Alice and John lived in a vast family network, held closely together by the constant letters passing between the women, by the joint holidays, the times they looked after each others' children and the visits paid to each others' houses. There must always have been somebody to worry about.
In the 1840s, when young John was born, Alice's sisters and sisters-in-law produced 14 babies between them. In the 1850s, when Alice had six babies, there were 22 born across the Hopkinson and Dewhurst families. In the 1860s, when Alice had another six babies, the other mothers added another 15. In the 1870s, grandchildren began to be born to Alice and John, while her brother Tom Dewhurst and his wife Maria added another five to their large family. The children lived in a sea of cousins.
And with the births, came the illnesses and the deaths. Alice lost three children in infancy, one daughter at the age of 21 and another at the age of 33. She and John were in their seventies when their son John and three of his children died in a climbing accident in the Alps. Her brother Bonny Dewhurst and his wife lost a 7 month old baby and a boy of 13. Three of Alice's sisters-in-law lost children. Her sister-in-law Ellen Tubbs lost three children in early infancy, and a son and a daughter died in their early twenties of cholera in India. Two of Elizabeth Rooker's four daughters died in infancy.
The first dreadful loss was Alice's beloved sister Jane. In 1850, two years after the death of her schoolfriend Mary Harrison in Penrith, and a couple of days before little John's first birthday, Alice heard from Jane, who lived with her husband Benjamin Harrison in Bradford at 5 Hustler Terrace, Barkerend. This row of houses for the comfortably-off middle classes had been built only a few years earlier on a plot that had belonged to the Bradford Union Workhouse. (It is gone now – Barkerend was the name of the Leeds Old Road, now the A658, and Hustler Terrace stood between the junctions with Otley road and Heap Lane).
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| O.S. 1850 Hustler Terrace, Bradford (National Library of Scotland) |
Jane's husband Benjamin was himself from Skipton, one of the twin sons of a remarkable man who had begun work as a little child at the spinning wheel and had become a lay preacher and key figure in the Zion Chapel at Skipton. Jane and Benjamin had two children – 4 year old Alfred and 1 year old John Frederick.
Little Alfred Harrison had fallen ill with dysentery – the "bloody flux", which we now define as gastroenteritis with bloody diarrhoea. In those days adult patients were treated with blood-letting, warm baths, laxatives, enemas and Dover's Powder, which was a patent medicine made of opium, ipecacuanha and potassium sulphate, generally used to dull pain and induce sweating. How much of these remedies little Alfred had to endure we do not know. On the fourth day of his illness he fell into convulsions which lasted for 24 hours. He died on 30 July 1850. Alice will have been following the news with great anxiety and Benjamin wrote to her at once with this briefest of notes [1]
Dr Alice,Our dear boy has just gone to heaven, Jane is better than could be expected.Yrs afflyB. Harrison
This was the very day that John had heard of the collapse of the Brinksway Mill and had taken the first train to Stockport where they were digging for the missing workpeople.
Alfred was buried on 3 August 1850 at the Zion Chapel in Skipton, where his grandfather Harrison had once been sexton. Two days later Jane fell ill with dysentery and Alice went to Bradford. But Jane died a week later on 13 August with Alice at her side, and it was Alice who registered the death. Jane was buried alongside her little son.
Jane was 33 years old. She had been a comfort and advisor to the more volatile Alice all her life and Alice's sense of loss at Jane's death was still vivid fifty years later whenever she talked of her sister. She loved to remember the doctor's description of Jane: "Your sister was the most unselfish person I ever knew". [2]
This memory, from such a traumatic and anxious time, can only have been an extra inspiration to Alice to follow a path of self-denial, a path which lay at the basis of her Puritan faith. She wrote to John in 1874 about their new daughter-in-law Evelyn
I must give Evelyn some motherly advice, whether it pleases or not. The more I see of life, the more I am convinced that, to a girl, the habit of self-denial is the most important accomplishment she can acquire, one absolutely needed for the discharge of her duty as a mother [3]
Did Alice tell herself that the excessive housework, which looked so worryingly unnecessary to her family, was simply putting their needs first? The compulsion to create cleanliness and order would not be helped by the frightening disorder and uncertainty of the world around her.
