Alice led a sheltered life: a little Sunday School teaching – chapel on Sundays – some visiting of the sick – fun with her younger brother and sister – staying with schoolfriends and family – writing letters – and quiet and thoughtful reading.
We don’t know how much she knew of the lives and hardships of the millhands in Skipton. She told her children about the fire that nearly finished her father’s business before it could begin, but there is no mention of her talking about the "Plug Plot" Riots of 1842. This was something that nobody who was in Skipton at the time would forget.
In the long hot summer of 1842, with the Chartists exasperated at Parliament's refusal of their demands and an economic depression bringing poverty and desperation, anger was building across industrial Yorkshire and Lancashire. A General Strike began. While Chartists were persuading the men of Messrs Wren & Bennett to come out, thousands of workpeople were taking to the roads and forcing the shutting down of mills by taking the plugs out of the steam boilers. In those days the fire was underneath the boiler and not in a flue through it, so if the iron plug at the bottom of the boiler was knocked out, the water escaped.
On Tuesday 16 August some 3,000 people walked the ten miles to Skipton from Colne in Lancashire. It seems that Skipton was trying to manage the distress – of a population of 18,610, there were reported to be 4,308 individuals trying to survive on an average of only 17d (17 pence) per week – by creating some employment through schemes of public works. This wasn't the case in East Lancashire. Declaring that man was "born to live and not to clem" [starve], men, women and boys set off foraging from Colne and Burnley, stopping the mills, calling on workers to strike, and demanding food as they went.
The Skipton magistrates – who had sent for soldiers and quickly sworn in special constables – tried to talk them out of coming into the town, while shops hastily closed, blinds were drawn, doors and windows shut and some householders got hand-outs of food ready in case the protestors appeared at their door. Some 500 of the marchers went to John Dewhurst's mill and pulled out the plug. Alice's 23 year old brother Bonny went out to the protestors and gave them some money.
The huge crowd had filled the town when about 50 foot soldiers and 12 mounted troops arrived and the Riot Act was read. Given five minutes to disperse, they left town quickly and settled in a field called Annahills on the road to Carleton to eat the food that they had begged.
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| 61st Regt at the capture of Delhi, Sept 1857 |
Local magistrates were moving among them trying to persuade them to break up the gathering but they were slow to move on and were caught out by the arrival of the 61st Regiment of Foot.
Things turned ugly and stones were thrown. A soldier later died of his injuries and James Braithwaite Garforth JP was blinded in one eye. This was known in Skipton as the Battle of Annahills and it was long remembered.
(The man charged with assaulting Mr Garforth came before the York Assizes, where he was found guilty of riot but not of assault and was sentenced to 6 months in prison)
Either all the family except Bonny were out of town by chance, or John Dewhurst made sure that Alice and the younger ones were sent away when he saw trouble brewing, but it seems probable from Mary Hopkinson's silence on the subject that Alice must have missed it. W H Dawson wrote in his History of Skipton (1882) that the episode "put the inhabitants into a state of terror from which it took them several days to recover".
The horizons of Alice's quiet life were broadened by the marriages of her elder brother and sisters.
Alice's elder sister Ellen, described by Mary Hopkinson as "a very bright, energetic and sociable girl", was the first to marry. She was twenty-two when, on 5 September 1843 in the parish church of Skipton, she married 37 year old James Milne.
He must have been quite a catch and she was going to have a very comfortable life. He came from the same part of the country as Ellen and Alice's mother Alice Bonny, being the son of a farmer from a village a few miles from Blackpool. But he had been apprenticed in the textile trade and for the past few years had been a partner in a thriving department store called Kendal, Milne & Faulkner. They were silk mercers and general furnishers, selling bonnets and silks, ladies' dress materials, carpets and soft furnishings from a grand establishment in Deansgate, Manchester. Only the year before they had created a sensation by lighting their shop with
Bude Lights, a very bright oil lamp
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| Kendal, Milne & Faulkner in 1850 |
Manchester Courier 17 September 1842
On Wednesday evening last, for the first time, this most extraordinary artificial light was seen by thousands, at what is known as the Bazaar, Deansgate, Manchester, belonging to Messrs Kendal, Milne and Faulkner. This shop is 120 feet long by 48 feet wide, and though only four lights were burning, (three of which were at the front windows, and in consequence one half of the light was thrown away – at all events, into the street,) still the light was so good that the smallest print or hand-writing could be read in any part of the shop, with as much ease and facility as though it had been noon-day.
(The department store was celebrated in Manchester and was run by the descendants of Kendal and Milne until the business was sold to Harrods in 1919)
Ellen's marriage had a significant impact on her sister Alice's life because it brought her to Manchester. She met John Hopkinson for the first time when staying with Ellen – the Milnes and the Hopkinsons were neighbours in York Place.
In 1844 Alice's brother Bonny was married in Colne to Frances England. This was another textile-related match – Frances's father Nicholas England and grandfather Thomas Thornber were both cotton manufacturers.
Jane was the eldest of the Dewhurst children and inspired a loving reverence in her younger siblings, who relied on her judgement and wisdom. In 1845 she moved away to Bradford on her marriage to a Skipton-born worsted manufacturer called Benjamin Harrison.
So Alice could now extend her visiting range to Manchester and Bradford and she was soon an aunt. Ellen's daughter Alice was born in 1845, Jane's son Alfred in 1846, but poor Bonny and Frances lost their seven-month old son Arthur, who was buried at the Zion Chapel in Skipton on 13 August 1846. Alice can never have been in any doubt about the perilous nature of childbirth and the frighteningly tenuous hold on life of even tenderly cared-for, middle-class children.
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