83. "Very palatial indeed": the move to Grove House in 1874

In 1874 the Hopkinsons moved into Grove House on Oxford Road.  John and Alice were now fifty years old.  Alice had left childbearing behind and her family was complete.  Thirteen children had been born; little Alice and baby William Henry had died.  Poor Ellen, now aged twenty and too tired to rejoice in the lovely new storage space, was the eldest of the nine children still living at home.  Harry, aged eight, was the youngest. 

OS map 1892:  Grove House & the Union Chapel  [National Library of Scotland]

Alice had found it very hard when the first of the children left home for good.  In 1871 as Alice faced the prospect of seeing her eldest son move away, she wrote to John

I cannot endure the thought of losing John from my home.  However it is no use forestalling our sorrows: we have enough to gladden us at present.[1]

The following year young John left for Birmingham, where he had been offered the post of Lighthouse Engineer with Messrs Chance Brothers, a major pioneering firm of glassmakers.  For a year he lived in an inn a few miles from the glassworks, but in 1873 he married Evelyn Oldenbourg and they set up home together.

As might be expected, partings grew easier and by May 1882, when Edward had finished at Cambridge and was hesitating as to what to do next, Alice was more concerned with his prospects than her own

One feels very anxious that Edward should be guided to a right decision in this matter.  For ultimate worldly advancement, it strikes me that a London settlement, even with small pay at present, would be best.  But my impression is that home life would be beneficial to character; London life seems such a whirl. [2]

Though they only had nine children living at home, John and Alice hadn't chosen a smaller house.  Grove House seems to have been bigger, if anything, than the house they had just left.  I haven't been able to find out any details of its interior – how many bedrooms, how many reception rooms – but the 1881 census shows that they now had four living-in domestic servants plus a gardener and his wife.  This was quite an increase in expenditure from ten years earlier when they had three domestic servants, which was a very usual number for middle-class families of their type.

One old habit hadn't changed.  In spite of having four domestic servants, a letter of 20 June 1885 reveals Mary describing to her mother how she, Gertrude and May were carrying out the spring cleaning.  They were spending their days doing housework and mending, she wrote, and 

I am sure your heart would be quite satisfied could you see me finding out dust in nooks and crannies and looking sideways to discover its whereabouts.[3]

The grandchildren had thought Grove House "very palatial indeed" when they spent the Christmas of 1883 there.

Too grand, so they thought, for all the small economies that were enforced at table and elsewhere [4]

wrote Ellen Ewing, looking back over the years.  Of course the size of the family probably meant small economies were necessary – Albert Hopkinson's daughter Alice Bragg remembered

At table, nothing less than a baron of beef, my father used to say, fed the family [5]

but John and Alice had always tended to frugality, and plainness of living had a moral aspect for them.  

Perhaps for them the main point of Grove House was the garden.  As Manchester extended southwards and more and more houses were being built, Grove House still stood in the sanctuary of its garden and the surrounding fields, which would be laid out as today's Whitworth Park soon after John and Alice left.  Grove House was part of the estate of Edmund Crompton-Potter, Beatrice Potter's uncle.  He lived in neighbouring Rusholme House, which lay to the south, and he kept the large and carefully laid-out gardens of both Rusholme House and Grove House well maintained.  So it isn't surprising to find that John and Alice needed the services of the gardener.  

If the house seems generally to have represented work to Alice, the garden was a great source of pleasure to her and to John.  Ellen Ewing quotes a letter written by Alice, describing a moment of family life to John as she gazed out at the garden and at Norah the cow.  The letter is undated, but possibly dates from 1878 to 1880, as the third volume of William Blanche Jerrold's biography of Napoleon III was published in 1877, and 1879 was the year of financial crisis in the family, when Lily was 19 years old.  Alice's tone is so light-hearted and attractive – what a pity we don't have the rest of the letter 

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 … 

The pigeons are laying eggs and the cockroaches are decreasing.  Norah looks charming, as if she enjoyed life.  Mary is better today; she is pacing the lawn, book in hand.  Lily has been working away very diligently, only giving herself time for her meals.  The full occupation has, I am sure, been wholesome, combined as it has been, with the satisfaction of being really helpful to you.  She seems to be managing the large tracing very nicely.  I do think our girls would make a very good shift for a living if put to it ... 

I will enclose Charles's letter from Carlsruhe.  I am amused at the Hopkinson energy in ascending heights and taking cold baths in contrast with the Wren temperament ... 

