54. "A brilliant success"? Juvenile balls & the ratepayers

I wonder whether the Children's Balls held by the last two mayors played a part in the decision to turn to John.

Of course there had always been children's balls.  Children had to learn to dance, and dancing academies often used to mark the end of term with a ball – a reward for hard work, a gratification for the parents and a useful advertisement for teachers.  In the late 1850s and 1860s, Doctor Mark and his Little Men held a series of balls in Manchester for children under sixteen, advertising: 

Dr Mark, professedly and most affectionately attached to all the little maids and little men of this country, and consequently always thinking and contriving how to please them and make them happy, begs most respectfully to propose to all parents and guardians the novel idea of giving a Grand Juvenile Ball, on the evening of St Valentine's Day, at the New Free-trade Hall  

He charged two shillings and sixpence per child, refreshments not included, with parents and guardians paying a shilling, and spectators paying two shillings for a seat at the front of the gallery, one shilling at the back.

This advertisement of 1857 in the Manchester Times might seem rather nauseating and highly dubious to us but Dr Mark was actually an idealist raising money to fund his programme of musical education for working-class boys.  Music would give them a start in life, a future career, an escape from poverty and crime. 

Dr Charles Bertram van der Mark (1816-68) was a remarkable and public-spirited musician.  He had developed a simple method of teaching which produced rapid progess and his "Little Men" were his youth orchestra.  He had established a conservatoire in Cheetham which he called the Royal College of Music and he toured his orchestra round the country to fund the project.  He never could raise enough money, no matter how hard he and his wife worked.  The children were given a home and a general and musical education – he charged a very low fee which he often waived.  The reminiscences of the children years later show that they were well looked after and happy – and so loyal, that after his untimely death, his Little Men tried to provide for his widow by carrying on giving concerts.[1]

The Manchester mayoral balls were not like that.  Ever since the 35 year old Queen Victoria had given a ball for the juvenile nobility on little Prince Arthur's fifth birthday in 1854, children's balls had become increasingly popular.  The Lord Mayor and Mayoress of London held a fancy dress ball for children every year in the Mansion House.  The Mayor of Liverpool gave a grand juvenile fancy dress ball for nearly 600 children in 1877.  The Mayor of Bootle held one in 1879.

Gertrude Thomson's illustration for
William Allingham's The Fairies (1878)

It was Alderman Henry Patteson, a marble and stone merchant, who gave the first children's ball in his mayoralty.  He was a family man in his early forties – probably the youngest man to become mayor of Manchester so far – whose eldest children were daughters aged 10, 13 and 14.  The newly-built Town Hall in all its grandeur and glory was a very tempting venue and Henry Patteson announced the ball soon after becoming mayor in November 1879.  Beautiful invitations, designed by the well-known Manchester artist Miss Gertrude Thomson, who was an illustrator for Lewis Carroll, went out to the well-to-do families of Manchester.  

The dancing master who had the good fortune to be appointed Master of Ceremonies for the evening announced special lessons in the Manchester press.  The drapers put out "Mayor's Juvenile Ball" advertisements.  Jewsbury, Crux & Gething of Deansgate ("Young Ladies' and Little Girls' Dresses after the Latest Fashion and Exquisitely Fitted.  Estimates given") engaged extra dressmakers for the late rush.  Macbeths, the boys' tailors in King Street, advertised costumes from 20 shillings.  

The arrangements for Alderman Patteson's ball were "exceedingly numerous and difficult" said the Manchester Courier on 10 January 1880, but the result was "a brilliant success".  The curator of Alexandra Park, the park which acted as a nursery garden for the other parks and provided flowers for the town hall, filled the grand staircase, the corridors and the refreshment buffet with "an admirable selection of palms, crotons, dracaenas, and various other ornamental and foliage plants" and a nurseryman from Sale provided decorations for the orchestra in the public hall.  Some 500 children of Manchester's wealthier citizens were brought to the Town Hall by their parents (who weren't allowed in the ballroom), and the first floor suite of apartments was thrown open for the guests.  Dancing began with the polonaise at 7 o'clock, there was a magic lantern entertainment, picture books were laid out on tables for the children to read, and Mr Whaite, who ran the German Fair in Bridge Street ("One hundred thousand penny toys, Presents and Toys suitable for Christmas") gave the children a show with Professor Whatman's famous Marionettes.  

