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

69. Evelyn Oldenbourg: the daughter-in-law with no religious belief

Dr Maclaren's guidance must have been a great resource when she was coping with the challenge that came in the person of her new daughter-in-law Evelyn Oldenbourg, and perhaps we can see both challenges in her letter to John on 9 March 1872.  Ellen Ewing quotes her saying, after she had been writing about Evelyn,

I am wondering whether it is good for us or not to hear statements contrary to what we believe to be truth; it tries me most when I see some reason in what is advanced and yet feel the view at variance with what I have long been accustomed to regard as undoubted truth.  If, by this means, we are driven to prayer and more earnest searching, no doubt the result will be good.  Certainly it is more easy to go on undisturbed, enjoying our belief and living upon it, refusing to listen to any opposition.  What is right is another question [1]

Evelyn, a school friend of young John's sister Ellen, came from a very different background.  Her father Gustave Oldenbourg, who died when she was a baby, was a German-born stuff and yarn merchant in Leeds, and her mother Angelina was from Yorkshire.  Ellen Ewing quotes her mother Evelyn's memoirs:

Perhaps my young life abroad and such a varied outlook and education did not quite fit with the somewhat serious severe atmosphere of this family, though I was happier there than anywhere else. [2]

Katharine Chorley, remembering her Aunt Evelyn, thought that the "months on end" Evelyn had spent with family in the "so much softer and sunnier and more expansive" surroundings of Dresden and Munich had 

infused into her outlook the richness and the freedom which raised her mentally a head and shoulders above almost all the women I knew when I was young. [3]

She described with great fondness Evelyn's unconventionality and eccentricities, her energy and bravery, indicating that Evelyn, who was to suffer such dreadful losses in her life, had no religious faith

her philosophy of life threw her on to her own resources and offered her neither comfort nor explanation.  She did without and, unarmed, threw back the challenge of suffering with a gallant 'No Surrender'. [4]

A greater contrast with her future mother-in-law cannot be imagined.  Evelyn's daughter Ellen Ewing wrote

Evelyn sensed that she was not entirely acceptable, though she probably failed to realize the spiritual upheaval which her advent in the family had caused, especially in the Mother and even the level headed Ellen. [5]

Almost everything about her seems to have been a challenge.  When Alice visited John and Evelyn in their first home near Birmingham, she wrote to John on 21 April 1873

Evelyn is really a fascinating hostess; her bright, happy face is quite contagious.  I must follow up your advice and not trouble about scratched furniture, plate, etc., and all best things in daily use.  I say to myself it is only a matter of money – earlier replacement, no great concern if they can afford it, and, if not, they must use the spoilt or do without.  What say you to my conclusions? [6]

But Alice grew steadily more and more comfortable with Evelyn, writing on 18 May 1890 to John 

When left alone with Evelyn we get on very well; she is very daughterly and interesting as well, and I can say more of my mind to her than to any of the four daughters-in-law [7]

John and Evelyn had married on 4 March 1873 at St John's Church in rural Longsight, half an hour's walk west of his parents' home at Grove House (the church is now a mosque).  His younger brother Alfred was married four months later, and his marriage also took place in a parish church.

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. 61

[2] ibid., p. 54

[3] Katharine Chorley, Manchester Made Them, pub Faber & Faber Ltd (1950) p. 232

[4] ibid., p. 227

[5] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 61

[6] ibid. p. 63

[7] ibid., p. 97

68. Challenges to faith: a son's imperviousness, science & new theology

John, their first child, was a strong and independent character even from babyhood.  On 21 June 1851, when he was 18 months old, his father John wrote to the little boy's grandmother Alice 

he is a dear little fellow, most loving and affectionate but so determined and headstrong that we sometimes hardly know how to treat him.  He has so much perseverance and energy that he will make either a very good or a very bad man [1]

In 1852 little Johnnie was impeding his mother as she wrote to John

I am writing whilst Johnnie is at my side telling me he wants to be naughty; you must excuse incoherency. [2]