I have finished the third volume of Napoleon 3rd and find it interesting and profitable.  I ought to read one of the strong books on the other side and take the balance [6]

The garden was clearly an important part of the grandchildren's visit in Christmas 1883.  There were five of them:  Bertram was nearly ten, Alice was eight, Ellen (Ewing) seven, Lina was approaching five and Jack was three.  Ellen writes about the stay in detail [7] – it seems likely that she merged later impressions into this account, given that she was only seven at the time.  She describes how their mother had drilled them to be on their best behaviour and had made sure the little girls' frocks would have no frills or furbelows, as this was the way Grandmama like it.  They found Grandmama generally lying on a sofa and carefully protected from them by their aunts, and "Grandmama would not like it" was the usual prohibition.  Ellen wrote that nevertheless

they all experienced something of her sweetness and fun and the older children of her moral beauty and her intellectual vigour.

But they could always see Grandpapa.  They loved to go on walks round the garden with him, and he loved to take them.  He could tell them in his booming voice all about the things he found to show them, the "little forms of life of all sorts", entertaining them with stories and explanations – "reminiscences and wise explanations and illustrations, highly interesting and instructive".

We don't know what little forms of life John was showing the children but there would be plenty to choose from.  In Fallowfield, a mile and a half further south, his grandson Arthur (Alfred's eldest, born 1874) could remember that at The Grove in Egerton Road, where they lived from 1882, there was "a large garden with lots of birds' nests" and a pond in which he used to fish for sticklebacks – "there was a kingfisher on the pond, and I have put up snipe in a field opposite the back-gate, where there is now a maze of streets". [8]

Ellen Ewing, born in 1876, had a clear memory of her grandfather

It was wholesome and pleasant, also, just to gaze on his countenance where sagacity, dignity, obstinacy and great benignity had printed their record.  He had a very pink face with masses of beautiful white hair.  He often wore a becoming round smoking cap of black velvet and a black velvet coat, and was good to look upon.  So was Grandmama, even more so.  If he was like a first-rate cart horse, she was like a race horse.  

Those who knew, said that, as a young woman, she was not particularly handsome.  As an old one she undoubtedly was, or, rather, lovely.  Her eyes must have always been beautiful, large and deep set as they were and expressive to a remarkable degree of her eager enquiring mind and her rich, humble spirit.  Very little provocation would stain her cheeks with a delicate flush emphasising the ethereal quality of her face. [9]

The children could feel John's "spoken and unspoken sympathy" with them.  And Ellen was struck by his "lover-like attentions to his wife" when he presented her every day with a nosegay of flowers.  

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. 65

[2] ibid., p. 78

[3] ibid., p. 66

[4] ibid., p. 84

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

[6] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 76

[7] ibid., p. 85

[8] Arthur W Hopkinson, Pastor's Progress (1942) pub. Michael Joseph Ltd., Religious Book Club edition, p. 213

[9] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 84

82. "I dared not tell Elizabeth": Theatre, music & dancing

When the boys reached fifteen or sixteen – when they left school and went to Owens College – John and Alice allowed them a good deal more freedom.  

John and Alice had never taken their children to a theatre.  In their circle, going to the theatre was often seen as the first step to damnation, and some families tried to ban even their adult children from theatre-going.  But John and Alice did not object to their boys going to the theatre once they had left school for Owens.  They just had to tell their father where they were going.  Alfred's first play was The Merry Wives of Windsor [1]

Programme from
original run of 'Iolanthe'

John himself went to the theatre for the first time in May 1883 when he was visiting young John and Evelyn in London [2].  They persuaded him to go to see a play with them and he sat most of the time with his hands on his knees staring solemnly at the stage.  They couldn't see that he was amused or interested.  He was nearly sixty – it must have taken him quite an effort to get the hang of the conventions of the stage and the dramatic technique and mannerisms of the actors, let alone the scenery and the lighting.    

I wonder what they took him to see.  Most of the plays on in London at that point were farces, burlesques and comedies, and mostly unknown to us.  Can they have taken him to see D'Oyley Carte's Company in Iolanthe?  Some of the critics had been rather snooty about the plot when it opened in November 1882, but there had been approving comments about the little electric lights in the fairies' hair.  This was the first time a show had been entirely lit by electric light and John and Evelyn had gone with Sir William Thomson, afterwards Lord Kelvin.  Overcome with this demonstration of all his work on electricity, he had sat gripping Evelyn's hand, from time to time saying "Mrs Hopkinson, the realization of it all!  The realization of it all!" [3]  Perhaps they took John to the Lyceum and saw Henry Irving (not yet knighted) and Ellen Terry in Much Ado About Nothing.  

