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  

72. "I am afraid I am tiring all my friends": Alice's sister Lizzie

Alice's younger sister Elizabeth was born with a club foot, which was remedied by a painful operation when she was a teenager.  Lizzie's health was never strong.  She stayed at home to look after her parents when her brothers and sisters were married, and she was a thoughtful and considerate woman.  In 1863 when Alice was worn out and pregnant with her tenth baby, Lizzie looked after her, keeping her in bed and feeding her up.  She was nearly 37 when her parents died.

Three months later, on 14 June 1864, she married their doctor, William Harrison.  (He was the brother-in-law who wrote so kindly to John in 1869 advising him to stop work because of his breakdown).  Lizzie must have known him most of her life.  His father and grandfather had been doctors in Gargrave near Skipton before him, and he and Lizzie were much of an age.  Perhaps they had waited to marry until she was no longer needed by her parents.  

In early 1866 Lizzie and William must have been sure that she was expecting a baby, and soon afterwards Alice became pregnant with her twelfth.  Lizzie's pregnancy did not go well.  Ellen Ewing tells us that Lizzie 

wrote singularly matter-of-fact letters to Alice about her prospects.  Her condition caused anxiety; but she seemed more concerned about the inconvenience to others than about the danger to herself. [1]

Alice kept "Dearest Lizzie's last letter" which included the lines

I am afraid I am tiring all my friends.  I wish I could set all at ease.  I can assure you I should be glad of freedom myself, though to be purchased at such a cost; but it has to be done and the sooner it comes, the sooner it will be over.  My dear husband gets very anxious. [2]

Lizzie died on 14 May 1866 after a week of puerperal fever.  There is no birth or death certificate for the babe.  Mary Hopkinson wrote in the Preface

Aunt Lizzie was very dear to those of her nephews and nieces who were old enough to know her. [3]

After Lizzie's death, Sissie Harrison kept house for her elder brother.  Their last years were spent at Dean Hill House on Matlock Green, just to the north of Matlock in Derbyshire.  (The house stood near today's cricket pitch).  The Harrisons were always close to the Hopkinsons – for example, in the 1881 census for their household we find 17 year old medical student Albert Hopkinson staying there.  

Sissie was a favourite of the Hopkinson family and she often visited and took holidays with them.  She and Alice were very close, as can be seen from a letter Alice wrote to her on 9 November 1904.  Alice was then 80 years old and Sissie, now alone after her brother's death, was 66:  

My pen has hardly been unsheathed this last fortnight.  My heart turns lovingly and trustingly to my dear Sissy and, as there is rather more life in me today, notwithstanding much pain from local troubles, I will use a little of it in sending you a few lines. [4]

Almshouses at Matlock Green,
by Mary and Angus Hogg

In the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, Sissie built almshouses at Matlock Green, not far from her home at Dean Hill House.  

Above the door is the dedication 

To the Glory of God – these Almshouses are built and as a memorial of her beloved brother, Wm Harrison MD, of Dean Hill House, Matlock, by his sister, Margaret Harrison, to provide rest for the aged poor 

Sissie outlived Alice, dying on 6 March 1918.

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. 47

[2] ibid., p. 47-8

[3] ibid., p. XXVI

[4] ibid., p. 109

71. Alice's special friends

John spent his days surrounded by other men whether he was at work, at the chapel or in the Council chamber.  He must regularly have encountered men he knew from his schooldays such as his fellow Alderman Joseph Thompson, but we don't know the names of his particular friends.  Alice, her daughter Mary wrote, "being so lovable and sympathetic" was "endeared to many".[1]  Mary names four special friends:  Miss Margaret Harrison, Miss J Knox Smith, Mrs West and Mrs Haworth.  A quick look at these friends might help cast more light on Alice and her interests and sympathies.

Mrs Haworth was probably Mary Ann, the widow of Dr George Haworth, who lived nearby in Oxford Road and had five children who were much the same age as Alice's own children.  

