15: Alice Bonny & John Dewhurst start their married life in Skipton

Perhaps Alice Bonny already knew Skipton – perhaps she knew some of John's friends and family – so perhaps starting her married life would not be too daunting.  She might even have known the family of John's first wife Ann.  That would have been helpful in what might have been an awkward situation.  Fortunately, Alice wasn't a girl but a calm young woman of 27.

To picture Alice's new life as a married woman, I'm drawing here on the life of Mrs Mary Stubbs and her family in Boroughbridge, another West Riding market town, a few decades later but still attached to traditional ways 

• Alice's first social engagements will have been going out to dine and meet the neighbours – people were asked to dine "to meet the bride" 

• frequent sociable gatherings among family, friends and neighbours – invitations to tea and supper, followed perhaps by cards, games, dancing, singing

• visits and visitors – female friends and relations often stayed for long periods

• offering hospitality to people calling in, or coming to see John on business, or coming to town for the markets and fairs – Skipton being a great mart for cattle, sheep and corn

• traditional ways and customs – even in the 1850s, in Boroughbridge weddings were marked by races – the women were busy, active housekeepers and countrywomen, keeping a cow for the house, and a good larder, ready to offer food and drink to young relations who might call in – like the men, the women were good walkers, and walking was a companionable, social activity as well as a means of getting from place to place

• the men's lives outside work were filled with the traditional activities of the countryside – going out with a gun, getting up parties for rook shooting and, in John Dewhurst's case, going hunting 

Almack's Assembly Rooms by George Cruikshank

The digitised Leeds newspapers for 1816 to 1819 mention local events in Skipton – nowhere near as smart as the High Society gathering in Almack's Assembly Rooms in London, but there were plenty of gentry in the Skipton neighbourhood and the town was growing, its population in 1821 reaching 3,411 – for example:

• on 20 January 1816, the Leeds Mercury reported that the Skipton Dancing and Card Assemblies would be held monthly in January, February and March in turn at the Devonshire Hotel and Black Horse Hotel – "Residents of Skipton or not, admitted as Non-Subscribers"

• at the beginning of December 1817, the Leeds Intelligencer carried an announcement by the young organist at the parish church, Mr Charles Morine, who

Respectfully informs the Public, that he intends having a Miscellaneous Concert

at the Devonshire Hotel, Skipton, on Tuesday Evening, December 23d, 1817

with vocalists, including one from York, and a Mr Bradbury "from the King's Concerts", while Mr Morine himself led a Band of violins, viola, cella, flutes, bassoon, horns and double bass – and there was a Ball after the concert

• perhaps some of the Dewhurst family even went to Marton to watch a Mr Kendrick and his colleague Monsieur Evonthomasi exhibiting "Feats of Necromancy, Tight-rope Dancing, Deceptions of various sorts, Thaumaturgic Horologium Exhibitions, &c." – this attracted the notice of the press because the two men were later sent to the Wakefield House of Correction for 3 months, though this was more about staging their exhibition on a gentleman's land without his permission than the Necromancy and Deceptions.

Sunday would be taken up with attending church, and in the first years of their marriage this was at Holy Trinity, Skipton, where their first child was baptised.  

Alice and John Dewhurst had seven children

• Jane, born 25 September 1816 

• John Bonny, born 16 August 1819 – the family always called him "Bonny"

• Ellen, born 17 March 1821

• James, born 24 December 1822

• Alice, born 1 November 1824 – she would go on to marry John Hopkinson

• Elizabeth Ann, born 17 April 1828 – she was called "Lizzie"

• Thomas Henry ("Tom"), born 14 December 1829

Zion Chapel

Within the first three years of their marriage, two big changes had happened in their lives

• by the time Jane was born in 1816, John had moved the family from Skipton to nearby Embsay because of the business

• and by the time John Bonny was born, John had transferred their allegiance from the Church of England to the Congregationalists, and they were attending the Zion Chapel in Newmarket Street, where the younger children were baptised

• John's cousin Hannah and her husband Robert Johnston had already become members, and perhaps others in their circle of family and friends – I don't know how much difference being members would have made to their social lives, and whether cards and dancing might have been off the menu in future …

The move to the Zion Chapel, according to his granddaughter Mary Hopkinson, was because of "the degenerate lives of some of the clergy with whom he was brought in contact."  It might really have been on more theological grounds – she wrote that John read "with great interest the Puritan divines".  As for the clergy:

• the vicar of Skipton, the Revd John Pering, was a bachelor who lived with his sister in his other parish, Kildwick.  There doesn't seem to have been anything said against him, though he did enrage his parishioners over the tithes, with some of them threatening to emigrate to America and others threatening to raise a Meeting House and become dissenters

• John can't have been angered by the Revd Robert Thomlinson, the curate of Skipton who baptised Jane, because he sent Bonny to Skipton Grammar School when Thomlinson was master there

• it might have been because of the long dispute over who should be appointed master at the Grammar School.  Because while Georgian Skipton was a lively place among the lower orders

Tyne Mercury, 5 March 1816

On Wednesday, some persons threw Mr Joshua Metcalf, inspector of licences in Skipton, over one of the bridges in that town, into the water

the times were just as lively among the educated classes – 

Old Grammar School & Chapel, Skipton by Stephen Craven

The dispute began with the death of the old schoolmaster in 1792 (when John was five) when the vicar, then the Revd Thomas Marsden, wanted to appoint his curate the Revd Richard Withnell

• 5 members of the Parish Vestry objected to Mr Withnell as master and when Mr Withnell couldn't get into the School, he had the door "violently" broken open 

• so there were 4 years while there was no schoolmaster and no school, because the clergymen Fellows of Lincoln College, Oxford claimed the right to nominate and they chose a Revd Thomas Gartham of Queen's College – but the Bishop wouldn't give him a licence to teach and meanwhile Mr Withnell had taken his case to the law courts 

• Gartham finally took the post in 1796 – the town thought he had bought off Withnell 

• in 1800 Gartham got his unfortunate maid Mary Slater pregnant and failed to support her – she had to go to the magistrate, there was a Bastardy case, and Gartham was ordered to pay her £5 per week for the first month, and afterwards 7 shillings per week.  I doubt Thomas and Ellen Dewhurst sent their son John to the Grammar School after that

• there was the problem of Gartham's debts – he had to make an arrangement with his creditors in 1802 and it was said that he only dared leave his house on Sundays for fear of bailiffs

• there were attempts to get rid of Gartham – at one point, he was accused of defrauding the charitable foundation of money and trying to misappropriate future rents – to which Gartham responded with a notice put in the Leeds Intelligencer under an eye-catching headline "Diabolical Conspiracy": 

Whereas, serious hints are just come into Circulation, of a Deep-laid diabolical conspiracy against the life and civil safety of the Rev Thomas Gartham …

• the problem was only solved in 1824 when Gartham died 

John regularly attended and generously supported the Zion Chapel for the rest of his days.  Oddly, Ellen, James and Alice – but not Bonny – all underwent a second baptism in the parish church on 3 March 1825.  Perhaps it was an impulsive action by John.  The younger two children were only baptised at the Zion Chapel.

Next:  16: The move to Embsay & the death of John Dewhurst's brother James: 1816-20