Alice, thinking of John's elder sister Elizabeth, wrote to him 

I dared not tell Elizabeth; she would have been so shocked.  You will tell me your impressions when we meet [4]

We don't know whether the girls had the same freedom to go, suitably escorted, to the theatre – or if they even wanted to go.

When it came to reading, Alfred remembered that as they moved on from Coral Island to Dickens and Scott, John and Alice did not object to the children reading novels.  Instead they would every so often warn the children that reading nothing but novels in their leisure time would lead to a "kind of mental flabbiness" which would put them off reading anything else.  Alice took reading very seriously, and insisted on the importance of meditating after reading a good book. [5]

And the family did enjoy the great literature of the day.  Alfred could remember hearing grown ups talking about George Eliot's Adam Bede when it was published in 1859.[6]  He was only about seven or eight years old at the time and he wondered what the ladies were talking about as they discussed the character of Captain Arthur Donnithorne, the seducer of Hetty Sorrel.  (Unsurprisingly, the book wasn't considered at all suitable for young people at the time).  But ten years later the Hopkinsons were eager readers of George Eliot, looking out for her books as they appeared in print.  So in 1874, a couple of years after it first appeared in instalments, we find Alice engrossed in Middlemarch and writing to John 

I am reading the second volume of Middlemarch; it is really wonderfully clever.  I think you would enjoy the book. [7]

A few years earlier she had tried the fashionable lighter fiction.  On 16 July 1856 she wrote to John

I have finished 'My Novel' I rejoice to say.  Certainly one does not arise from the reading of it refreshed, strengthened for action.  Such reading does not allow a healthful stimulant; it is an over dose and produces weariness, exhaustion.  I am disposed to abjure all novel reading even the very best of the kind.  It does not aid one in life's battle and we need all the aid we get [8]

My Novel, or Varieties in English Life, which began to appear in instalments in Blackwood's Magazine in 1850, was by the celebrated and prolific Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, author of many big three-decker novels.  When we read the closing paragraph of this equivalent of an upmarket blockbuster for holiday reading:

So, symbolled forth in these twin and fair flowers which Eve saved for Earth out of Paradise, each with the virtue to heal or to strengthen, stored under the leaves that give sweets to the air;  – here, soothing the heart when the world brings the trouble – here, recruiting the soul which our sloth or our senses enervate, leave we woman, at least, in the place Heaven assigns to her amidst the multiform "Varieties of Life." 

Farewell to thee, gentle Reader; and go forth to the world, O MY NOVEL!

we can see why Alice might prefer Middlemarch.

It's often been said by descendants that the Hopkinsons heard very little music, but Alfred wrote that the family had "a genuine love and keen appreciation" of music, though "very limited knowledge".  

We often attended the Halle Concerts from their first institution to hear the great oratorios, and when I remember these, any remark made depreciating Handel – or Mendelssohn – fills the soul with savage and righteous indignation. [9]

So they gave Mr Charles Hallé's Grand Orchestral Concerts a miss – the first was on 30 January 1858 at the Free Trade Hall when Alfred was a little boy of seven – and they didn't bother with the Classical Chamber Music Society.  But when Mr Hallé gave the great oratorios, perhaps even from the first performance of Haydn's oratorio The Creation on 3 April 1858, the Hopkinsons were there.

And they danced the old country dances, as we can see in a letter written on 26 December 1879 by Alice to Gertrude.  It's such a jolly picture for once, it's a pity we don't know where Alice was writing from – perhaps the Milnes' at Belmont – 

After dinner we had music and singing and ended up with a dance.  Aunt and I both appeared in Ninepins and Sir Roger.  Of course our movements were most elegant.  John Milne was my partner.  Father also tripped it "on the light fantastic toe" [10]

Notes

[1] Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C., LL.D., Penultima (1930) pub. Martin Hopkinson Ltd, p. 60

[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. 83

[3] ibid.

[4] ibid.

