to provide continuity and avoid losing experienced councillors, and the Act provided that they could be elected by the Council from among the councillors or from anyone qualified to be a councillor.  A councillor's term of office was three years; an alderman's was six.  But in Manchester an alderman was an alderman until death or resignation). 

At the end of 1881 a new chapter of John's working life began.  His partnership with Henry Wren seems often to have been an uneasy one and in 1881 the end was seriously under consideration.  Alice wrote to John

My notion is that he will follow out this plan as likely to be the most inconvenient to you and that his idea will be to buy in the concern for he will be well assured that he has the money advantage.  Somehow my faith in his nobility is so small that I should give him credit for wishing to make it as awkward as possible for you.  It is best that the upset should come now than later on in life, and your coolness will give you a great advantage [p 79] [7]

On 19 December 1881 John and Henry Wren parted company, the required legal notices appeared in the press, and John became a consulting engineer in partnership with his third son Charles. 

And then in July 1882, out of the blue, a delegation came to him with the message that it was the Council's unanimous wish that he should let himself be elected mayor for the next year.  

Very flatteringly, it was 75 year old Alderman Matthew Curtis who set himself to persuade John.  Alderman Curtis, head of the cotton machinist firm Curtis, Sons & Co and deputy chairman of the Consolidated Bank, was a venerable link to Manchester's municipal past.  

When John was a boy, the town was still run by the manorial court and the police commissioners.  The commissioners had been set up in 1792 to run the night watch and fire engines and make, clean and light the streets – a job which they had not done with any great efficiency.  Manchester, which had been given the right to elect an MP in the days of Oliver Cromwell only to have the right taken away when the monarchy was restored, by way of punishment for its strongly Parliamentarian history was not made a borough.  It had been run as though it was a village through years of rapid growth and booming population.  It finally became a municipal borough in 1838, and even then had found it a struggle to wrest control from the old authorities which wouldn’t even let the new council meet in the old town hall.  Before long the borough council was referring to Manchester as a city, and this was made official on 2 April 1853.  

Matthew Curtis had been elected in the first borough council elections in 1840 and had already been mayor twice.  In his first mayoralty he had welcomed the Empress Eugénie of France to Manchester.  In his second mayoralty, when the stupendous new Town Hall was being built, it was he who had placed on the summit of its tower the copper ball which represented Manchester's crest of a globe covered in bees.  His arguments carried the force of knowledge and experience and he had known John for 40 years.

Notes

[1] The journal of the Institute of Civil Engineers, Vol CL https://www.icevirtuallibrary.com/doi/pdf/10.1680/imotp.1902.18314

[2] Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C., LL.D., Penultima (1930) pub. Martin Hopkinson Ltd, p. 304-5

[3] 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

[4] Penultima, p. 41

[5] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 89

[6] Penultima, p. 108

[7] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 79

51. John Hopkinson at work

John's work – pressure of work, trips abroad in pursuit of contracts, business worries – crop up very frequently in the edited letters.  Sometimes specific contracts are mentioned – for example, the work to be done on Isambard Kingdom Brunel's steamship 'Great Britain', and the contracts for gearing from Scandinavian mills – and Ellen Ewing ends her book with an extract from a piece about John in the July 1893 number of Manchester Faces and Places.  More details of his work can be found in the obituaries published in the journals of the professional institutes to which he belonged, and the firm's name can be found in contemporary newspaper reports.  All these combine to give us a glimpse into John's energetic and diligent life as an engineer.

French floating battery 'Lave' in 1854

The main business of the firm had always been mill-gearing.  For example, in 1855, the year when Alice and John went on their trip to Paris, newspaper reports show that the firm had the contract for making the toothed gearing for the floating batteries to be sent to the Baltic for use against the Russian port of Kronstadt.  The Crimean War had been underway since October 1853 and the French and British navies were building floating batteries – steam ships armoured with thick wrought iron plates – so as to attack Russian coastal fortifications.  (As things turned out, the Russians sued for peace before the batteries came into operation.)  

But John's interests and abilities had always gone beyond mill-gearing.  In 1848, the year of his marriage, he had developed an early sewing machine.  It was only a mechanical success and was not taken up commercially – his son Alfred later commented that it is never the pioneers who get the financial benefits of inventions.[1] (I thought there might have been a mention by Alice and her daughters in all their household chores of using a domestic sewing machine – but there isn't.) 

In 1856, the year when John's fifth child Alice was born, Sir James Chance of Messrs Chance Brothers approached the firm to see if they could solve a problem for him.  Messrs Chance were a major Midlands glassworks company.  They had glazed the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851 and made the ornamental windows for the White House in America, and John's firm and its predecessors had been their millwrights for years.  For the last five years Chance Brothers had been a major lighthouse engineering company and Sir James' request was for machinery for grinding and polishing the lenses needed for dioptric lights. (A dioptric lens, as I understand it, is one where light is refracted twice, once on entering the lens, and once on leaving it).  John designed a complete equipment of machinery to do the job very satisfactorily; later, his son John invented a system of rotating optics for the company.

From 1868, the year when his last and thirteenth child, Harry, was born, he was very frequently consulted by the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company about the design and equipment of their goods stations and sorting yards.  He rearranged yards in Liverpool and Manchester for them, equipping them with revolving capstans and power cranes.

He was the active head in technical matters for Wren & Hopkinson for 33 years.  He designed buildings for their customers, while over those years the firm's business came to include slate-working machinery, cord power-cranes and hydraulic-press plants for baling raw cotton.  After his partnership with Henry Wren broke up at the end of 1881, he worked as a consulting engineer in partnership with his son Charles.  He gave expert opinion before Parliamentary Committees, and was instructed as an expert witness in the law courts and in valuation cases.

The big breakthroughs in electrical engineering came after his time, but John had always been interested in the subject.  When he was an apprentice he made a cylinder frictional electrical machine, and in his old age he designed an electrical locomotive.  It was his three engineer sons who excelled in that field, and so, he was very pleased to see, did some of his apprentices.

Alongside his other professional work, he held directorships.  In 1866, the year that baby William Henry died at birth, John became a director and vice-chairman of Carnforth Hematite Iron Company, which had blast furnaces at Carnforth near the north Lancashire coast, and he was involved with the company until his death.

For a time he was a director of the Union Plate Glass Company, which had a major glassworks at Pocket Nook, St Helen's.  Perhaps an attraction was its attitude to its workforce – a newspaper report of 1855 noted approvingly that there was a library for the workers "and other means have been provided by the directors for the improvement of the social and intellectual welfare of the workpeople".