The next mayor was Alderman Thomas Baker, a solicitor, eminent in civic life and pillar of the Unitarian church – the Unitarians, later wrote Alfred Hopkinson, were the "intellectual aristocracy of South Lancashire" [2].  Trustee and historian of the Cross Street Unitarian Chapel where Elizabeth Gaskell's husband was minister, he was the uncle of Edward White Benson, who would soon become Archbishop of Canterbury.  Thomas Baker was 70 when he became mayor and, though he and his wife Helen had no children, was quick to follow Alderman Patteson's example in announcing a children's ball.  Advertisements for dancing classes and ball costumes began to appear in the newspapers.  R Micheson of Oldham Street had children's ball dresses in the newest styles and Thomas Peel of The Great Outfit Establishment in Oldham Street added the warning that "Ladies are respectfully requested to place their orders early, as they will be executed in rotation" to his usual advertisements.

Manchester Town Hall:  Great Hall Foyer by anpalacios

The invitations went out and about 600 children aged between 10 and 15 were expected.  They arrived, wrote the Manchester Courier of 18 January 1881 in closed carriages warmly wrapped up against the frost and snow, and were taken into the cloakrooms on the ground floor of the "bright and cheerful town hall", then up the grand staircase "which was laid with diaper cloth" to the banqueting room for tea.  The master of ceremonies organised them into pairs and they processed to the large hall, where they were received by the mayor and mayoress and their guests.  Again the conservatories of Alexandra Park had filled the staircase, hall and corridors with plants "and the brilliant dresses of the guests were rendered all the more beautiful in appearance by contrast with the dark-green leaves and branches of dracaenas, palms, aloes, crotons, and azaleas".  Again the  "splendid suite of rooms" was theirs for the evening.  There were marionettes, there were refreshments.  The mayor, meanwhile, was entertaining members of Parliament, clergymen, Salford's mayor and mayoress, and various aldermen and councillors and their wives.  John and Alice do not appear in the list. 

Thomas Baker served a second year as Mayor – and was afterwards knighted – and he gave a second children's ball.  This was held on 20 February 1882 and was just as grand.  Mr W B Wood of Urmston gave the children a magic lantern show (scenes in the life of Dick Whittington and comic slides) in the council chamber.  In the mayor's parlour, Mr Whaite put on another show of Professor Whatman's celebrated marionettes (an Indian juggler, a great contortionist, Old Mother Shipton and others).  And this time the Children's Ball attracted the attention of the Illustrated London News.  Its writer thought 

The Townhall is well suited to such a purpose.  The large room, when not crowded, is well adapted for dancing, while the richly furnished state apartments afford all other accommodation needed. 

Among the adult guests were the Greek Archbishop of Corfu and his suite, who were visiting Manchester.  The 600 or so children were not all – in spite of the instructions that been issued – under 15 and over 10 years old, which seems to have been a problem with all children's balls.  But, thought the Illustrated London News, there were fewer under-tens than there had been in earlier years and the girls' dresses showed "the improvements which have of late years been introduced into the attire of children of the female sex".  They were mostly dressed in light colours and in white. 

The front page of the Illustrated London News' edition of 4 February 1882 consisted entirely of "Sketches at the Mayor's Juvenile Ball at the Manchester Townhall" drawn by illustrator Henry Stephen ("Hal") Ludlow.  The text on page 102 described them as "scenes at this pleasant gathering of happy young people"; this is not what Hal Ludlow depicts.  In fact, his illustrations seem comically subversive.  

