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 

74. Family ties: the Dewhursts of Skipton

I have already mentioned the times that the Hopkinson children spent with Tom and Maria Dewhurst's children at 'Whinfield' and the links between the Hopkinson boys and Bonny and Frances Dewhurst's sons.  

John Bonny Dewhurst
from the collection 
of Mrs Valentine Rowley

Alice and her sister-in-law Frances led very different lives.  Frances was a sociable committee woman, president of the Skipton Nursing Association and governor of the Girls' Endowed School.  She died in 1897 at the age of 74 after some time of ill health (principally "due to old age" said the Craven Herald on 26 February 1897).  

Bonny outlived her, dying in 1904 aged 84.  While his younger brother Tom had mostly focused on the business, Bonny had been very active in public life.  He was on the town council, the Board of Health, governor of the Grammar School, member of the West Riding County Council, magistrate, and chairman of the Skipton Liberal Association.  Both brothers, like the Milnes, stayed with the Congregational Church and were trustees and generous supporters of the chapel in Skipton.

Several of Bonny and Tom's sons went into the family mill, and with their careers we can see how trade and industry changed at the end of the 19th century with the growth of cartels and monopolies.  [1]

As the economies of the United States and Germany expanded, British industrialists worked to reverse the fall in their profits caused by the new competition.  The response was to be Anti-Trust legislation in the USA and competition law in Europe.  The Dewhursts banded together with thirteen other companies to form the English Sewing Cotton Co, with Algernon Dewhurst as the first chairman, his brother Lionel and uncle Tom among the fourteen directors and Bonny a trustee for the debenture holders.  But the new company did not start well and it became clear it was over-capitalised.  No impropriety was alleged, but Algernon resigned shortly before a very stormy AGM.  Lionel carried on as a non-executive director but the family's involvement in the business really ended in 1902-3.

Lionel's daughter Miss Mary Frances Dewhurst is probably the most eye-catching of Bonny's grandchildren.  She was born in 1885 and one feels that, over in Manchester, Miss Mary Hopkinson will have been rather startled by her occupation.  Here is the Yorkshire Post of 8 January 1932

Miss M F Dewhurst, of Gargrave, is hunting her good jumper, Joe II for a few weeks before sending him back into training.  There are few straighter women to hounds with the Craven and Pendle Forest Harriers, or indeed, any other northern packs.  It was with the first-named pack and the Ribblesdale Buckhounds she began her hunting career.  Born at Skipton, Miss Dewhurst lived for 16 years at Marton House, but ten years ago went to Gargrave, and during the war she served in the V.A.D. in France and Italy. 

Although Joe II is the first racehorse she has had, Miss Dewhurst had a mare named Baylinda which was considered the best jumper ever seen in Craven.  Joe won his first race in 1928, and in 1929 the Pendle Hunt Cup and the Adjacent Hunts Race in the same afternoon.  Since then he has won steeple chases in Miss Dewhurst's colours – blue, red, white and black striped sleeves, red and white striped cap.  

Bonny's daughter Hilda Dewhurst and her barrister husband Arthur Stanley Wills lived at number 27 in the Royal Crescent in Bath.  Any member of the Wills family caught the attention of the press because of their wealth.  When Arthur died, the Weekly Dispatch of London on 14 April 1935 reported that twelve members of the Wills tobacco family had died in the last 16 years leaving more than £41,000,000.  Hilda and Arthur's son Wilfred Dewhurst Wills was in Parliament – he was Conservative MP for Batley and Morley – at the same time as Alfred's son-in-law Gerald Hurst and son Austin Hopkinson.

Alice's brother Tom outlived her by six years, dying during the First World War.  The description of him by his obituarist in the Craven Herald of 23 June 1916 is endearing.  He died "at the ripe old age of 86 years" having been in failing health for some time.  

He was a typical type of the "old time English gentleman," alive to the responsibilities of his position, broad and tolerant in his views, able to appreciate and sympathise with the opinions of those who might differ from him on vital questions of Government or social legislation, courteous to all, and a generous supporter of all good works. 