And, as I described earlier, he was involved in the Chatterley Iron Company which cost him a great deal in time, money and expense of spirit, and was to lose young John and Evelyn all their savings.

Sometimes the family brought in work.  

Dewhurst mill buildings in 2022

Between 1852 and 1854, John designed buildings for his father-in-law in Skipton – a weaving shed for 400 looms for the south side of their mill, and a 5 storey warehouse of 12 bays for the east side.  In 1867, he designed a new mill for his Dewhurst brothers-in-law, built to the west of the existing mills, and with a frontage on Broughton Road. 

The description of it given by K C Jackson in his article on the Dewhursts [2] gives us an idea of the work that John was doing.  The new 5 storey mill was 20 bays long and 6 bays wide and of up-to-the-minute design.  It had transverse brick-vaulted flooring and a sprinkler system against the risk of fire, the water coming from an impressive water tower finished to resemble a French Hôtel de Ville.  There was an integral engine house at the east end equipped with two Wren & Hopkinson horizontal engines, rated together at 800 ihp (indicated horse power).  Nine boilers supplied the steam, while the rest of the mill was driven by the pre-existing power supply which was rated at 600 ihp.  A chamber was provided above the engine house in connection with a dust extraction system for the blow room.  The mill was equipped with vertical shafting with bevelled gears because rope drives were not applied to cotton spinning mills until 1875.

For life on the other side and what it was like to work on the machinery – the implications and responsibilities that must have been very present to John's mind – an accident that happened at the Bellevue mill in 1872 will give an idea.  

An experienced and intelligent young woman of 29 called Mary Jane Simeon was working at a thread winding machine.  She was winding or spooling – that is, taking cotton off the larger bobbins and winding it upon the smaller bobbins.  Under her machine frame, a shaft revolved at about 600 times a minute.  Every so often she had to change the brass pinions at the end of the spindle, and sometimes one would drop into the hole through which the material came, and fall on the floor.  This happened on 19 March 1872.  As she stooped down to search for the pinion, her shawl – she wore the same sort of shawl as all the other women – was caught in the machine and her head was drawn down to the shaft.  Before she could be dragged away by the other women, her hair and scalp were torn right off and her bare skull was fractured.  Some of it had gone, leaving the brain membrane visible.  She was terribly injured.

She lay between life and death for some time during her 16 months of treatment at the Huddersfield Infirmary, and her surgeon thought the wound was unlikely ever to heal and that she would not again "be fit for the ordinary duties of life".  

She brought an action against the Dewhursts to recover £1,000 as compensation for her injuries on the grounds that the machine should have been fenced.  The case at the Assizes was widely reported, but the story went on from there and I can't find the final result.  At the Assizes, the judge had been extremely displeased at Mr Dewhurst's discourtesy in not attending court – 

he was treating the Court and the plaintiff with the greatest disrespect.  He could not conceive a case in which the presence of the defendant was more desirable.  Had it about a horse or a dog he would have attended. [3]

The Dewhursts' QC had claimed that Mary Jane had contributed to her injuries by her own negligence because, they said, she had tried to reach the pinion from the front of the machine and not the side.  The jury had found that there was some contributory negligence and awarded her £75.  For the Dewhursts, this was a victory.

But the case came up again before the Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer Sir Fitzroy Kelly with an application for a new trial on the grounds that the Factory Acts had been passed expressly to protect young children and women, and mere negligence by Mary Jane in the course of her duties would be no answer to an action to recover damages.  The Lord Chief Baron commented that, if she was entitled to a verdict, the damages awarded appeared to him to be wholly inadequate to meet the justice of the case.  

Her QC said it was clear to him that the amount of damages was a compromise reached by the jury because they had a difference of opinion over the amount.  The Lord Chief Baron commented drily that "possibly there were some millowners on the jury."  And her QC replied that there were two. [4] (Sir Fitzroy Kelly, a strong Tory, was rather unlikely to feel much sympathy for Liberal Nonconformist millowners.)  As Sir Fitzroy granted the rules sought by Mary Jane's QC, I rather think the Dewhursts will have given up and settled the case because I can't find any more references to it.  They had fenced the machine before the case ever came to court.

Sometimes John's work brought in new family.

In 1850 John was in contact by way of business with Henry Overton Wills III of the Bristol tobacco manufacturing dynasty.  It seems very likely that it was through John that Henry met John's younger sister Alice.  Henry was a more than suitable match – he was born to be one of Bristol's merchant princes, he was from a Congregationalist family and was much the same age as Alice.  It was a very advantageous marriage, and they were wed in Plymouth in the spring of 1853.  

John's work in Ulster was eventually to bring him two daughters-in-law.  Belfast was growing at a terrific rate in these years on the back of the linen trade and by the end of the 19th century it was the linen capital of the world.  Wren & Hopkinson had always done a good deal of work there – they were making the shafting for Ulster linen factories from the 1850s – and one of John's best-known buildings was the nine-storey warehouse he designed for the York Street Flax Spinning Company in Belfast.  But it was his contact in 1865 with John Campbell of Mossley Mill that was to prove most significant to the Hopkinson family.  

Mossley Mill was about 10 miles north of Belfast, and John and his wife Nannie McCulloch and their three daughters and four sons lived in nearby Mossley House.  Later they moved to 'Rathfern', a country house in extensive grounds outside the village of Whiteabbey.  John's continuing business with the Campbells led to his son Charles' marriage to Mabel Campbell at the beginning of 1886.  A few months later Charles' brother Edward married Mabel's sister Marianne ("Minnie") Campbell.

(The York Street Flax Spinning Company was once the largest flax spinning mill in the world, but it was destroyed in the Blitz of Belfast on Easter Tuesday 1941.  Mossley Mill is now the civic centre for Newtownabbey Council, and housing estates have been built on the grounds of 'Rathfern')  

And what was John like as an employer?  His obituary in the journal of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers records [5]

He will long be remembered amongst the most progressive of engineering employers in Manchester for his generous and farseeing views in regard to the relations of employers and employed, and the part he took in establishing the fifty-four-hour week. The interests of his own employees and those of the companies with which he was associated were always promoted by him with characteristic generosity and disinterestedness. 

