Outside work, John’s time was absorbed, then and for many decades to come, by the Rusholme Road chapel and its activities. Just as his elder sisters had done, he became a Sunday School teacher, starting at the age of 16 after he had left school. In the letter he wrote to his mother on 28 May 1846 – she was away in Wiltshire visiting his married sister Ellen – he gave her the latest news from the Sunday School before turning to the subject of his prospects at Messrs Wren & Bennett.
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| Kinder Downfall, by Stephen Burton |
He was writing on the Thursday just before the Whit Sunday weekend. On Whit Tuesday, he told her, he planned to join a walking party to climb Kinder Scout, setting off early by train to Mottram or Tintwistle and walking the rest of the way "making a good day's work of it, and returning by train in the evening". This can't have been an expedition he had made before because he had to explain to his mother that "Kinderscout" was "the highest mountain in Derbyshire, and within sight of Manchester". In fact, Kinder Scout isn't so much a mountain as a plateau of high moorland; part of it, at 636 metres (2,087 ft) above sea level, is indeed the highest point in Derbyshire. John knew the Pennines from his time at school, but perhaps this was the serious beginning of his lifelong passion for walking in the uplands and mountains of Britain and Europe.
An adventure like this had been opened up for him and his friends by the railways. Mottram station (now Broadbottom) was opened in 1842 on the Sheffield, Ashton-under-Lyne & Manchester line, and it lies 10 miles east of Manchester Piccadilly station. It would depend on the route they took, but I think Mottram station to Kinder Scout would be a 10 mile walk. A long energetic day.
Three days later, on the Friday, he would be back at Mottram station with the Sunday School children. They were going "to the field as usual" on the Thursday and the next day were "to have an excursion to Mottram, where a field is engaged and a tent is to be fixed, the scholars to pay their own fares by the railway train and to take their dinners."
The letter shows that John at 22 years old was evidently a level-headed young man with a good deal of common sense and wry sense of humour, and he had done his best to scotch this plan only to find that, as a safe pair of hands, he was landed with the work:
I made quite a speech at the teachers' meeting in opposition to the proposal of taking the children out of town on account of the risk, responsibility, etc; but all my objections, in common with many others of the prudent teachers, were over-ruled. And, being quite beaten, I had the amiability to say that, as they had thus decided to go out of town, I would go with them and do all I could to promote the safety and pleasure of those who went, which they have so far appreciated as to give me, with some others, the duty of seating the children in the carriages and seeing them safe there and back.
His letter gives us a glimpse of his mother's social life in the chapel – "very many of the friends enquire particularly and frequently about you" – and home life at York Place. Only he and his younger sister Alice, aged 19, were in Manchester and Alice was running the house. "Our maids go on pretty well" he says
Alice makes a very good mistress; but she is not afraid to speak when there is necessity for doing so. Jane does far better than Anne, so much more ready to oblige, manifests more interest in her work and in us. Alice is looking out for servants in place of Anne and Jane, as the former has given notice because there is so much work to do, the place is so hard, but was not a little surprised when Alice accepted it most cordially.
(He doesn’t mention the wage that Anne was clearly trying to negotiate. I would think it possible that employers were in a strong position in Manchester, safe in the knowledge that there were always more young women newly arriving in town and looking for work)
Ellen, the eldest, had been the first. Her husband was George Ibberson Tubbs, the Congregational minister of the Independent Common Close chapel at Warminster, a market town on the western edge of Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. When the census was taken on the night of 6 June 1841, Elizabeth, the second of the sisters, was staying with Ellen at her house in Boreham Road and Ellen will have been glad of her company and support as she was expecting the first of what would be a large family. Her niece Mary Hopkinson wrote that Ellen had five boys and four girls in all and was "beautiful in character, most gracious and refined in manner and very sweet in appearance".
By the end of the decade Ellen had four children and her husband George had left the Congregational church and become an Anglican clergyman.