[5] ibid., p. 109

[6] Penultima, p. 56

[7] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 63

[8] ibid., p. 26

[9] Penultima, p. 57-8

[10] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 74

81. Education & the Hopkinson children

John jnr aged 18 or 19

When it came to schooling, John and Alice gave the matter careful thought.  They sent young John to board at Lindow Grove in Cheshire when he was about 10½ because they were worried about his health.  Because of his "languid circulation" they sent port wine and eggs to the school as strengthening extras to the school food. [1] After he'd been there for about a term, a new headmaster arrived.  This was Charles Willmore, who was very much against long hours of study and a firm believer in developing boys' physical health.  So the boys spent most of their time outdoors, exercise and fresh air being of the greatest importance.  In 1864 Willmore became head of Queenwood School in Hampshire, and young John and some other boys transferred with him.  This school was in wild and beautiful country on the edge of the New Forest, so young John spent hours bird nesting, tree climbing, taking hornets' nests and catching butterflies.  All his life he thrived on the outdoor life and plenty of exercise – he was very lucky in his education.  Then in early 1865, when he was 15½, John began at Owens College.

Owens College was of great importance to John Hopkinson and his family – all the boys went there.  It was founded in 1851 from the legacy of a wealthy industrialist called John Owens with the aim of providing Manchester with a college of education for boys above the age of 14 in "such branches of learning and science as are usually taught in the English Universities" – but unlike the ancient universities, it was to be non-denominational.

Most middle-class young men in Manchester started in business at about the age of 15.  Owens, from the beginning, provided both for students who were already at work and for students who wanted to study longer and in a more advanced, longer course.  It provided day classes and evening classes.  It offered both a technical education and courses that would lead to a degree from London University.  There were "occasional" students who could attend the parts of a course that they needed.  There were evening classes in classics and maths for schoolmasters, to improve standards in Manchester schools.  There were public lectures.  Dedicated students who were already at work could attend evening classes which could build up to the number needed to give them access to the matriculation exam for London University.  In 1861 Owens absorbed the Manchester Working Man's College.  Manchester was enormously proud of Owens – which eventually, after being part of the federal Victoria University, became Manchester University and Alfred was its first Vice-Chancellor.  

When young John went there, his son Bertram later explained [2], Owens aimed at replacing the first three years of an engineer's 'time' of apprenticeship with a wider education.  John went on from Owens to read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge.  It must have been during his student years that he first met his sister Ellen's friend Evelyn Oldenbourg.  She describes the meeting delightfully

The first time I met John Hopkinson was on the lawn of their home in York Place, Manchester.  I feel now what a momentous meeting it was.  The great luminous eyes of the brilliant Cambridge scholar looked straight into mine, and it surely was the insight of a great romance that was to follow … I must confess to me he seemed then rather an awkward boy, my chief impression was – Why did he wear horrid brown socks with trousers too short to cover them? Alas, I was but a silly girl, and these and other impressions spoiled my life for two years. [3]

Their son Bertram wrote of him

John Hopkinson took a high view of his responsibilities as eldest son and at quite an early age he began to assist in teaching the younger members of the family.  When they grew older they followed in his footsteps.  Everything that he did, and especially new departures, such as going to Cambridge, had far-reaching effects as an example to his brothers.  His brilliant success in all that he undertook gave them confidence in following him. [4]

The force and independence of his character, his drive and his successes, must have been both encouraging and daunting for his younger brothers.

Alfred aged 16 or 17

John and Alice sent Alfred to a day school, but he had to change after a couple of years because the master's gout became unsurmountable.  So they sent him to another day school and then a boarding school – we don't know if this was Queenwood.  Alfred seems to have felt that sending children to boarding school broke up the family dynamic in an undesirable way.  He wrote in Penultima

In spite of some obvious advantages in the boarding school system, I am disposed to think as the result of subsequent experience that for many families, especially where there are more than two or three children, the day school is often best – at all events where the parents have character and sufficient leisure to enable them to throw themselves into the life and the interests of their sons and daughters.  The break-up of family life by boys and girls going to boarding school is often very serious [5]

We don't know whether this came from his boyhood experience or whether it was something he observed in families later.  He was only at the boarding school for eighteen months.  Perhaps his parents felt it didn't suit him, because they brought him home and sent him to yet another day school.  This was the Victoria Park School under Dr Ernest Adams.  Alfred described him as

a good scholar of original mind.  He had a delightful sense of humour, and in a term or two during which I was the only member of his Greek class, I learned much from him; but taking the school as a whole, it was not a model to be imitated. [6]

However, it must have been the best boys' day school in the neighbourhood, because John and Alice sent Charles there too.  Alfred then went to Owens College on the Dalton Mathematical Scholarship in 1866.  Evelyn described him as he was at eighteen, before he went on to Lincoln College, Oxford