Notes

[1]Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C., LL.D., Penultima (1930) pub. Martin Hopkinson Ltd, p. 107

[2] K C Jackson, The Dewhursts of Skipton: a dynasty of cotton masters, 1789 to 1897 Yorkshire

Archaeological Journal, 75, (2003), pp.  181-205

[3] Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 11 August 1873

[4] Dewsbury Reporter, 15 November 1873

[5] 1902 Obituary of John Hopkinson 

https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/John_Hopkinson_(1824-1902)

50. "Skipping with joy": holidays in the 1870s and 1880s

Of the later family holidays, we know that they went to Arnside on the Westmorland coast, because Mary mentions in her Introduction that the family party was joined on "various occasions" at "Arnside and other places" by Miss Margaret Harrison. [1]

We know of three visits (in 1871, 1875 and 1877) to Southport on the Lancashire coast.  Always popular for the sea bathing, it was developed from the 1840s as a refined resort – it's said that Haussmann's boulevards were inspired by the young exile Louis Napoleon's stay in Southport in 1838 – and it had sandy beaches and a famous pleasure pier built of iron.  

When 17 year old Ellen was in Southport in 1871 struggling with poor little Harry's illness, her brother Alfred was on a walking tour of Germany and Austria.  He went in a party of three – I think his elder brother John was one of them, having just emerged from Cambridge as Senior Wrangler.  It was the year after the Franco-Prussian War.

Fortunately, a relative who had been at school in Germany and had strong German sympathies was a member of our party of three [2]

wrote Alfred.  This will have been one of their Dewhurst cousins, Bonny's sons.  

Bonny wanted his sons to have a scientific education and, as practical training in science and technology was better abroad, he sent Algernon and Lionel to Germany.  I think Algernon is the most likely candidate for this trip.  He matriculated at London University in 1867, studied chemistry first under Prof. Fehlinge at the Stuttgart Polytechnic School and then under Hoffmann at the Laboratory of the University of Berlin. [3] In 1870 he went home to the family business in Skipton and in 1874 he and Cecil Slingsby made the first traverse of the Hurrungane range of mountains, some 200 miles NNW of Oslo.  

It was a five week walking tour and it cost them £26 each.  They covered 20 miles before breakfast, 30 to 40 miles a day.  They spent one night on a mountain in a thunderstorm.  Katharine Chorley's description of Alfred's holidays [4] – disappearing off into the hills with a rucksack, getting off the beaten track and having no fixed plans – shows that the tour of 1871 gave him the pattern for his ideal holiday for the rest of his life.

In 1875 Alice's sister-in-law Ellen Tubbs had taken the younger children to Southport when Ellen fell fatally ill with scarlet fever.  In 1877, after the deaths of Ellen and Harry, we know that Mary was in charge of the party when she escorted her mother and some of her siblings to Southport – May, the youngest, was by then approaching 13.  It seems very likely that the young ones had been taken there, or to other seaside resorts, regularly over the previous ten years.  

John and Alice also took holidays abroad together.  I think they probably had children with them, but it isn't entirely clear, and we don't know when they went.  All we have is this paragraph from their daughter Mary's Introduction:

Bellagio promontory, Lake Como

I now come to the last subject I propose to treat with, viz., Holiday trips, notably enjoyable visits to Switzerland, Italy and Austria.  Those experiences meant much to our parents and afforded striking illustration of their fine characteristic qualities.  We know well how they delighted in the beauty and grandeur of Nature and revelled in the happy freedom of holiday.  

We picture to ourselves Father skipping with joy down the path of Bellagio and remember Mother's determination to face the risk of going up to the rock at Schaffhausen when the river was in flood, and the deep snow did not deter her from being carried over the Grimsell Pass.  These and many others are events not to be forgotten. [5]

They went to Norway, which was a country that quite a few of the Hopkinsons and their relations already knew well, in June 1881.  They probably went with Gertrude and May; the others were at home, as we can see from the stern letter that Charles wrote to his mother on 26 June

Charles Hopkinson

I am extremely obliged to you for your letter, but am also exceedingly disappointed with it and Father's telegram.  You have abandoned my route as being too severe work and you straightway go and drive further in less time and, instead of taking your tour leisurely and comfortably, you rush about from place to place in order to be home a week earlier than is requisite, advisable or desirable.  It is very shocking – you deprive yourselves of the many letters that we have written on the reasonable supposition that would go along decently and in order, and not in this wild hurry from place to place.  Why should you do so?  I cannot find a reason, for you ought not to be homesick with four of you together and, as for business here, Father can do nought for Carnforth till the Board Meeting of Union Place … 

From Chatterley Mr Wain reports in a commonplace way.  There is no motive for this haste.  Mary will hardly have the house ready for you and will certainly not have time to spring clean her lungs by a weekend in the country as we had intended before your arrival.  Edward is helping me efficiently at the Works, so I am all right.  Albert has his ordinary life for another fortnight.  Lily wants to be at home to greet you and cannot if you return next Tuesday week …

Now for home news.  The Spring Cleaning is still in process.  I have escaped three days for I went to Newcastle on Wednesday night, I did my work quite satisfactorily with Mr Maling and saved more than my expenses by my eloquence … I hope this may be in time to catch and influence you and remain

Your very affectionate son

Charles Hopkinson [6]

Norway had become familiar territory to the family.  Cecil Slingsby first went there in 1872 when he was 23 years old.  It determined his life as a mountaineer, as his obituarists H. Tönsberg and E. Sundt explained in the Alpine Journal  [7]

In 1872 a strong young Englishman, 23 years of age, standing on the Sognefjeld and gazing at the Horungtinder, became lost in the sight.  "Undoubtedly," he afterwards wrote, "the finest mountain range in Norway.  I shall never, as long as I live, forget my first view of Skagastölstind, the grandest European mountain north of the Alps.  Our guide told us that it was the highest mountain in Norway, that it had not yet be ascended, and that no doubt this was impracticable.  Can it be wondered that I determined, if possible, to make the first ascent?"

And he carried his cousins with him.  We know, for example, from Cecil's writings that in 1879 Charles Hopkinson had made an attempt with friends on the Stor Trolltind, the highest point on the Trolltindane ridge.  

Norway was all the more attractive for Hopkinson holidays because John Hopkinson's brother-in-law Henry Overton Wills went there for the trout and salmon fishing, and he bought the Aak estate in the Romsdal valley after his wife Alice died.  He spent his summers there and gave a warm welcome to visitors.