I think Mrs West was the widow of John West, who ran a well known gas meter manufactury at Oldham.  Elizabeth West lived with her children at 151 Plymouth Grove, not far from Alice.  She was clearly a woman of some enterprise and energy – when her husband died, she ran the business for a time.  Born in Manchester and the same age as Alice, she shared Alice's love of gardens.  Alice wrote of the garden at Grove House, their home from 1874

Our garden is lovely; the shadows fall so beautifully.  There are some special elements of beauty about this place; it is a privilege to have something to feast the eye upon [2]

Mrs West was a life member of the Royal Manchester Botanical and Horticultural Society.  In the Manchester Courier of 14 May 1880, I find her listed as one of the Lady Visitors at the Northern Counties Hospital for the Incurables in Ardwick Green for the week beginning 17 May.  Her fellow Lady Visitor was "Mrs Hopkinson, Grove House".  I wonder if this was actually Alice or whether it should have read "Miss Hopkinson", and it was really Mary, always an energetic volunteer worker, who was going to the Hospital that week.  

Royal Society of Chemistry landmark
at the site of Dr Angus Smith's laboratory
in Grosvenor Square, Manchester, by Duncan Hull

Miss Jessie Knox Smith was a Scotswoman who lived in York Place with her uncle Dr Robert Angus Smith, the distinguished analytic chemist who discovered the phenomenon which we now call "acid rain", caused by burning coal rich in sulphur.  One of Dr Angus Smith's early papers was "On the Air and Rain of Manchester", which must surely have interested John, as Manchester's air pollution was of great concern to the city council.  

Dr Angus Smith's wide interests included spiritualism and his native Scotland.   Jessie evidently shared Alice's love of mountain scenery.  She and her uncle must have spent long hours beside Loch Etive, north of Oban, as she provided the delicate illustrations for Dr Angus Smith's book Loch Etive and the sons of Uisnach (which can be read online at the National Library of Scotland website).  

Miss Harrison was a particularly close friend who came from near Skipton.  Her Christian name was Margaret but she was always known to the Hopkinsons as Sissie.  Fourteen years Alice's junior, she was the younger sister of Dr William Harrison, the husband of Alice's sister Lizzie.

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. 76

70. Esther Wells: the daughter-in-law who converted to Anglicanism

It is Alfred's eldest son Arthur who suggests that the marriage gave John and Alice some concern on religious grounds.  Esther had come into the Hopkinson family in 1865 as a 19 year old governess.  Alfred was then 14 years old and he quickly fell for Esther – within months John was writing to Alice 

Alfred was expressing great approval of Miss Wells to me last night. [1]

One of John and Alice's criteria for applicants for the job was that they should be able to fit in with the family's religious education, and Esther's letter of application was supported by a letter from her 31 year old sister Miss Anne Eliza Wells, a teacher:

Ours is, I may say, hereditarily a congregational family … My uncle Mr Arthur Wells' name is probably familiar to you in connection with many religious and denominational efforts.  And my two sisters with myself, have long been members of the Church here.  Esther has, of course, been brought up in the same persuasion, but is not yet a member.  The Rev C Colemance, our present minister, considers her in a hopeful state of mind; but she has not yet made a public profession.  And we should be most thankful to see her admitted into a truly Christian family where impressions which I know she has received would be encouraged and brought forward. [2]

John and Alice were very pleased with the letters from the Wells sisters and offered Esther the post.  We don't know how long Esther stayed with them.  Her father Henry Wells, a Nottingham solicitor, died aged 61 in October 1869 and she may have been called home that year.  By 1870 she was back in Nottingham living with her rich uncle Arthur Wells and returning to Manchester as a guest and friend of Alfred's sister Ellen, seven years her junior and evidently a great admirer.

Esther barely appears in Ellen Ewing's account after her appearance as a governess.  As Gerald Hurst says in his Preface,

the Esther Wells whose first appearance in its pages under the date of 1865 presents to later generations what seems a strange contrast with the vivid and dominant personality whom they knew in after years. [3]

But we know that Alfred had fallen deeply in love with her.  And Ellen Ewing includes a letter in which Alice wrote to John on 9 March 1872 

Alfred proposes to come home by Nottingham, staying a few days.  Poor lad.  I feel his heart is there.  I am sorry for it under the present circumstances [4]

but it isn't clear why Alice was sorry nor what the "present circumstances" were.  Possibly Alice is thinking of her struggle to adapt to young John's engagement to Evelyn, as "the Mother's sympathy, confidence and love are no longer needed".  Possibly Esther was steadily turning Alfred down.  Possibly Alice wasn't convinced that Alfred and Esther were really suited; the marriage was to be an unhappy one.  And possibly it was because Esther had by then been confirmed into the Church of England and this development had made them doubt Alice and John's understanding of Esther and whether she was the right wife for Alfred.