He wasn't involved in public life like his brother Bonny but he was for a time president of the Skipton Choral Society and, while never being a member of the Skipton Congregational Church, he was connected with it all his life and was one of its most generous supporters.  The church building that we can see now on Newmarket Street – unfortunately it isn't used as a church building any more and when I last visited it was up for sale – was built largely by Tom.  It was due, said the Craven Herald, 

in no small measure to his unostentatious benefactions that the scheme for the erection of the handsome new church in Newmarket Street was carried to a successful issue in spite of unprecedented difficulties.

His wife Maria Stevenson had died aged 71 in 1907, "a most estimable lady," said the Craven Herald, and "sincerely mourned in the town".  She was another sociable and active committee woman, quite unlike her sister-in-law Alice.  This had struck Alice years before when they were on holiday together in July 1864.  Alice had written to John 

I am alone today, have been darning stockings … I have been enjoying solitude … Maria says she "hates to be alone."  I cannot understand the feeling; to me the quiet is so charming and the view from these windows is never failing society [2]

Somehow it doesn't seem surprising that Tom and Maria's jolly family at Whinfield should go on to lead lives in which sport, and not just the usual country sports of shooting and fishing, features prominently.

Their son Arthur, who went into the Dewhurst mill, died in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1921.  He and his wife were visiting their son Godfrey, who was a tea planter there and married to the tennis champion of Ceylon, Evelyn Marshall.  After losing to Wimbledon champion Mlle Suzanne Lenglen, Evelyn turned professional and had a short British tour with Suzanne Lenglen.  She wrote successful tennis manuals, and they can still be bought second-hand.  

Arthur's brother Edgar, who also went into the mill, was a rugby player, but his career for Yorkshire was cut short by a knee injury.  He went out to the Boer War with a Territorial Battalion.

Their sister Ethel was married out in India in December 1886, the year the Hopkinsons were busy with the weddings of Charles and Edward to the sisters Mabel and Minnie Campbell in Northern Ireland.  Ethel's wedding was at Fort William, the citadel of the Bengal Presidency at Calcutta, and her husband was Charles William Thomas, an indigo planter and keen polo player and big game hunter.  When they came back to England, Charles was agent to the owner of Gargrave House near Skipton.

Tom and Maria's son Jack was at Trinity College, Cambridge when Albert Hopkinson was at Emmanuel.  He was a rugby blue and an England international player, and he went on to practise as a doctor in the Cotswolds.  (Visitors to the churchyard of St Faith's at Havant on the South Coast will find the Dewhurst Garden, named in honour of Jack's son Dr Michael Stuart Dewhurst and his wife).

Tom and Maria's daughter Lilian and her doctor husband Dr George Edward Fisher had two sons.  Lieut. Henry Brian Fisher was killed at the Battle of the Somme, but George Annesley Fisher became a doctor and carried on his father's practice in Skipton.  He rowed for Cambridge in the 1913 Boat Race.  Even Tom and Maria's son William, quietly farming at Witton-le-Wear in County Durham, had a sports connection – his Scottish wife Mary Aitken was a successful golfer.  

The family of Tom and Maria's daughter Alice gives us another example of the Dewhurst-Hopkinson link.  Alice, who was the same age as Gertrude Hopkinson, married a Welsh solicitor called Goronwy Maelor Evans, a charismatic advocate for the miners of the Rhondda Valleys and a popular public speaker.  He disappeared from Alice's life four years after their marriage and was found to have gone to the Rhondda, where he died a couple of months after the decree absolute for their divorce on the grounds of desertion.  Alice's daughter Ethel married Edward Hopkinson's son Campbell, but the marriage ended in divorce.   