Alderman Thomas Baker
Manchester Art Gallery

Ludlow's sketches of the Lord Mayor of London's juvenile fancy dress ball at the Mansion House in January 1883 display the children's costumes, and the children look serious but not unhappy.  

At the top left of the page of Manchester sketches, he shows the backs of children's heads sitting in row after row as they watch "Dissolving Views" on the magic lantern.  They are being shown the portrait of a white-haired gent with a receding hairline, rather flowing locks and a copious chin beard and side whiskers – the Mayor himself.  The central sketch, "Unusual occupants of the Mayor's chair", shows three drooping girls looking pale and wan, their long fair hair flowing decoratively around them, and a rather supercilious looking boy with dark curly hair leaning against the lectern. 

In "Well, my dear, what's your name!" the Mayor is graciously chucking a demure little girl in short skirts under the chin while a sulky boy stands with his hands in his pockets to the side.  "Spectators of the Dance"  depicts assorted ladies, wilting children, bored boys, little girls and the Mayor, sitting on a long bench under a balcony of potted plants.  There are portraits down the side of the page of doe-eyed future beauties, a pugnacious boy in a stiff collar, a bored boy leaning back on a bench with one leg nonchalantly across the other, a sad boy apparently in a sailor suit, and a profile of an distinctly objectionable boy gazing snootily and gloomily to the left.  Perhaps all the happy children were actually dancing.

The coverage can't have pleased everyone in Manchester, but the ball was hailed by the press as a great success.  Then, a few months later, an objection was raised.  The children's balls were supposed to be held at the Mayor's expense – and what a gratifying way of returning invitations and making new business and professional contacts the balls must have been – but there were people who suspected that the mayor did not bear all the cost.  

On 30 September 1882, the Manchester Courier printed a letter from a young man called Frank Hollins, a leather merchant in his early thirties.  A singer, artist and writer, he was rather hot-headed and very strong on the question of waste and corruption in the Town Hall, sometimes finding himself in trouble for over-hasty allegations.  He would go on to write graphically and with great sympathy at the end of the decade of the poor of Manchester and Salford who received food and clothing from Superintendent Bent's charity at the Old Trafford police station.  

He described in the Manchester Courier on Friday 16 January 1891 his visit one cold, frosty Sunday evening to the county police station drill yard and shed at Old Trafford.  There he saw nearly 1,000 people, aged from 3 months to 71 years, queuing at the soup kitchen which was run, in their own time, by Superintendent Bent and his men.  Some of those queueing – and this included the little children – had tramped miles to be there and had arrived two hours early.  Hollins described their bare feet and legs and their ragged clothing, and he told some of their stories.  Lizzie Wilkinson, aged nine had come with her 2½ year old brother.  Her father was dead, her sister Alice was minding their mother who was very ill, and they were mostly fed by the kindness of Mrs Kegg who kept a shop on the corner and let her mother have some things on trust.  There were children who had had neither breakfast on Sunday nor dinner on Saturday and an old couple who would not go into the workhouse where they would be separated from each other.  Frank Hollins appealed to his readers to donate – "every sovereign sent feeds about 300 children".  In 1882 Hollins was a self-appointed ratepayers' advocate and would in a couple of years' time be elected as citizen's auditor.  His attack on Charles Stewart about building materials bought from the council ended Stewart's time as a councillor.  

In his slashing letter to the Courier in 1882 he wrote

… Now, sir, it is pretty well known that a considerable portion of the amount entered in the Town Hall committees' accounts as "casual expenses" is illegal.  I am informed that some portion of the expenses in connection with the children's ball, given by the mayor, falls upon the rates.  If this is so it is simply monstrous.  Have the working men of Ancoats to pay rates to entertain the children of the merchants of the city at a ball?  Will John Smith's child, of Angel Meadow, or Medlock-street, ever get an invitation?  I trow not.  Yet, I have it on good authority that the dance programmes alone for the last children's ball cost the ratepayers over £40 ...