Romsdalen was, and is, a famously beautiful part of Norway and a centre for climbing.  The Hotel Aak in Romsdalen (one of Norway's first tourist hotels and still thriving) had been Cecil Slingsby's base for climbing Store Skagastølstind in 1876.   It was supposed to be unclimbable and Cecil's solo ascent to the summit was a turning-point for mountaineers – that's why he is known as the Father of Norwegian Mountaineering and why this year, in July and August 2026, there are celebrations planned in Norway for the 150th anniversary of this famous climb.  (Of course, as in Switzerland, there are stories of the locals climbing the peaks before the sport arrived …)

Romsdalen and Trolltindene with some clouds by Ximonic (Simo Räsänen)

Cecil Slingsby loved Norway and his writings give us a vivid picture of the sort of holiday that the Hopkinson brothers enjoyed.  His book Norway, The Northern Playground was first published in 1904, can be read online and is still in print.  It is a lyrical account of the people, landscape and wildlife of Norway, written with great enjoyment and affection, and with plenty of advice for future visitors.  On arriving at a sæter – the summer grazing – in the hope of getting something to eat

one should take off one's hat and bow to the girl there as to a princess.  She may keep you waiting for an hour until she has finished milking, before she can attend to your wants, but that is as it should be, and lessons on patience are very wholesome. When at last she provides a meal for you, the least you can do for her is to ask her to share some small portion of the luxuries which you are sure to have with you, and it is desirable to let her know that you are aware that she is conferring a favour upon you.  If you can give her some little trinket, in addition to the small payment which goes to the farmer in the valley below, it will be much treasured.  I have found coloured pictures, pins, and needles to be well appreciated. 

In his obituary of Charles Hopkinson in the Alpine Journal, Cecil Slingsby told the story of the time they had had to take refuge in a hole amongst tumbled-down rocks, on stones of "aggressive angularity". 

All through the black hours of night Charley was the very personification of cheerfulness.  It was the same too a few weeks later, when the three of us were assailed by a fierce gale … at the top of the steep snowfilled trap dyke …

This was during their 1885 expedition.  A new sheet of the Amtskarter – Norway's O.S maps – had been issued in 1884 and it seemed to show a large snow-field in Western Norway that mountaineers had not known was there.  The snow-field was about 17 miles long and 4 to 6 miles broad and lay between Førde and Nordfjord.  On today's maps, it's perhaps best found by looking out for Ålfotbreen. Ålfotbreen and Gjegnalundsbreen, its neighbouring glacier, (breen means glacier) are designated Landscape Protection areas.  

So Cecil and Charley decided to make an exploratory tour.  They set off in September 1885, with Lars Janssen (who had made two capital expeditions with Cecil the year before and could tell thrilling stories of his adventures fishing at the Lofoten Islands) as guide, porter and companion, with the plan of exploring and trying to climb some peaks that nobody yet had climbed.  Then they would go north to Romsdal to see if they could climb a peak Cecil had named Mjölnir, after the god Thor's war hammer.

In Cecil's account in Northern Playground he describes the bracing pure air, woody slopes where honeysuckle filled the air with fragrance, bear tracks, tarns unknown to the Amtskarter surveyors, a little lake of rich turquoise blue set in vivid grass and dark pine forest, pushing their way for hours through rocks, screes, streams and copses.  He describes making their way up the valley of the river Skjerdalselva and being overtaken by a little lad who had come up from a farm an hour behind them, with the breathless news that they should come back for fear of bears.  They showed him their axes, but he didn't think that would do.  Three bears had been seen the day before near the tarn that lay just ahead, and the men had hidden bear traps on the usual goat tracks on each side of the tarn – rifles and guns heavily loaded with bullets and old nails, and with strings attached to the triggers.  So instead, the boy rowed them over the tarn on a leaky boat.  "The blue water was studded with huge rocks greened over by moss, fern, and birch."  To the east there were thickly wooded slopes.  To the west an enormous precipice here and there crowned with snow.  To the south an enormous amphitheatre of rocks and snow rose to the jagged mountains beyond.  They plodded on up the valley until they reached the snowline.  There they found "a small lake of deepest blue flecked with an icy flotilla from the glacier flowing into it".  They crossed crevasses, went through deep snow, waded through streams, cut steps across a glacier.

They travelled north to Romsdalen where they stayed with Henry Overton Wills.  He drove them up to Nedre Dale, the nearest farm to the peak they wanted to climb.  They stayed with farmer Ivar Olsen Dale and his family in their house on a sunny knoll.  It was clean and cosy, and the rooms were scented with sprays of juniper.  The family were very interested in the preparations and thought the axes and rope were surely for fishing – everyone there was thinking only of the herring, which had just been in the fjord.  

There was a beautiful valley of rich colouring and gentle pastoral beauty, and beyond lay the fantastic aiguilles, savage glens and dark precipices of the mountains.  Cecil describes dewy meadows, sparkling trout streams, glorious views, rock-climbing to the blunt arête with a glacier on either side, narrow chimneys, glorious climbing to a grim col in a vicious arête.  Back at the farm, an admiring audience gathered around Lars as he modestly told the tale of their adventures.  Ivar Olsen Dale was disappointed that they drove back to Aak that evening, as he wanted to see more of them – and by the time Cecil and Charley read their account of their expedition to the Alpine Club on 10 April 1888 Charley had been back to visit him already.  (Their joint paper appeared in the August 1889 edition of the Alpine Journal:  'The ascent of Mjölnir and the exploration of the Ghegnalund [Gjegnalundsbreen] glaciers in Norway').

This was the Hopkinson brothers' idea of a good holiday.  We know of some of their climbing companions – they included Wilberforce Newton Tribe (1855-1928) who married their sister Lily in 1888, and Hermann Woolley (1846-1920) who used to sit next to John Hopkinson in lectures at Owens College.  

John, Alfred, Charles and Edward could take the weeks from their work needed to go on these expeditions.  Albert, the youngest, had climbed with them from boyhood, his obituary in the Alpine Journal recording that

Albert was a very agile and bold climber, and already as a boy he was put in the lead by his brothers upon new and difficult rock ascents, notably upon Dow Crag.  

but he became a doctor in general practice and his work left little time for climbing.  As for the girls – we know that Cecil Slingsby was a great advocate for women climbers and that young John's daughters climbed – but we don't know what the daughters of John and Alice did in their holidays.  