Just as Alice stayed close to Lizzie's widower, she kept in touch with the widower of her beloved sister Jane.  Benjamin Harrison was a stuff manufacturer in Bradford but he came of a Skipton family so she had probably known him a long time.  He had been left to bring up one-year-old John Frederick when Jane and little Alfred died of dysentery in 1850.  In the census taken in the spring of 1851 the little boy was staying with his Aunt Milne in Cheshire, so we can see the family had rallied round.  Alice and Benjamin kept up, wrote Ellen Ewing, "a lively but, on his side, well nigh illegible correspondence" [3].  In 1861 he wrote to her 

How changed our lives since we used to hold such long correspondences … You are surrounded by gems of life so precious that you don't care to look beyond your own domestic circle to give you the highest happiness which this mundane sphere affords. [4]

And the contact carried on.  Benjamin died at the age of 52 in 1866 – the year when the Hopkinsons and Dewhursts between them suffered five deaths – leaving his boy a 17 year old orphan.  We don't know who took him in, but in 1878 he was a partner in Messrs Campbell and Harrison, woolcombers of Shipley.  In that year he married Helen, daughter of stuff merchant Alderman Law.  They lived for a time at Rawdon Hall, which may be a familiar name – it is thought to have been the inspiration for Charlotte Bronte's Thornfield Hall.  

John Frederick and Helen retired to Craven, and lived at Halton Place near Hellifield.  They had one son, Alan Duncan.  His mother died in 1890 when he was 12, and his father ten years later of a stroke at the age of 51.  (Their joint grave in Kirkby Malhamdale churchyard is very distinctive, as a tiny beck runs out from under the memorial and flows down the middle of the plot).  John Frederick had been a keen Volunteer, the Colonel of the 2nd West Yorkshire Artillery, but Alan became a professional soldier and served in the Boer War.  When he married in Settle in 1903, the newspaper account shows the Hopkinson connection in the list of wedding presents – they included a present from Dr Albert Hopkinson and his wife Olga.  

Alan did not have a long life.  He died of appendicitis in January 1915 in Tasmania, aged 36.  The Benjamin Harrisons were not a lucky or long-lived family.

  

Notes

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

Archaeological Journal, 75, (2003), p. 193 et seq.  

[2] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910 (1948) ed. Mary Hopkinson and her niece Lady Ewing, with a Preface by Sir Gerald Hurst, K.C., p. 40

[3] ibid., p. 15

[4] ibid., p. 32

73. "Aunt Milne was ever so good to us": the Milne family

The Dewhurst and Hopkinson relatives must never have been far from Alice's mind, especially as her life centred so much on family and home life.  The sisters and sisters-in-law seem to have been in constant touch by letter, they took holidays together and shared family news.  With such a large family on both sides, John and Alice's world was full of people.

In their turn the cousins kept in touch with each other.  In their generation and the ones that followed, the family spread into the wider Empire – into Australia, India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and, with the army in the Boer War, to South Africa.  Over time, they left behind their roots in the peculiarly Puritan Nonconformist world of the mill owners and engineers of Lancashire and the West Riding and merged with the rest of the late Victorian middle classes and haute bourgeoisie.  

The lives of the women of the family who were engaged actively in charitable work, particularly in Alice's children's generation, often included a great deal of "visiting".  This was a form of social work done on a voluntary basis, and I think that Katharine Chorley's account of her mother "going visiting" is the best description I can give:

This did not mean paying and returning social calls.  It meant looking up the housewives of Ancoats from an accredited list, in her case provided by Aunt Mary [Hopkinson], listening to the tale of their difficulties, giving sympathy and advice and arranging for material help.  It mean getting to know how they really lived and how they could really be helped within the compass of their circumstances (nobody thought of altering the compass).  It meant bridging the gulf between Alderley Edge and Ancoats with that bridging stuff which is the hardest of all to handle, the thin silken strands of human sympathy.  If it were done sensibly and sensitively, and mother did it that way, then I think Ancoats accepted it with gladness but if it were done in a prying and patronizing spirit, and sometimes it was, then it became the most revolting insult. [1]

The Hopkinsons often visited Alice's elder sister Ellen Milne and her family at 'Belmont' near Cheadle for a welcome break in the Cheshire countryside and to enjoy themselves with their six cousins.  Ellen, who was described by her niece Mary Hopkinson as a "very bright, energetic and sociable girl" and "ever so good" to her nieces and nephews, was left a 45 year old widow in November 1866.  Her husband James Milne, a partner in the well-known department store Kendal, Milne & Co, had been 61 years old.  

