A little while after John recovered from smallpox, he went to an interview with the partners of Messrs Wren & Bennett and on 30 May 1840 he was bound an unpaid "gentleman apprentice" for a five year term, his trustees paying a premium of £100 for his training.
Sixteen year old John would walk in from the outskirts of town into the smoke and noise of Manchester every morning to start the 12 hour working day at 6 o'clock.
Messrs Wren & Bennett's works were at 31 Dale Street and 6 Newton Street in today's Northern Quarter, a little north of the Rochdale Canal. There would soon be a new railway station on Store Street, a short way south of the Canal – opening on 8 May 1842, it would much later be called Manchester Piccadilly Station.
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| O.S. map of Messrs Wren & Bennett's works (National Library of Scotland) |
The works were on a split site, which can be seen on this O.S. map of 1851: firstly the Newton Street Iron Works, which were bounded by Newton Street, Friday [Faraday] Street, Hilton Street and Port Street (this building was clad in concrete in 1960 and is today a listed building called Marlsbro House); secondly, the small L-shaped 'Iron Yard' across the road; and thirdly the "Machine Manufactury" on the corner of Newton Street, Port Street and Dale Street, a large 6-storey workshop.
There is a drawing of the premises in Dale Street as they were in the mid-1830s by James Nasmyth, famous for his development of the steam hammer. He was a good friend of the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell's family and is said to have been the model of Mr Manning in Mrs Gaskell's Sylvia's Lovers. He had rented a place there from Wren & Bennett and Mr Bennett had helped fund his work – in fact, Mr Bennett married his sister, the painter Anne Nasmyth. The drawing was made years later from memory, and it's not entirely to be relied on – too many stories, for a start – but it gives a vivid idea of the tall buildings and the smoke stacks that John will have known.
The newness and strangeness of Manchester, its people, its industry, its amazing growth was a source of huge fascination, a mixture of admiration and horror. The historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), the commanding cultural figure of the day, wrote of
Sooty Manchester … every whit as wonderful, as fearful, unimaginable, as the oldest Salem or Prophetic City.
The MP and future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81) described in his novel Coningsby of 1844 how his hero
had travelled the whole day through the great district of labour, his mind excited by strange sights, and at length wearied by their multiplication. He had passed over the plains where iron and coal supersede turf and corn, dingy as the entrance of Hades, and flaming with furnaces; and now he was among illumined factories with more windows than Italian palaces and smoking chimneys taller than Egyptian obelisks.
John was daily among these illumined factories and smoking chimneys and he was at the cutting edge of industry in possibly the most exciting town in Europe. And around him all his young life had been the noise of the great socio-economic debates of the time, with the 1840s the most turbulent decade of all:
- the long struggle to reform conditions in mines and factories
- Chartism, the mass movement with a violent fringe, with its vast meetings and huge petitions demanding electoral reform so that the voices of workpeople would be heard in Parliament – the workforce at Wren & Bennett's walked out for a time in August 1842, when approached by some of the Chartists. At that point there were over 2,000 troops in Manchester in case of disorder
- the depressions in trade and the waves of strikes and protests by desperate workers against working conditions, new machinery and cuts in wages
- the arrival in Manchester of the emaciated, starving and destitute Irish seeking to escape the Great Irish Famine (1845-52), the result of Europe-wide potato blight combining with the disastrous laissez-faire politics of the Whig government in Westminster to produce an enormous death toll
- the Anti-Corn Law League, with the efficient campaign of industrialists and middle class employers against protectionist tariffs on imported grain, a campaign depicted in graphic colours as a fight against the injustice of the landed interests of the countryside hampering exports and starving the poor by pushing up the price of bread
- the call for Free Trade and low regulation, with businessmen and industrialists at the forefront
- the battle between Nonconformists and the Established Church over who should educate the children of the poor and how
- the battle of Nonconformists for the final end of discrimination against them and for full civil rights
- the growing concern, and increasing use of statistics, of medical men and public health officials across Europe as they examined the appalling conditions in the new towns and cities
He was learning the skills of a mill architect, millwright and mechanical engineer from two engineers in their fifties, working for them at the premises in Manchester and travelling about the country with them on business.
The partnership between Henry Wren and William Bennett was only about eight years old, but the business itself was much older.
It had first been established by Thomas Cheek Hewes (1768-1832), pioneer of the suspension wheel. The son of an Essex farmer, Hewes had settled in Manchester in 1792 as a maker of water wheels and millwork and then, towards the end of the decade, he had started making steam engines.
Hewes was a highly respected millwright. He built the great waterwheel at the Quarry Bank Mill at Styal in Cheshire (which is a National Trust property today) and his firm, and its successors Wren & Bennett and Wren & Hopkinson, were employed as millwrights there until the 1900s, installing and repairing gearing, advising on improvements to the power system and liaising with Boulton and Watt.
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| Quarry Bank Mill by David Dixon |
Henry Wren (1782-1858) was born in Dalston near Carlisle, where the baptismal record of his brother Timothy shows that their father was a "house carpenter." He came to Manchester as a very young man and worked for Thomas Cheek Hewes, who made him his partner. They traded very successfully as Hewes & Wren – one historian of factories, Jennifer Tann, has written that "the partnership of Hewes and Wren and later of Wren and Bennett marked the zenith of the millwrighting trade".
When Thomas Cheek Hewes died in 1832, Henry Wren took Nottinghamshire-born millwright William Bennett (1788-1866) into partnership, and the business became Wren & Bennett.
When John started as an apprentice, both men lived near the works. They hadn't yet moved out to the middle-class suburbs and the Bennetts were renting in Lever Street and the Wrens in Dale Street itself – there are still early 19th century houses to be seen in both streets. The Wren family's house at Number 43 had, according to the Rate Book, a gross estimated rental value in 1841 of £40 – interestingly, the value for John's family home in Rumford Street was £45 – while Mr and Mrs Bennett, at 9 Lever Street, lived in a house with a gross estimated rental value of £60.
Also in the business was Henry Wren junior, known in the firm as Mr Henry; he was about four years older than John Hopkinson and he was obviously destined to take over the business from his father in due course.
John soon proved his worth to his principals. His aptitude for the work, his education and enquiring mind together with his early experience working on building sites around his home meant that before he was out of his apprenticeship he had been entrusted with a major project.
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