Alfred I had met often before.  About eighteen years of age then and most attractive, with a beautiful head (dark shadowy hair and also luminous eyes) – I used to imagine that he would some day be a great poet; but to him there came a different fate.  At Owens College, like his brother in a different direction, he had, on the literary side, carried everything before him.  I shall never forget the great last day of his college life when every first prize appeared to come to him – a library of beautiful books, his proud brother helping him to carry these trophies which almost filled a cab.  They were indeed a unique couple of brothers and such pals. [7]

We know that Charles went to the Victoria Park School and to Queenwood, and that Albert went to the Norman Road School in Rusholme.  The headmaster was Mr Henry Jones – this was the school that he and little Harry were attending when Harry caught his fatal illness in 1877.  All the boys went to Owens College.  

Where John and Alice differed from most Manchester parents of their class and position was in allowing their sons to take up places at Oxford and Cambridge.  Bertram Hopkinson, in writing his memoir of his father's life, was struck by his grandfather John Hopkinson's independence of mind.  Even though John belonged to a world in which practical experience was what counted – most engineers didn't even know any College men, let alone think of sending their own sons to university – he fell in with young John's own ideas for his future.  Young John thought the usual training for engineers was too narrow, and he wanted to study more science before he began in engineering.  This might have been first suggested to him by Mr Willmore at Queenwood [8], but it was Professor Barker at Owens who encouraged him to  enter for a Mathematical Scholarship at Trinity College in the spring of 1867.  John came out first among some thirty competitors and this settled any doubts his parents might have had.  

It was even more unusual for Nonconformists or sons of men in business to find their way to Oxford.  Oxford was supposed to be reactionary, ultra-Tory, extremely High Church, and very extravagant.  Even at Cambridge young men's principles could be unsettled and they could be made quite unfit for business, and Oxford was worse.  But John had won an open scholarship of £100 and this made the difference, or so Alfred thought when he looked back on it.  Their father earned a very good living, but it depended on his very hard work and, with so many children, paying for John to go to Cambridge would have taken opportunities from the younger ones.  John himself wouldn't have gone if he had thought he was cheating his brothers.  (In later life, this thought left Alfred with a quandary.  Excluding people from scholarships on the grounds of their parents' income was "one of the most retrograde and injurious steps possible".  But on the other hand he couldn't but acknowledge that "it is scandalous for those with large and certain incomes to take the benefit of endowments which they do not really need"  [9])

Alfred went to Oxford by "a curious chance". [10]  The Rector of Lincoln College at that time was Mark Pattison and he and his colleagues were looking to break away from some of the old Oxford ways.  He approached Owens College and asked them to nominate a Science Scholar.  Owens' best choice was a man who could not take up the scholarship and so it was offered to Alfred.  He was eighteen years old and he very liked the idea of going somewhere that was looked upon with such suspicion in their Manchester circles, but he didn't want to be tied down to Natural Science.  It was agreed that he could change to Greats (Literae Humaniores – the Classics, that is Ancient Latin and Greek, philosophy etc) if he wanted to.  He made this decision while his parents were away, but his father had no objection and helped him go to Oxford.  There he lived a frugal life ("The living was of the plainest possible description and as restricted as was at all compatible with good health" [11])

Charles went to the Victoria Park School, then Queenwood School, then Owens College, taking his degree in science from the new Victoria University in 1882.  He went into his father's firm.  Of Edward, I know only that he was Dalton Mathematical Exhibitioner at Owens College, and went from there as an exhibitioner to Emmanuel College, Cambridge.  Dr Ernest Adams must have retired by the time John and Alice looked for a school for Albert, so he was sent to Norman Road School in Rusholme under the headmastership of Mr Henry Jones.  By the time he went to Owens College it had become the Victoria University of Manchester.  And from there Albert went to Emmanuel College, Cambridge.  Little Harry was at Mr Jones' school when he caught his fatal illness in 1877.

We can see that John and Alice sent Ellen to Ellerslie Ladies' College in Victoria Park because it was there that she met Evelyn Oldenbourg.  Ellerslie School had been started by Miss Jane Anderson in 1850 and in 1868 she set up the College for older pupils, with tuition from Owens College staff.  As it was by far the best girls' school in the area, I think Ellen's sisters will have gone there too.  