Trollryggen and Romsdalen as seen from the cliff edge of Stabbeskaret in Rauma, Møre og Romsdal, Norway in 2019 July. Simo Räsänen, CC BY-SA 4.0

Next:  51. John Hopkinson at work

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] Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C., LL.D., Penultima (1930) pub. Martin Hopkinson Ltd, p. 24

[3] Kenneth C Jackson, The Dewhursts of Skipton: a dynasty of cotton masters, 1789 to 1897, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 75 (2003), p. 194

[4] Katharine Chorley, Manchester Made Them, pub Faber & Faber Ltd (1950), p. 218-9

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

[6] ibid., p. 77

[7] Alpine Journal 1929, Vol 41

49. John, Alice & "nervous exhaustion"

Perhaps there are few letters after the late 1860s because after that John made sure that he had a proper holiday and stayed with the family instead of commuting to work.  In 1869 he drove himself – with his work in the business, as a city councillor, as superintendent of the Rusholme Road Sunday School – to the point of a breakdown in health.  We get a glimpse of his busy life from a letter to Alice on 23 February 1857

You will like to know all that goes on … Sunday.  Went down to school, had 19 or 20 present – attentive and I enjoyed the teaching … Took the first girls' class – their stillness and silence almost appalled one … I commenced with trembling but was enabled to speak with more freedom than I anticipated … After school, to united prayer meeting at Saville Street, then a pleasant time with the babies …

A fine lecture in the evening from Mr S. on the scripture proofs of the doctrine of Inspiration – for an hour and twenty minutes …

Have rectified the smoking nursery completely and improved front parlour at the same time.  Very busy at Works … Left at 6.25, took the new four horse bus to Hydegrove, came over field – washed – saw children – tea and down at meeting only ten minutes after time [1]

In 1869 Alice's brother-in-law Dr William Harrison wrote, warning him to stop all work for a month at least

I have not come to this conclusion abruptly.  Knowing so well how mischievous symptoms are which attend nervous exhaustion and how often they lead on to danger, it is found that, without early and decided treatment, there is often laid a foundation for disturbances which cannot be removed even by prolonged care and the best attention. [2]

Possibly after this crisis, John spent the holidays with Alice and the children instead of commuting back to work and keeping in touch by letter.  Alice took many breaks on her own in search of rest and recuperation.

Her parents and sisters had always kept a watchful eye on her strength – she seems to have a tendency to outrun her resources and become entirely depleted.  Soon after her marriage, her solicitous sister Jane advised her "to lay up a stock of strength for the Winter".  But the pregnancies and her inability to restrain herself from overwork frequently pulled her down and then she would escape household duties entirely.  Possibly her worst breakdown in health was in 1877 after little Harry's death.  That year she became steadily more reduced and from then on it seems Mary took the entire household management into her own hands.  In the spring she went to visit young John and his family and wrote to John at home

I feel no interest in shopping or sight seeing … I am very fond of the dear children; But I am changed; it seems impossible to get up the life and energy to win little children.  I think that will never come back to me.  I shall never win love, only hold that which is already mine [3]

By the summer she had become very unwell, unable even to walk up and down stairs, and was taken to Thirlmere in the Lake District by Mary ("the personification of patience and self-control").  At last she was able to write to John

These last 24 hours I seem to have risen to the surface after being submerged for a time.  My mind is clear and natural and my body seems to belong to me – Alice Hopkinson. [4]

Next:  50. "Skipping with joy": holidays in the 1870s and 1880s

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. 27

[2] ibid., p. 53

[3] ibid., p. 72

[4] ibid., p. 73

48. "Wholly given up to the worship of pleasure": Paris in 1855 & 1867

In 1855 Alice made her first trip abroad, going with John to Paris.  By this time they had been married nearly seven years and had four children.  When she got back to England, she wrote on 25 August from the home of her sister-in-law Ellen Tubbs to her "beloved sister" Alice Wills, who had been looking after some of the Hopkinson children at her house in Clifton, the affluent suburb of Bristol.  The trip had been something of a culture shock to her:

I have enjoyed our trip very much and am really very glad to have seen Paris.  But I love England all the better for the change.  Paris seems wholly given up to the worship of pleasure. [1]

In August 1867 John went to Paris with young John and Alfred to join some of the Wills family and to see Messrs Wren & Hopkinson's stall at the Paris Exposition ("quite one of the popular attractions in the Engineering Department" said John).  Young John was by now 18 and was very taken with the French, writing

I like the French very well; they are very civil and seem to enjoy themselves heartily; they do not appear to be troubled with self-consciousness in any form.[2]

Between Rue de l'Échelle and Rue Saint Augustin: demolition. 1877. by Charles Marville

Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the great Napoleon's nephew, after an adventurous life had become President of France in 1848 and made himself Emperor by coup d'état in 1852.  He had set about modernising France and radically changing the old mediaeval city of Paris.  

In 1854 Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann had begun work – the city would be a vast building site for twenty years – and John Hopkinson as an engineer and city councillor was inspired by the Haussmann vision and the new grands boulevards:

I am delighted with the magnificence of Paris – the boldness, and straightforwardness of the ideas in the streets, railways, etc and the development of the national power of arrangement and organization.  I should like to apprentice a few of our town councillors or aldermen here for a few years.  London and Manchester might well take a lesson.  I must go through some of the buildings in course of construction to see what new dodges can be picked up.  We English have a good deal to learn and one does not wonder that the French sometimes talk about our insular notions and prejudices.  There is nothing like going from home to have the conceit knocked out of one.  I should almost like to live here for a few months or years to understand better some of the social and governmental questions. [3]

Alfred aged about 16
(taken 1867 or 1868)

This was the boys' first visit abroad and it gave them a glimpse of the startling events that were soon to come.  Alfred, remembering foreshadowings of the revolutionary Paris Commune that seized power after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, wrote 

Even then there was a strange sense of the undercurrents of feeling in Paris which came to the surface three years later. [4]

He remembered very well the British public's fascination with the Emperor Napoleon III, that "man of mystery", and knew people who were caught up in the conspiracy theories that abounded: 

By many earnest people the Prophetic Books and the Apocalypse were searched, with what they thought to be complete success, for references to the part he would play before the final battle of Armageddon.  One book which an excellent clergyman of my acquaintance and members of his family read with thrilling interest was 'Napoleon, the Destined Monarch of the World'.  The letters of the Emperor's name were taken to represent Greek numerals which made up the number of the Beast 666. [5]

There were many British people who thought that, like his uncle the first Napoleon, this Napoleon was a very real threat.  Alfred remembered the uneasiness of the mood in Paris.  He and Johnnie were on the balcony of their pension on the Avenue Wagram talking with the owner's daughter when she said "as though it were a matter of course, that a revolution would very shortly take place and that it might be expected at any time". [6]

At the time of their trip to Paris, their younger siblings were under the age of 14 – Albert was only four and May was three.  Not very many letters from the later 1860s and the later 1870s survived, so we have hardly any information on the younger children's holidays.

Next:  49. John, Alice & "nervous exhaustion"

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. 25

[2] ibid., p. 50

[3] ibid.