This was not the sort of publicity that serious-minded councillors appreciated.  Corporations did sometimes get some funding from central government by grants in aid which could be made to encourage councils to comply with a newly-imposed duty.  Councils could, with difficulty, find capital funding through local private Bills or provisional orders under an enabling Act.  "Municipal trading" was a popular option, and in this Manchester had led the way, building the first publicly-owned gas works for its street lighting.  But most of the corporation's income came from the ratepayers.

The ratepayers could keep themselves very well informed about council proceedings, which were reported in great detail by the local newspapers – the Courier, the Guardian, the City News, the Evening News and the various satirical papers.  There had been a boom in local newspapers since the abolition of Stamp Duty on newspapers in 1855 had made them cheaper.  So there was a very well-informed body of ratepayers, and it was very uncomfortable to be in the line of fire from letters to the Editor and reports of the Ratepayers' Association.  Councillor Charles Sydney Grundy, who was mayor between 1877 and 1879, took press criticism of the Improvement Committee of which he was chairman so personally and bitterly that he abruptly resigned from the council in 1885.  The old ways of doing things were beginning to be challenged and expected standards of behaviour were changing, just as local government itself was changing as it tried to catch up with the problems of a growing industrial population. [3]

Bad publicity about children's balls wouldn't have helped.

We can see there was uneasiness about the balls from the fact that it didn't become a yearly event.  There was a revival in the 1890s, but in 1896 Alderman A E Lloyd broke the tradition again. "Instead of the usual ball, to which the well-to-do only have been invited," wrote the Manchester Courier on 6 January 1896, "he has given a treat to poor and deserving old people living in the city".  He and his wife invited some 700 old people to a good tea, and gave them each a quarter pound of tea, two pies, pastries and any leftovers to take home.

I think it possible that John Hopkinson, as a serious and personally austere practical man and an engineer, was all the more attractive as a choice to some councillors and aldermen because of an uneasiness about adverse publicity and because of what some might well have seen as the flaunting of wealth in the face of poverty and need.

In Alice Bragg's autobiographical account of her life [4], her description of her grandparents is one of lively, vivid and frequently inaccurate details.  She wrote that John became mayor "with some anxiety, as his illegitimate birth was raised and his acceptability queried in some quarters at first."  I can't find any support for this comment.  I've no doubt that those of John's opponents who knew of his illegitimacy were happy to use it – how could they resist such a titillating bit of gossip?  But in this booming city of new men, what need was there for it to be known?  I think it was quite probably more embarrassing for John's grandchildren, in their new upper middle-class, public school-educated status, than it had been for John in the 1880s.  And the men of Manchester Council were not looking for social acceptability in their mayor.  It wasn't a matter of choosing someone from your own social circles but of choosing the right man for the job.

Alderman Philip Goldschmidt
Manchester Art Gallery

The man who succeeded John was Philip Goldschmidt, the first foreign-born mayor of Manchester.  He belonged to the large German population of the city, he was a naturalised British citizen, and he was a Jew.  (London-born Benjamin Disraeli, Jewish but baptised, had died on 19 April 1881 a year after Gladstone defeated his ministry at the general election).  He was almost certainly chosen because of his financial expertise.  On his sudden death in March 1889, the Manchester Courier set out the details of the official programme for the funeral procession (he was buried in the Nonconformist section of Southern Cemetery), and below it a report from the Anglican Cathedral:

The Dean of Manchester, preaching at the Cathedral yesterday, referred to the late Mr Alderman Goldschmidt, and said he was the first Mayor of Manchester he had the pleasure of knowing, and he remembered gratefully his courtesy and kindness to a stranger … He did not know the exact description of the late Alderman Goldschmidt's theological belief, but he represented one of the modern versions of that venerable creed and cult which, whatever its relation to other Oriental faiths, was the direct parent of the Christian Church, and in no slight degree also of the whole structure of Christian civilisation.  He was faithful to the best traditions of his race and faith, and that day, fellow-citizens and fellow-believers, whatever their differences, were one in their respect for him and in sympathy for his family.