The fact that it was John, on whom she relied so much, who was the next to suffer the shock of a sudden bereavement, will have been very hard on them both. John's mother Alice had stayed with them in Manchester for the first year of their married life and been with Alice at the birth of her first baby. She wasn't in the best of health and was suffering from heart disease.
In September 1849, when little John was about two months old, John took his mother by the night train to join her daughters in the much milder, but rather damper climate of Plymouth. They must all have hoped that retirement to a new and softer climate would do her good. He wrote to Alice on their arrival
By the preserving mercy of our Heavenly Father we reached this in safety – my dear Mother got through on the whole tolerably; but many times indeed was I glad that I could bear her company. [4]
On 12 September 1849 John looked over a house that he thought might suit her, and the next day they saw the landlord together. Perhaps this was 10 Alfred Street near the Hoe, where she was living on census night 30 March 1851. It was quite a new house, one of a planned terrace built in about 1830 – Plymouth was at the forefront of town planning at this time – and it was conveniently close to her daughters, Elizabeth Rooker at 1 Sussex Terrace and Mary Tubbs at 4 Athenaeum Terrace. (10 Alfred Street survived the Plymouth Blitz in the Second World War; Elizabeth's and Mary's houses did not).
John stayed in Plymouth for a few extra days as he wasn't well, and then he left his mother and sister Alice in their new home and went back to 1 York Place. About a fortnight later, he and his Alice and baby John moved to 41 Rumford Street, a rather cheaper house and much nearer the Rusholme Road Chapel and John's works.
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| Bath chair, Roman Baths Museum by Rwendland |
John had always been very close to his mother. She was deeply interested in his life, he valued her advice extremely and he wrote to her in great detail about all his concerns in business and at the chapel. His love and gratitude for her was evident. By the spring of 1850 she was using a bath chair to go out, and John wrote to her in March
I hope you will continue, dear Mother, to go out in your chair so long as the weather will permit … You did not have so many holidays when you were young as most others have, so it is only fitting that you should take the more and enjoy them in your leisure now that you are old [5]
But she did not have long to enjoy her leisure. In early April 1852 she had begun to suffer from oedema, a build up of fluid. The congestion grew worse and she died at 10 o'clock in the morning of 14 May 1852 at home at 10 Alfred Street with Alice beside her. She was 65 years old. John had set off for Plymouth but did not get there in time.
His mother was buried five days later in her son-in-law Alfred Rooker's vault in the new cemetery at Plymouth. It was a very sad blow for her children. Three months later John's sister Mary Tubbs wrote to Alice in Manchester
I have felt for some time that my beloved parent would not continue long with us and, for her sake, I do indeed rejoice to know that her weariness and suffering are exchanged for perfect rest. That she is with her Saviour in whose presence is fulness of joy is untold consolation. And yet, dear Alice, I cannot tell you how I daily miss her even now and it seems to me that I can never feel so thoroughly at home here as before my dear Mother's death. Her love did indeed sweeten our lot. Dearly as I loved her I knew not fully what she was to us until we lost her. [6]
The Hopkinson and Dewhurst families between them suffered twenty deaths in the 1850s and 1860s, ten deaths in each decade. It was during these years, when there must have been so many letters of condolence to write and receive, that the family began to be worried about Alice's over-zealous cleaning. And two of the deaths were of her own children. In the 1870s she and John lost their daughter Ellen at the age of 21 and two years later 9 year old Harry, the pet of the family, both of scarlet fever.
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., p. 15
[2] ibid., p. XXV
[3] ibid., p. 63
[4] ibid., p. 8
[5] ibid., p. 18
[6] ibid., p. XXX
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