[4] Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C., LL.D., Penultima (1930) pub. Martin Hopkinson Ltd, p. 20

[5] ibid., p. 21

[6] ibid., p. 22

47. "We want to teach them to go alone": Holidays in the 1860s

After that, John and Alice chose to go to North Wales.  They could usually be found at Llanfairfechan or nearby Penmaenmawr, favourite resorts of the Manchester middle and upper classes, with Liberal prime minister William Gladstone particularly favouring Penmaenmawr.  They were easy to reach by train and offered not just sandy beaches and clean air but mountains.  From this northerly tip of the Eryri (Snowdonia) National Park the boys could explore the mountain ranges of the Carneddau and Glyderau.  Alfred remembered 

As boys, first with my father and afterwards alone, we used to wander over the hills of Carnarvonshire, the Carnedds and Glyders, which were then very little known. [1]

They climbed Tryfan

and sought for traces of glacial action in Cym Tryfan and so knew what was meant by moraines and roches perchés before we had set eyes on an existing glacier. [2]

In July 1863 Johnnie was soon to be 14 years old and Alfred was 12.  Their parents believed in giving them freedom to explore on their own.  On 3 July Alice wrote to John from Penmaenmawr

The children are all good and tractable, the boys anxious to conform to your wishes.  I trust them a great deal, telling them I have the fullest confidence that they will follow out all your instructions, which I believe they wish to do [3]

and John replied the next day, having just come back from Liverpool where he had seen Isambard Kingdom Brunel's steamship 'Great Britain' – the first iron steamer to have crossed the Atlantic – come into dock.  She had been completed in 1845 and now took emigrants to Australia. 

We shall have a heavy and difficult piece of work there which will take a couple of months restoring the teeth of the great driving wheels, which have done very well for thirteen years regular work

commented John, and continued

I am very pleased to have your reports of the dear children.  I do think that a little of this sort of life is useful to their characters as well as to their health.  I think it strengthens their mind, develops their energies, awakens their powers of observation and, I trust too, that, surrounded as they are on every side by the proofs of the goodness and wisdom of the Creator, they are, in some degree at least, led up through nature to nature's God.  

I quite agree in wishing to trust them a good deal – we want to teach them to go alone – to think and act for themselves – in subordination to the wishes of their parents and to the will and law of their God.  And I believe that we shall be more successful in obtaining a ready compliance with those points on which we have to insist by conceding a fair amount of liberty in other and safer directions. [4]

Johnnie and Alfred had already learned a little about looking after themselves.  The year before, John had taken the two boys to London on the train to see the International Exhibition in South Kensington, the world fair held on the site where the Natural History Museum stands now.

The Palace of Art & Industry, 1862 Exhibition

Alice took baby Gertrude and little Mary to Skipton, while the other four children stayed behind with their nurse Anne Cookson.  John wrote from to Alice from the train on 25 June

We have had a lesson together as to what they would do if by any accident we should get separated and the rehearsal is quite satisfactory as I think they would use their wits rightly.  I trust that this journey will be of no small use to them as they are just at the age to take in readily by observation so much that is novel and instructive.  I mean to devote myself pretty much to them all this jaunt. [5]

Alfred remembered this first visit to London very well – it left two deep impressions.

One was the condition of the Underground Railway at Baker Street and Portland Road where the smoke was choking, and the other the contempt felt by visitors from the North for the two horse 'buses which slowly perambulated London in those days. [6]

Most of all he remembered the crinolines, which had grown larger and larger.

But nothing at the time left a stronger or more unpleasant memory than the dress of fashionable women at the Exhibition.  I remember one lady scowling at the young boy who was found to be standing on her dress though she must have been at least two yards away.  My poor brother had been suffering from an injured and inflamed leg due to a kick at football, and the horrible steels of the crinoline brushing by caused him acute pain, but he had his revenge by stooping down at a little distance, taking the metal hoop between his finger and thumb and breaking it.  We thoroughly enjoyed our attacks on those abominations. [7]

from The Railway Station (1862) by William Powell Frith

At this point the crinoline was beginning to change, becoming a sloping bustle at the back while the front was flattened, which must have proved useful for women who wanted to approach a display case without disturbing their dresses.  And the colour of any streetscape was changing and brightening with the discovery of the brilliant intensity of aniline dyes, which brought clear vivid mauves, pinks and magentas into women's clothes for the first time.  We have no idea when or whether Alice ventured into these colours!

The next year their cousins John Milne and Mary Tubbs holidayed with them in Llanfairfechan.  John was the eldest son of Alice's bright and sociable sister Ellen, who had married James Milne of the well-known Manchester retailers Kendal, Milne & Faulkner (later Kendal, Milne & Co) – it was at their house that John had met Alice for the first time.  The Milnes' country house near Cheadle in Cheshire was a very welcome country refuge for Alice, and her daughter Mary Hopkinson wrote of it gratefully

Belmont was a home to which we frequently went, enjoying the country surroundings and the company of our relations.  Aunt Milne was ever so good to us and we knew all our cousins well – Alice, John, Sydney, Herbert, Janey, Ellen and Clifford.  We had the opportunity of keeping in touch with them for many years and with some of their descendants.  [8]

In 1864 John Milne was 17 years old and Mary Tubbs, whose parents were Mary Hopkinson and the Plymouth dentist Charles Foulger Tubbs, was a few months younger.  John and Alfred were now 15 and 13 years old.  Alice wrote to John on 6 July

Poor Nellie is a little bit troubled with the boys' attentions to Mary and feels herself at times neglected.  I think it may be a useful lesson to her. [9]

But the main focus of the boys' attention was their expeditions.  We can see from other instances that Alice wasn't averse to girls and women walking – she enjoyed long walks herself, and we have seen her sister-in-law Alice Wills joining in the nine-mile walk with the steep climb in the Lakes in 1857 – but the boys had more ambitious plans.  On 7 July 1864 Alice wrote to John  

They really are good lads.  Johnny listens with loving respectful attention to my little discourses.  Mary Tubbs is very ambitious to take some of their long walks; but I told Mary this morning that, without express leave from home, I would not consent to her undertaking them because I feel sure Charles would say we were made to let her undertake so much, for, with unformed girls, there is a risk in such stretches [10]

Nearly a week later, on 13 July, she wrote 

This morning I roused the boys at 3.40 for their long walk [11]

We know "the boys" included both Johns and Alfred; there may have been more cousins.  The boys  were out till night.  Alice wrote on 14 July