Perhaps doubts had crept into his mind and, from careful study, he had come to believe that he had been wrong all along and that the church should, as the Church of England held, be run by bishops. We don’t know how the Hopkinson family reacted, but it had no effect on the relations between John’s family and Ellen’s. His wife Alice and her sister-in-law were close and supportive of each other throughout their lives.
His congregation in Warminster was certainly sorry to lose him. The Patriot of 13 May 1847 reported that the members of the Common Close Chapel had held a meeting where they unanimously adopted a resolution expressing their "most unfeigned regret" at the resignation of their "beloved pastor". They deeply deplored "the circumstances which have made it appear to him his imperative duty to sever those bonds which they had fondly hoped would have been long perpetuated" and decided to send a deputation to wait upon him "to request him to reconsider". It was no use. The Church of Ireland, traditionally of the Low Church tradition, was a natural home for him at least at the beginning of his ministry and he was ordained deacon for the diocese of Lismore in the Cathedral Church of Waterford on 19 Nov 1847. In 1848 he was priested and until late 1849 he was curate at Innislormagh.
The main result of Mr Tubbs' decision as far as John’s mother was concerned was that Ellen and the children were living on the other side of the Irish Sea and so she may not have been able to visit them. However, in early 1848 when John was proposing to Alice Dewhurst, Ellen was in Manchester with her mother for the birth of her fourth baby, and as the decade ended Ellen and George had moved to London where he was curate at Trinity Church in the parish of St Mary Newington.
Ellen’s marriage clearly led to the marriage of the third sister, Mary. On 25 June 1844, Mary married Charles Foulger Tubbs at Rusholme Road Chapel. He was her brother-in-law George's younger half-brother. He was then a 28 year old dentist with a practice in Gosport, which lies across the harbour from Portsmouth, the birthplace of James and Eliza Griffin and Henry and Fanny Burnett. Mary was five years his junior. When she died in 1866 at the age of 43, her sister-in-law Alice, who had known her for nearly twenty years, wrote to John urging him to
say something of our dear Mary in a Sunday School address. Her earnest piety, great prayerfulness, unobtrusive but earnest endeavours to bring others to Jesus, her gentle meek spirit, altogether there was such a sweet savour of Christ about her that it seems as if the perfume of such life should be shed abroad …
John’s sister Elizabeth married on 19 September 1845 at the age of 26. Her husband was 31 year old solicitor Alfred Rooker from Plymouth on the Devon coast. Alfred was, of course, another Congregationalist. His father William, a Congregational minister in Dorset, came up for the wedding and Elizabeth's two married sisters came from the South of England to be there. "Twenty friends and relations were at the wedding breakfast" wrote John's daughter Mary. Mary’s fondness for her aunts Ellen and Mary doesn't seem to have extended to her aunt Elizabeth. She comments on Elizabeth’s rather sententious letters and her "customary little homilies" while praising Uncle Alfred Rooker as a "standby in the family" and a "valuable helper".
The census of 1841 had found John’s younger sister Alice still at school. She was 13 years old and at a boarding school at The Elms in Lance Lane, Wavertree. Wavertree was a genteel area, a place to which wealthy Liverpool merchants moved out of the city, with Georgian town houses in the High Street and new villas being built. It was a very suitable school – its headmaster Thomas Sleigh was a Congregational minister.
By the time John reached his 21st birthday in 1845, three of his sisters were living far from Manchester – Ellen was in Warminster and Elizabeth was in Plymouth where she would soon be joined by Mary and her husband Charles. Their mother Alice could now get a complete change of scene by visiting her married daughters. When John wrote to her on 28 May 1846 from 1 York Place, only he and 19 year old Alice were in Manchester
I am really glad, dearest Mother, to find that you are so much enjoying the pure air of Wiltshire and the society of our dear ones
It was after the move to York Place in 1845 that John first met his future wife, Alice Dewhurst.
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