At the end of the Second World War three of John and Alice Hopkinson's thirteen children were still alive, and they were all in their eighties. It was the eldest, Miss Mary Hopkinson, who led the plan for a history of their parents' lives. The task was taken on by her niece, Ellen Ewing, the widow of Sir Alfred Ewing and the daughter of Mary's eldest brother John.
The result was the book John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, which begins with a preface by Sir Gerald Hurst, whose wife Margaret was one of the granddaughters. Mary Hopkinson provided the Introduction to set the scene, with her own memories of her parents and little vignettes of their later lives – friends, family, holidays. Ellen Ewing created a history of John and Alice told through extracts from their many letters, written whenever they were apart.
As far as anyone can tell, all the letters Ellen Ewing used in her account were destroyed after her book was published. We don't know how many letters there were – we don't know whether we would have agreed with her choice of extracts – we can't check the accuracy of her transcriptions – we have no way of knowing whether we would have come to Lady Ewing's conclusions. We can see that she thought of her work as a stop-gap because of the constraints under which she was working. She wrote at the end of the book [1]
For a variety of good reasons, Mary Hopkinson and others wished that the history of her parents should, in part at any rate, be perpetuated. This book is the result. It is too fragmentary to be in any sense a complete biography.
She describes her part in the book as a
selection, not always judicious, from the great number of private letters, sometimes almost illegible, together with the avoidance of such commentary as might offend the susceptibilities of the Living still closely connected with the Dead. For some future family historian there awaits a congenial task in, say twenty years, when there should be ample scope, free from present day restrictions and inhibitions, among the abundant material still available.
But we don't have the abundant material, so I'll make do with what we have and I'll supplement it, where I can, with further research together with material from the memoirs written by John and Alice's children and grandchildren. This is, in fact, a re-working of Ellen Ewing's book, with extras and a fair bit of social history because it's very hard to convey the lost world of Puritan Manchester Nonconformity without showing John and Alice in their proper setting. Unfortunately they didn't leave us many photographs of themselves, so I've had to make do with what I have.
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., pp 110-111
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