May Hopkinson

I think the "Miss M Hopkinson, Ladies' College, Ellerslie, Victoria Park" who is listed among the successful Lancashire students in the Cambridge Higher Local Examinations in the Manchester Courier of 23 August 1880 was the youngest sister, 15 year old May Hopkinson.  (She passed in essays on English literature, and with distinction in English history and English language and literature).  Ellerslie College was the girls' equivalent of Owens College – in the 1871 census Ellen is listed as "student Ladies College", Charles as "student Owens College" and the younger children are each described as "scholar".  

Ellerslie – its Edinburgh-born headmistress Miss Anderson had named it after the supposed birthplace of the Scottish hero William Wallace – was a seriously academic school.  Girls' education was at last being taken seriously and schools like Ellerslie began to appear in the second half of the 19th century, modelling themselves on boys' grammar schools.  Here is Ellerslie as advertised in the Manchester Courier of 2 January 1869 

Ladies' College, Victoria Park

The Course of Study includes the higher branches of English, Latin, French, German, Mathematics, drawing, harmony, and class singing.  All the teaching in the College is carried on by professors.

Inclusive fee for the above, 27 guineas a year; or 10 guineas a term.

The College will REOPEN on Tuesday, the 12th of January, at 9.30 am

The Pupils of the School (which is carried on as usual) will reassemble on Monday the 11th, at 3 pm.

Further information may be obtained on application to Miss ANDERSON.

Ellerslie, Upper Park Road, Victoria Park.

One of its Old Girls was Agnes Bell Collier (1860-1930), who was a few months older than Lily Hopkinson.  She was a pioneering mathematician at Newnham College, Cambridge.  Another was Angela Brazil (1868-1947), who was four years younger than May Hopkinson and was very well known in the first half of the 20th century as a prolific writer of girls' boarding school stories.  In her 1925 memoir My Own Schooldays she wrote that her parents sent her to Ellerslie because "it was considered the most select school in Manchester".  She described the workload and the exam pressure as "a tremendous grind" – pupils for exams went to demanding after-hours classes every day with professors from the university – but lessons were "splendid, inspiring, the very backbone to a real education".  It sounds like a very suitable school for Hopkinsons.

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. 33

[2] 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. xvii

[3] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 54

[4] Original Papers by the late John Hopkinson, p. xviii

[5] Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C., LL.D., Penultima (1930) pub. Martin Hopkinson Ltd, p. 233

[6] ibid.

[7] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 54

[8] Original Papers by the late John Hopkinson, p. xx

[9] Penultima, p. 244

[10] ibid., p. 245

[11] ibid.

[5] ibid., p. 57

[6] ibid., p. 6

[7] ibid., p. 7

[8] ibid., p. 76

[9] ibid., p. 76

[10] ibid., p. 10

[11] ibid., p. 72

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hiawatha from Project Gutenberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Owd Swaddle has brought thi new shoon;

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

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

Aw've brought thi top-cwot, doesto know

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

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

Come whoam to thi childer an' me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

wrote Alice to John from Sunderland Point in 1862.   

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

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

(The "picture boy" is Alfred)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alfred at about 16
& Albert aged about 4

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

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

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

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

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

On 19 May 1865 she wrote

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

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

Edward and Charles in 1867 or 1868

Notes

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

[2] ibid. p. 13

[3] ibid, p. 13

[4] ibid., p. 14

[5] ibid., p. 57

[6] ibid., p. 6

[7] ibid., p. 7

[8] ibid., p. 76

[9] ibid., p. 76

[10] ibid., p. 10

[11] ibid., p. 72

[12] ibid., p. 65

[13] ibid., p. 63

[14] ibid., p. 63-4

[15] ibid.. p. 18

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

[17] Penultima, p. 15

[18] ibid., p. 15

[19] ibid., p. 16

[20] ibid., p. 19

[21] ibid., p. 109

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

[23] Penultima, p. 228

[24] ibid., p. 99

[25] ibid., p. 100

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

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

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

[28] ibid., p. 29

[29] ibid., p. 33

[30] ibid., p. 44

[31] ibid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

London Necropolis Terminus
at 121 Westminster Bridge Road

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

[2] ibid., p. 77

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

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

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

Henry Overton Wills III (1828-1911)

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

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

OS map 1883: Redland Knoll
National Library of Scotland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

[1] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910 (1948) ed. Mary Hopkinson and her niece Lady Ewing, with a Preface by Sir Gerald Hurst, K.C., pp. 25 & 27 & 38

[2] ibid., p. 80