Esther's son Arthur – who was devoted to his mother and entirely on her side – gives Esther's side of the story and we have no other.  Before her marriage

She came under the influence of a great priest, Canon Hutton of Sneinton, and was confirmed.  It was a brave step, and she needed grace and courage then and thereafter, for at the time of her marriage to my father he was strongly anti-Church, and especially bitter against Baptism.  His people were Congregationalists or, as they preferred to be called in the old days, Independents.  They would have been glad to get my mother back to the denomination in which she had been brought up.  But nothing shook her loyalty to the Church, nor her determination to have her children baptized.  I expect the battle was fought and won over me, for my six younger brothers and sisters were baptized as a matter of course. [5]

And so on 3 July 1873 Alfred and Esther were married at St. Leodegarius' Church in what was then the village of Basford outside Nottingham.  Their grandchildren had a story that John had pressured Esther into marrying Alfred by saying that the lad would take his own life if she didn't agree to marry him.  After spending so long in John's (virtual) company, I find this absolutely impossible to believe.  I can imagine one of the sisters, perhaps Ellen, would be very keen to emphasise to Esther quite how much Alfred was besotted with her, but I cannot think those serious girls would make so light of the idea of suicide, so grave a sin as it was to them, and also still a crime under English law.

The officiating clergyman at the wedding was Alfred's uncle Revd George Ibberson Tubbs of St Mary's, Reading.  Like Esther, he had undergone a conversion.

When I last mentioned George Ibberson Tubbs it was at his wedding to John's sister Ellen in February 1839.  He was then a Congregationalist minister in Warminster in Wiltshire.  Eight years later he amazed his congregation at the Common Close Chapel by announcing that he was leaving for the Church of England.  The Patriot on 13 May 1847 reported that the subscribers of the Common-close Chapel of Warminster had unanimously adopted a resolution expressing their "most unfeigned regret" at the resignation of their "beloved pastor".  They deeply deplored 

the circumstances which have made it appear to him his imperative duty to sever those bonds which they had fondly hoped would have been long perpetuated

(I can only think that his studies had converted him to the Book of Common Prayer and the necessity for Bishops).  They were sending a deputation to wait upon Mr Tubbs "to request him to reconsider".  George didn't change his mind.  

St Mary's, Castle Street, Reading
by Stephen Richards

He became a priest in the Church of Ireland.  In 1850 he left his curacy in the diocese of Lismore for London, to become a curate at Trinity Church, St Mary Newington, south of the river in the parish of Lambeth.  Two years later he became incumbent of St Mary's Episcopal Chapel in Castle Street in Reading.  There he stayed for more than 30 years.  

It had been founded by breakaway Anglican evangelicals and for nearly 40 years had been outside the Church of England, taking its ministers mainly from the Calvinistic churches of the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion.  In 1836 it had been accepted back into the Church of England, but it must always have been close in spirit to the Nonconformist churches – no wonder it was a good home for George Tubbs.  The church has come full circle in recent years.  In 1994 the Church of England (Continuing) was founded there and it is once more outside the Church of England.

We have no idea what John and his mother and sisters made of George's conversion to Anglicanism, nor whether George's wife Ellen agreed with him, nor how difficult it was for her to adjust to being a vicar's wife in County Tipperary.  On the other hand, we can have a pretty good idea of what John and Alice thought when Esther's brother Arthur became a Roman Catholic priest.

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. 46

[2] ibid., p. 45

[3] ibid., p. VII

[4] ibid., p. 61

[5] Arthur W Hopkinson, Pastor's Progress (1942) pub. Michael Joseph Ltd., p. 134 of Religious Book Club edition