Directly below this, coincidentally, is a review of the opera put on by the Carl Rosa Opera Company at the Theatre Royal – it was "The Jewess", La Juive, the 1835 triumph of grand opéra by French Jewish composer Fromental Halévy.  

There is plenty about Catholicism in Ellen Ewing's book but no mention of John and Alice's attitude to Jews.  Perhaps this was from tact, given that Gerald Hurst was writing the Preface and we know that his brothers-in-law had been hostile to his marriage to their sister Margaret because he was a Jew.  I think we can be fairly sure that councillors such as John Hopkinson did not move in the same social circle as Philip Goldschmidt, though his son Richard and John's son Edward regularly shared the prizes at Owen's College.  But this was no impediment to successful co-operation on the Council.

After Mr Goldschmidt came the difficult and prickly John Harwood, later Sir John.  He had begun work at the age of six in calico printing works in Oswaldtwistle and by sheer hard work had become the owner of the biggest calico printing works in Manchester.  He was not an easy man to get on with and, though he came to dominate the council, his colleagues clearly often found it difficult to work with him.   "He was not easily understood.  He was a strong man, very reserved and very sensitive" said the Manchester Evening News on his death in April 1906.  But he was certainly chosen for his close attention to detail and figures and his constant desire to keep costs down. 

Notes

[1] For more on Doctor Mark and his Little Men, see https://momh.org.uk/exhibitions/dr-mark-and-his-little-men/

[2] Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C., LL.D., Penultima (1930) pub. Martin Hopkinson Ltd, p. 37

[3] Pamela Mary Nuttall, Corruption in Municipal Government in the late Victorian Period, (1871 – 1902).  Thesis submitted to University of Huddersfield March 2019

https://pure.hud.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/71701519/Nuttall_THESIS.pdf 

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

 

53. Becoming Mayor: John makes his decision

John was quite thrown by the idea that he should be mayor.  He had never thought of taking a prominent public rôle – he had never thought he was up to it.  He distrusted his own powers, as he told his old friend and mentor, the Revd James Griffin.  His work as a councillor in suggesting solutions for technical problems must always have been similar to his professional life, and dealing with the problems of people living in his ward must have been very like the work he had been used to for years with the Rusholme Road Chapel.  Being the public face, the "first citizen", of the new Cottonopolis was a very different matter.  

And he was very concerned for Alice's "sensitive, shrinking nature", as he told Mr Griffin.  Unlike some of her sisters-in-law, Alice had always stayed in private life, she had never been a committee woman, and she had deafness to contend with.  As she had written four years earlier

My deafness! My deafness! How it interferes with pleasant communion and makes one dull and uninteresting [1]

How would she feel about taking on the rôle of Mayoress?  He thought she might not like it, or perhaps simply the thought of it would make her nervous.  

Alice was away in Grasmere and couldn't be consulted in person.  He wrote to her on 13 July 1882.  

Alderman Curtis had been very reassuring about the duties of the Mayoress.  As the new Town Hall was now finished, the Mayoress did not need to do anything or appear any more than she liked.  To make the proposal more attractive, Mr Curtis had stressed the advantages – through the position itself and the introductions it would bring – that being mayor would be to his son and partner Charles in his profession.  ("I daresay there is a good deal of truth in it," wrote John).  And Mr Curtis had said 

he had never on any former occasion seen so much unanimity and cordiality, eight or ten of the Council, including Stewart as well as my own friends, commending the proposal. [2]

(Councillor Charles Stewart was elected to the Council at the same time as John.  Born in Warkworth in Northumberland, he was a pawnbroker with a sideline in house building projects.) 