O.S map surveyed 1872, pub. 1882 
National Library of Scotland

Ellen was 74 years old when she died on 23 February 1895.  Alice outlived her by fifteen years.  

But Milnes stayed on at 'Belmont'.  

Finally, after the First World War, the family sold it to the Manchester and Salford Boys and Girls Refuges which was looking for good country air for the children in their care, feeling that Strangeways was not good for their health.  The charity built four homes on the Belmont estate and the Milne family were generous donors to their cause.

Ellen and James' eldest son John was the intrepid youth who had gone on the 30 mile hike with young John and Alfred in 1864.  He and his brothers James and Sydney went in due course into Kendal, Milne & Co.  

Sydney stayed only a short time.  By 1884 he was living in Iowa and he died on Christmas Day 1884 in Hot Springs, Arkansas aged 36.  Perhaps he was there for the thermal baths.  

John Milne became a serious and influential man in Manchester civic affairs.  His uncle John Hopkinson thought so highly of his judgement that John Milne was the only family member he consulted while he considered whether to accept the offer to be Mayor.  When John Milne died aged 63 in 1910 – dying a month before his aunt Alice Hopkinson – his cousins Alfred, Charles, Edward and Albert were all at his funeral.  

Malcolm Midwood Milne
(1887-1954)

He and his wife Lucy Midwood had seven children, but it is his son Malcolm Midwood Milne and daughter Hilda Milne who catch the eye.  

Not only did they both become artists – Malcolm, who studied with Walter Sickert, was more well known than Hilda (the Tate, the British Museum and the V & A hold examples of his work) – but the photographs of their pleasant, attractive faces show such a clear likeness to their aunt Alice Hopkinson. 

These photographs are courtesy of the Henfield Museum in West Sussex  [2], which holds several paintings by Malcolm.

 

Hilda Lucy Milne
(1874-1959)

In the mid 1920s John Milne's daughter Frieda Dyson-Perrins visited the homes at Belmont.  (She was married to Charles William Dyson-Perrins of the Lea & Perrins' Worcestershire sauce family – he had one of the most important book collections in the world). 

Struck by the fact that there was no sanatorium for ill children, Frieda promised that the Milne family would build them one.  It was opened in 1927 and dedicated in memory of her father John Milne who, in the words of the commemorative tablet, "lived and died there".  

The Alderley & Wilmslow Advertiser of 3 June 1927 reported its official opening.  It should have been done by Frieda, but her mother Lucy was ill and she could not be there, so she asked her father's cousin Alfred Hopkinson to take her place.  He was now a very suitable dignitary for the task, being Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C, M.P. 

Alfred told Frieda, he said in his speech, that 

he should certainly put it before anything else if it was her wish and of her family.  He looked upon himself as a connecting link between the past and the present.  His memories went back to its earliest time, some 70 years ago, soon after his uncle bought it.  Some of the happiest days of his life had been spent in those gardens.  That building stood on the site of the old fruit room, on which in earlier days and days of good digestion they used to make raids, and sometimes they had painful recollections of the after effects of those raids.  (Laughter).  ... He remembered his uncle laying out the place for planting many of those beautiful trees with his own hands

The Manchester and Salford Boys and Girls Refuges eventually evolved into the Together Trust.  The old house was most recently used as a care home, but it has been empty some time.  It was given Grade II Listing after a fire destroyed the roof and planning permission was granted a few years ago to turn it into flats, but it may still be simply deteriorating and decaying.

Notes

[1] Katharine Chorley, Manchester Made Them, pub Faber & Faber Ltd (1950), p. 158

[2] see this blogpost by curator Alan Barwick
Hilda and Malcolm Midwood Milne: Henfield's Sibling Artists