The boys arrived home about nine last night, pretty well tired out but the two Johns consumed a noble quantity of food … They are all lame this morning from swollen feet, sprains or blisters and disposed to loiter about and have dinner at home.  They had a grand walk, over thirty miles.  They saw the eagle again [12]

This must have been the day that Alfred remembered years later

Specially I remember crossing the mountains to Llyncwlyd [probably Llyn Cowlyd], and as we descended hearing the strange cry of the golden eagle, like a peewit speaking through a megaphone, and watching for an hour or more a flight of two of these great birds across the lake, circling above the mountains almost out of sight and then swooping down until we could feel the shadow of their outstretched wings and see their open beaks as they cried.[13]

The children were always proud of their father's courage.  He had told them the story, Alfred wrote, of

how the Chartists had marched into Manchester, stopping the mills and works by drawing the boiler plugs, and there was fear of serious riots; how a threatening mob was once dispersed by a tremendous thunder shower; and how, when a young man alone in charge of engineering works, he refused to open the closed gates in spite of threats, and the crowd passed on [14]

and Alfred knew this for himself, remembering an anecdote about his elder brother

My father, I believe, was naturally rather a nervous man, but I cannot imagine him refraining from any course of action from want of courage, either physical or mental.  I have seen him in the old days, when drunkenness was much more common than it is now, stopping two or three fights on one day merely in passing down the street towards his works.  

He did not talk about courage, but I remember one occasion when my brother was a small boy and had been boasting of the brave things he would do and that he was not afraid of deep water.  We went down to the dam near my grandfather's mill at a very deep place and were about to try bathing in the river when my father, remembering the boast, said:  "Are you afraid of the water now you see it?"  The boy, who could not swim a stroke, jumped head first into fifteen feet of water and my father had to follow him with his clothes on and drag him out. [15]

This boldness and physical daring from a young age was to lead to the Hopkinson brothers' passion for mountaineering, and we can see that it started young.  On those holidays in Wales – we know they went there in 1865 and 1866 – Alfred said

We took young cormorants from a ledge of the cliffs overhanging the sea and tried to reach the puffins in the holes of the rocks. [16]

Next:  48. "Wholly given up to the worship of pleasure": Paris in 1855 & 1867

Notes

[1] Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C., LL.D., Penultima (1930) pub. Martin Hopkinson Ltd, p. 109

[2] ibid., p. 226-7

[3] 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. 37

[4] ibid., p. 37-8

[5] ibid., p. 34

[6] Penultima, p. 43

[7] ibid., p. 44

[8] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. XXV

[9] ibid., p. 40

[10] ibid., p. 41

[11] ibid.

[12] ibid.

[13] Penultima, p. 109

[14] ibid., p. 14

[15] ibid., p. 15

[16] ibid., p. 109

46. The near-disastrous holiday at Sunderland Point: 1862

 

Sunderland Point by Heather Bolton

The small village at Sunderland Point lies at the tip of a windswept peninsula where the River Lune comes out into the Irish Sea.  Here the Hopkinsons would find a wide horizon, a landscape of sea and river, salt marsh and mudflats, home to wading birds and wildfowl, with shingle beaches from which sandbanks could be reached farther out into the sea.  It had once been the port that gave Lancaster merchants access to the colonial trade – at the end of the 18th century, it had been the fourth largest port in England.  It had been a fashionable resort for sea bathing and had claimed to have the first bathing machine in North Lancashire.  By 1862 its glory days were over, but it was still popular for holidays.

One of its most notable things about Sunderland Point was – and is – that, though it is part of mainland Britain, it is reached by a causeway a mile and a quarter long across a tidal marsh and is cut off at high tides, when the causeway can be under several feet of water for up to four hours.  (My information comes from the excellent Sunderland Point website.  I recommend it strongly, it's full of information and beautiful, evocative photographs)

John with Gertrude and May in 1867 or 1868 

John noted in his logbook [1] that they left 12 York Place for their holiday lodgings in Sunderland Point on Monday 4 August 1862 in a large party of five adults and eight children.  

John was now 38 and Alice would be 38 in November.   Young John was just 13, Alfred 11, Ellen 8, Charles 6, Mary would soon be 5, Edward was 3, Lily nearly 2, and baby Gertrude was 3 months old.  Miss Maria Neild, the mother's help, came too, with 24 year old Annie Cookson the children's nurse and 25 year old Emma Wood.  While the family were by the sea, John would be at work and would come out to join them when he could.

Getting from Manchester to Sunderland Point was not straightforward – he would need to go by train and boat and then, if there was no conveyance for the last stretch, on foot.  He should have made a careful study of the tide tables.  

Somehow, he miscalculated.  

He set off from Manchester on the afternoon of Saturday 9 August 1862, arriving at the village of Overton on the Lune estuary quite late in the evening.  The family was expecting him, and his son Johnnie was out on the shore watching for his arrival.  John thought he had time to get to the house before the tide turned.

This is the record he made afterwards in his logbook, which Ellen Ewing abridged for the book [2]:

The Causeway by Andy Biggs

On Saturday Aug 9th I took train in afternoon to Lancaster and boat part way down the river, landed near Overton to walk to Sunderland – same road over the shore as our bus had taken on the Monday.  The tide was coming up … I walked as rapidly as I could towards Sunderland Point through the gradually rising water which covered all the road.  I saw a stake standing and, supposing that it might be to mark the road, made for it … 

I felt with my feet the ruts of the wheels and knew it must be on the road.  I called continuously:  "Boat ahoy.  Boat ahoy."   The water continued to rise above my hips so I unbuttoned my waistcoat and put the left flap over my shoulder to keep my watch dry and I felt the run of the tide past me and dare not leave the stake as I would have been carried off my feet … My voice failed with shouting but a handful of water restored it.   

And at last had the great relief of hearing the handling of the oars of a boat putting off.  I shouted to direct the boat where I was.  They rowed with a will, were soon alongside and seized hold to haul me in … The water was near my armpits and probably at the top of the tide … 

I learned that a woman, ironing her husband's shirt with the cottage window open, had heard my shouting and ran to tell the boatmen to get the boat out.  John was on the shore, knew my voice and that I was taking the shore-road from Lancaster, and knew that I must be in danger.  The boatmen were sure that the voice must come from the opposite shore.  My boy insisted on their going towards Lancaster.  And he was right as they soon found.  Each of the boatmen received a family Bible, inscribed: "To – in memory of [illeg] help in time of need" [3]

This is the 1840s Ordnance Survey map, with the route marked by Bill Morris.  The landing stage at Overton is marked in green and the causeway in red.