Alice replied on 14 July

My own beloved husband,

My mind is full of many thoughts, some of them troubled and anxious.  If you were here I might be able to explain myself better than in a letter

But she was very definite

On no account would I be a hindrance to your doing what you think is right and best in the matter.  

She thought he would like to accept and

If your judgement seconds your inclination, I beg that anything I have said may be forgotten and that you will act accordingly.  With regard to any benefit to Charles, I am sceptical – your nature is not one to make capital of any such advantage; you are too disinterested for that.  With a very large share of wisdom, I do not believe you have much worldly wisdom.  When you take a public office it will be with one thing in view – to forward everything that will be good for the community; private ends will never enter your calculations.  If you feel you can afford to do this, I would not hinder, especially if you are assured you will be serving your generation after the Will of God. [3]

John turned next for advice to Alice's nephew John Milne, by this time an established Manchester businessman, for his opinion and on 18 July he wrote to Alice

I had a short talk with John Milne, the only family friend I have consulted.  He takes a clear decided view.  'It is the fitting and proper thing for the Council to do, and for you to do.'  Many acquaintances have expressed gratification that I have been asked and they hope that I would undertake the office – some very enthusiastically [4]

and he wrote to the Revd James Griffin.  Ellen Ewing quotes from the draft letter, written on tissue paper and "singularly difficult to decipher".  John explained that he had

just been receiving a deputation from the City Fathers to express the unanimous wish of the Council that I should allow myself to be elected as mayor for the next year.  I do not find it easy on this occasion to get into my usual judicial position of looking at a question.  The cordiality of the invitation binds me to give it a respectful consideration 

Revd James Griffin in 1847

He put before Mr Griffin his distrust in his own powers and his concern for Alice.  But now, he told the Revd Griffin, she said "I am prepared to stand by my husband anywhere and at any cost".  What should he do?  

He ended with a summary of the family situation.  By this time, the summer of 1882, his youngest child, May, was 17 and John, the eldest, was soon to be 32.  John and Alfred had been married men since 1873 and had five children apiece.  They and their brothers were hard at work in their chosen careers:

Albert, my good son, goes to Cambridge in October, to qualify as a Doctor of Medicine, to which he is giving himself from the highest motives.  Charles is my right hand here in business.  He and Mary go on Saturday to join their Uncle Wills in Norway.  Edward is living near London helping Dr Siemens in new applications of Electricity.  John and Alfred are full of hard work and honourable employment in their respective professions. [5]

Mr Griffin, who had written on 11 September 1872 of his looking forward "if life be spared" to seeing John as Mayor of Manchester and one of his sons as Principal of Owens College [6], wrote back with warm and emphatic encouragement to his "dear and valued Friend"

Your long and valuable services to your Corporation and City claim this reward.  Next, your own character, your public talents and ability and the high repute of your family entitle you to the office of First Magistrate of your distinguished City.  Besides this, I have not the shadow of a doubt that you will be able, by Divine Assistance, to fill the office with dignity and effect, and very much to the honour and advantage of your eminent City Council and of the great community they represent … You cannot decline to be Mayor  [7]

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. 75

[2] ibid., p. 80-1

[3] ibid., p. 81

[4] ibid.

[5] ibid., p. 80

[6] ibid., p. 62

[7] ibid., p. 80

52. John Hopkinson, Councillor & Alderman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Bright in 1870s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

[4] Penultima, p. 41

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

[6] Penultima, p. 108

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

51. John Hopkinson at work

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

French floating battery 'Lave' in 1854

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes the family brought in work.  

Dewhurst mill buildings in 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes John's work brought in new family.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

[3] Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 11 August 1873

[4] Dewsbury Reporter, 15 November 1873

[5] 1902 Obituary of John Hopkinson 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bellagio promontory, Lake Como

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

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

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

Charles Hopkinson

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

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

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

Your very affectionate son

Charles Hopkinson [6]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next:  51. John Hopkinson at work

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

[6] ibid., p. 77

[7] Alpine Journal 1929, Vol 41