We can see how much careful thought Alice and John gave to the best way of bringing up their children in a letter of Alice's in February 1854

Johnnie has been getting very crooked with Grandpapa this afternoon.  The scene made me pray that we might be spared to bring up our dear children – harshness and hastiness would ruin Johnnie, whereas gentle loving correction seems to bring out all his tenderest affection.  I have had occasion to put him to bed twice lately; when he comes to himself the dear little fellow has clung to me with more than his usual affection.  Alfred is rather obstreperous; he has a prouder spirit than Johnnie.  I fancy he will be more difficult to subdue yet he is a winning pleasant child [3]

They hoped fervently that their children would come to experience conversion, the experience that Fanny Dickens had described to the Revd James Griffin:

By degrees my eyes were opened, and I saw with shame and confusion my utter worthlessness in the sight of God, and that unless I came to Him through His dear Son, I could not be saved  

They hoped and prayed that daily Bible reading, chapel attendance and careful teaching would help the children on their way.  They often spoke of it to each other, as John wrote to Alice in August 1867 from Paris, when young John was 18  

We went to a little prayer meeting at eight.  There were several very earnest faithful addresses.  Oh how I longed that it might be the turn of our dear John's conversion [4]

But young John was impervious to all their teaching.  From her visit in October 1881 to young John and Evelyn in Kensington, Alice wrote to John in something like bewilderment

There is very much to be thankful for in this home – a growing mutual affection and, in the main, a wholesome training of the children.  But I do feel the want of religion in the home; it is like the perpetual banishment of a cherished needed friend.  And yet, strange to say, John seems to be more of a 'good' man than many a professing religious man. [5]

This was a conundrum that she and John had not expected.  But it didn't affect their relationship with their remarkable son.  In Bertram Hopkinson's memoir, he wrote of old John Dewhurst that his nonconformist principles were 

the expression of a sturdy independence of character, and it taught an almost stern devotion to truth and duty.  These were the qualities which Alice Hopkinson learnt from her father and passed on to her son.  Of the narrowness which sometimes marred the nonconformist faith in those days there was none in her teaching.  Thus it was, that though John Hopkinson in part rejected the form of her creed, he was able to keep its essence, and this slight divergence never affected the sympathy between him and his mother.  To the end of his life it remained, a perpetual joy to both of them [6]

In the years after Alice's death in 1910 her children generally drifted away from Congregationalism but not necessarily from faith, her daughters especially remaining truly devout.  Alfred was clearly the most torn in mind, leaving a legacy in his Will to the Rusholme Road Chapel Sunday School, disapproving heartily of infant baptism, but finding himself strongly drawn to the paintings of the Madonna he found in his holidays on the Continent.  His niece Katharine Chorley wrote that he had "a rather troubled spirit" and, she suspected, "an unresolved philosophy of life." [7] Distinct social differences had opened up between chapel people and church-goers by the early 20th century, but she thought that the great draw of the Church of England among her family and neighbours was on aesthetic grounds and because of the "grave and noble dignity of the Book of Common Prayer".  Her father's brothers and sisters had deserted one by one the Congregationalist chapels of their upbringing and she felt they were "drawn by the alluring beauty and majesty of the Litany" [8]

The second challenge to John and Alice's faith were the momentous 19th century developments in science and scholarship which brought immense difficulties to so many.  Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and the eruption into British scholarship of liberal German theology are the most famous examples of this.  