There is another version of the episode.  It appeared in the Lancaster Gazette on 16 August and was written by a 21 year old solicitor from Kendal called Joseph Swainson junior.  He was lodging with Richard and Jane Nicholson who ran the Maxwell Arms, the licensed hotel on Second Terrace, and farmed the 30 acres of  Point Farm.  This is young Joseph Swainson's dramatic letter, published under the heading 'Narrow Escape from Drowning'

Sir,

Perhaps you will allow me to trouble you with the following narrative of a very narrow escape from death by drowning which has just occurred here.

About ten o'clock on Saturday night last Mrs Nicholson, the wife of Mr Richard Nicholson, who farms this property, having occasion to go to a neighbour's house on the other Terrace, heard cries of distress which appeared to proceed from the direction of the road across the Sands to Overton.  She immediately gave the alarm to myself and her husband, and the nearest boatman having been at once roused, a boat was with all possible haste procured, and in the absence of a fourth experienced boatman, I most willingly accompanied them to pull the fourth oar.

The cries of distress which were borne along the water to us were truly pitiable, and such as to call forth the most strenuous efforts on the part of the men.  We proceeded as rapidly as possible in the direction from which the cries came, and when approaching the post which indicates the first small bridge on the road to Overton, we found a gentleman up to the chest in water clinging to the post in an all but exhausted state.

On our return, after drawing the gentleman in safety into the boat, we found that he was a Mr Hopkinson, from Manchester, whose wife and children, are staying down here for a few weeks, and who were all, with the exception of his eldest boy, in happy ignorance of the occurrence.

He was on his way from Lancaster, having arrived by the evening train, with the intention of spending Sunday at this place.  The tides at this time rise very rapidly, and the boatmen all say, that there cannot be the slightest doubt as to the fate of this gentleman had the boat been longer than five or ten minutes in reaching him, for, in addition to the great increase which that period would have made to the water (it still being an hour and a half from high water) it would have been impossible for Mr Hopkinson, judging from the weak state in which we found him, much longer to have retained his hold.

James Spencer

The rescue of this gentleman from a death gradually but certainly approaching, was no doubt due, under Providence, primarily to the mere accident of Mr and Mrs Nicholson's not having gone to bed at their usual early hour, and also to the strenuous efforts of Thomas Dickenson, James Spencer, and John Bagot, with whatever assistance I may have afforded.  The persons who live in the cottages which are nearest to the place where this occurrence happened, were not aware of it until next morning.

The road between this place and Overton, when the tide is out, is almost as safe and hard as any turnpike, but when covered with water it is of the most dangerous description, from the many and deep pools which abound near to it.

My reasons for troubling you with this narrative is that a warning may not be lost to strangers of the extreme imprudence of venturing across the sands without first ascertaining the state of the tide, especially at night time.  And, also, that I may redeem a promise made to the men that I would do my best that the great anxiety to do their utmost and the strenuous exertions they made should not be lost sight of.

I enclose my card, and I am,

Yours very obediently,

Jos Swainson, Jr.

Mr Nicholson's, Maxwell's Terrace, Sunderland Point, 12th August 1862

PS - The boatmen here have often before been instrumental in saving lives

John thought it was "probably at the top of the tide" when he had been rescued; young Swainson thought it was still 1½ hours to the full.  Who was right?  Unless Joseph Swainson misheard comments about the height of the tide, he was in a better position to know than John.

And there's another oddity.  Joseph Swainson describes John being rescued by three highly experienced fishermen who were probably also river pilots, plus himself.  Bill Morris, editor of the website of the Sunderland Point Community Association (and to whom I am deeply indebted), tells me that the fishermen of the time generally worked in pairs, one to use the oars and the other to work the net.  The boats could take two fishermen using two sets of oars.  Two men to row and another man to help John into the boat would be swift and efficient.  Bill's comment is that

Given the urgency, having four in the boat, with each taking a single oar and one being inexperienced, is highly unlikely

However, that is what Joseph Swainson wrote, so we leave it there for readers to make their own minds.   

The story doesn't end there.  Alice, whose first realisation of the near catastrophe must have been when John was brought in amid excited scenes, soaked, chilled and weary, wrote to him on the Monday when he had gone back to work

I feel intensely lonely today and such a weight of oppression, I suppose the reaction after the excitement.  The crowning mercy of Saturday night seemed to fill all my thoughts … When I think of what might have been!  But I must banish that thought; it quite overpowers me [4]

Joseph Swainson wrote to the Lancaster Gazette the next day, and it appeared in Saturday's paper.  Alice was very cross and wrote to John

It is just a worked up tale.  Had I seen that letter I should have kept at a more convenient distance from Mr Swanson and deemed him a young puppy who wished to appear in print … Do not forget the Bible for the boatmen; I fancy they look for some reward. [5]

Perhaps she felt rather more kindly towards Mr Swainson after the next development.  Somebody had told the other Lancaster newspaper that John had not given the boatmen any reward.  Mr Swainson wrote again to the Lancaster Gazette saying that they had in fact been rewarded most handsomely:

A paragraph in last Saturday's Lancaster Observer having been pointed out to me, stating that Mr Hopkinson had not thought fit to reward the men for their exertions, I venture to trouble you again to contradict a report that John Hopkinson had not rewarded the boatmen.

So far from being the case, Mr Hopkinson has rewarded each of the men most handsomely, in a much more suitable manner than by a pecuniary recompense, and, moreover, in a way which will afford a lasting memorial of his appreciation of their prompt and efficient exertions.

He means the inscribed Family Bible.  

The causeway was notoriously dangerous.  A man from Overton drowned in 1869; the innkeeper of Sunderland Point's Temperance Hotel drowned in 1877.  There were numerous rescues.  In 1870 fishermen rescued a farm boy from Sunderland Brows and went back into the water up to their necks to rescue his two horses.  In 1897 a char-à-banc from Morecambe carrying twenty people slipped off the road into a rapidly rising tide; all were rescued.  

We don't know if the boatmen felt a Family Bible was sufficient reward for their speed and expertise and chancing their own safety to save John; we can only hope that John thought to give these working men a cash reward as well.  

As far as I know, the family did not return to Sunderland Point.  If any readers would like to visit this uniquely beautiful place, make sure to check https://www.sunderlandpoint.net/ for the tides first.  

Rescue of Visitors by Alan Smith

Next:  47. "We want to teach them to go alone": Holidays in the 1860s

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. 35

[2] ibid.

[3] ibid., p. 35-6

[4] ibid., p. 36

[5] ibid., p. 36