Alfred could remember the shock of the liberal theology.  He wrote in his memoirs of how in Puritan households like theirs the Bible was the literature that "absorbed most attention and was read most constantly" and was considered "literally and verbally inspired" and that

I can remember at the age of fifteen or sixteen feeling rather shocked by the remark of an older boy that what is recounted in the Bible before the Call of Abraham must be taken as really allegorical. [9]

Dr Alexander Maclaren
(1826-1910)

Alice's adjustment must have been made much easier by the minister at the chapel she now attended, the Union Baptist Chapel in Oxford Road, close to their home in York Place.  Her daughters Ellen and Mary had started attending in 1873 and Alice must have followed soon after.  The minister there was the celebrated Dr Alexander Maclaren (1826-1910) who was famous as an expository preacher – that is, he explained in detail the meaning of Scriptural texts.  Listening to his sermons would be like listening to an excellent lecture.  In a lunchtime lecture in 2010 (it can be found on the Evangelical Library website), the Revd Gary Brady quoted an American professor of homiletics who described Dr Maclaren [10] as one of the great preachers of the world – 

First of all, he had the physical outfit of an impressive speaker – an erect figure, a good action, a flashing eye, an expressive countenance, a carrying voice.  The character lying back of the utterance was one of singular purity, depth, simplicity and humility.

Alice's son Alfred describes meeting the great actor Sir Henry Irving at the opening of the John Rylands Library, when Dr Maclaren had given a speech.  Sir Henry had been greatly impressed – "Good heavens," he said to Alfred, "What an actor that man would have made!"[11] 

The Union Chapel was built to hold 1,500 worshippers and its seats were filled morning and evening to hear Dr Maclaren preach for anything up to 45 minutes.  And Alice could actually hear Dr Maclaren's clear, carrying voice and distinct enunciation long after her deafness cut her off from so many other things.  Extracts from Dr Maclaren's works can be read online on the Bible Hub website or from the link at the bottom of his Wikipedia page so we can see how he dealt with some of the puzzles posed by science.  On Genesis 1:26 he wrote [12]

We are not to look to Genesis for a scientific cosmogony, and are not to be disturbed by physicists' criticisms on it as such. Its purpose is quite another, and far more important; namely, to imprint deep and ineffaceable the conviction that the one God created all things …

The work of the first four days is the preparation of the dwelling-place for the living creatures who are afterwards created to inhabit it.  How far the details of these days' work coincide with the order as science has made it out, we are not careful to ask here ... 

On the sixth day the earth is replenished with living creatures.  Then, last of all, comes man, the apex of creation.  Obviously the purpose of the whole is to concentrate the light on man; and it is a matter of no importance whether the narrative is correct according to zoology, or not.  What it says is that God made all the universe, that He prepared the earth for the delight of living creatures

When it came to the new German "higher criticism" which applied scholarly historical and critical methods to Bible study, Gary Brady quotes Willis B Glover, who wrote of Dr Maclaren in 1954 that 

His greatness as a preacher rested on his emphasis on evangelical certainties rather than on the reconciling of old theology with new theories. Nevertheless, the example of so great a preacher who was tolerant of higher criticism and who even entertained the possibility that the story of the fall was mythical could not have been without effect.

While old Lord Shaftesbury in his undeviating and rigid Fundamentalism was dreadfully troubled by the threat from the higher criticism (scientific discoveries, as Alice's great-granddaughter Georgina Battiscombe explains in her biography of the Earl, [13] bothered him far less), Alice could leave it all to Dr Maclaren, secure in his learning and guidance.  

Next:  69. Evelyn Oldenbourg: the daughter-in-law with no religious belief

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. 18

[2] ibid., p. 20

[3] ibid., p. 24

[4] ibid., p. 50

[5] ibid., p. 77-8

[6] Original Papers by the late John Hopkinson, D.Sc., F.R.S. edited with a Memoir by B. Hopkinson, B.Sc (1901), Vol 1, pub. CUP, (available online at archive.org)

 p. xii

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

[8] ibid., p172-4

[9] Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C., LL.D., Penultima (1930) pub. Martin Hopkinson Ltd, p. 79

[10] cf https://www.evangelical-library.org.uk/articles/Maclaren_Lecture.pdf

[11] Penultima, p. 242

[12] https://biblehub.com/sermons/auth/maclaren/the_vision_of_creation.htm

[13] Georgina Battiscombe, Shaftesbury: A Biography of the Seventh Earl 1801-1885, (1974), pub Constable & Company Ltd