During his twenties, when so much of a young man's habits of mind and practice are formed and his character is so often moulded by his occupation, John Hopkinson went through a great deal.
He started his twenties still in his apprenticeship. A couple of times he was nearly wiped out in accidents at work. One of the workmen suffered a hideous death by scalding. He put all his inheritance into the partnership with Messrs Wren & Bennett at the beginning of the tumultuous year of revolutions across Europe, with all the economic anxiety that followed. He married, and within months he was doing his utmost to support his lively, fun-loving, sensitive wife as she found herself plunged into a sort of despair during her first pregnancy. The following year, just as Alice was hit by the death of her beloved sister Jane, the Brinksway Mill collapsed and thirteen people died; John found himself giving evidence at the inquest in the presence of their grieving families. In 1851, the year after his firm became Wren & Hopkinson with the retirement of Mr Bennett, they suffered a disastrous fire. In 1852 his mother, who had been his constant advisor and friend, died. By the end of 1854, when he had reached 30, he had four children and his old friend and father-figure the Revd James Griffin had retired to the South Coast because of his health.
It was in those years that John Hopkinson became the responsible, conscientious, frugal, hard-working, enterprising man and loving husband and father that his family and friends remembered.
We don't know how much money John Hopkinson made – perhaps his log-book would have told us – but Gerald Hurst, who did see the log-book, wrote in the Preface
The social historian will note how comfortably a middle-class provincial family could live in the 'fifties' on an expenditure of £300 a year; the bread-winner's income was about £700 [1]
£700 a year was, I think, a nicely comfortable income for a rising professional man. But John's income wasn't assured and he knew very well that he couldn't take anything for granted. He was doubtful about being able to take a holiday when he wrote to Alice on 4 April 1849,
Our Easter work is unusually heavy and success in our business depends so much on personal attention, especially at such times. [2]
 |
| John aged 43 or 44 |
The themes of pressure of work and the need for his personal attention were a constant in his working life – in 1865 he wrote to Alice from Belfast
All day here has been occupied with details of the new sheds we have already in hand, and also a great deal of gearing for another already built. There is plenty of work to be done; but, to be really effective here, one needs to be almost always on the ground. [3]
In 1850 he wrote to his mother
I am head over ears in engagements just now. Most heartily do I wish I could be freer from them and have more time for higher objects, but really it is necessary nowadays to work hard to keep pace with the times and I feel that, in my position especially, I must achieve standing room in the world for myself. The probabilities now are that trade will gradually revive and be more steady than formerly. Unfortunately the cotton speculation in Liverpool has spoiled the prospects of this year. [4]
At that point the firm was hopeful and they were planning new buildings. He explained to his mother
Having been for long sadly hampered by our works being divided and nothing of our own we have determined to build new ones on a modern scale where we can have all together – Foundry and everything on the same spot so that, when the gates are closed, all is locked up. The site is at the bottom of the Temple Street, Chorlton-upon-Medlock. [5]
(Temple Street disappeared, I believe, in the 1960s. The works were in Lower Temple Street, that is, somewhere in the area of the Renold Building and Pariser Buildings of the University)
The new buildings were just finished when, at about 9.30 on the morning of Sunday 26 October 1851, a fire was discovered burning furiously in the three-storey building used as Wren & Hopkinson's pattern room on Altrincham Street. Three fire engines turned out and four jets of water were poured into the building from the high pressure mains. The fire was put out but the pattern room was completely destroyed with its contents. Bell's New Weekly Messenger of 2 November 1851 reported that these were
valuable patterns of machinery, which had been accumulated during a business of thirty years. The damage altogether will be from £3,000 to £4,000. The owners are insured in the Atlas, Sun, and Legal and Commercial Offices, to the amount of £2,300. The origin of the fire is not ascertained. The workmen were on the premises until about midnight on Saturday finishing some work, but not in the pattern-rooms, and the porter left all right when he locked up after them.
It must have reminded Alice of the fire at Skipton when she was a little girl that had nearly brought her father to disaster. It certainly struck John Dewhurst that way. He wrote on 28 October with his own inimitable spelling and style
My dear Son in Law,I am in receipt of a note from dear Alice this morning informing me of your serious loss sustained by fire in your Moddle shops etc … Your loss no doubt will be great but not so much as to take away the whole of your business, which was the case with me or thereabouts when my Mill was burnt down in 1831. I have great reason to think that the Almighty God and our Saviour was at that time in a peculiar manner my daily support in raising me kind friends and also in directing my steps in all my proceedings afterwards [6]
He ended his letter
I am, my dear Son in Law, your well wishing and affectionate Father in LawJohn DewhurstExcuse all my little blunders being written under excitement
When John wrote to his mother about the "disaster on Sunday" he described to her how, the day after the fire, the firm had put out a circular to most of the customers to say there would be no interruption of business, and that several men in the same line had offered them help with tools and so forth. The fire had made the national press, and he didn't want his mother unnecessarily alarmed, writing to her
In regard to the loss, the amount will exceed our insurances, perhaps considerably – yet not so much as we expected at first – and if we obtain the amount we claim, upwards of £2,200, it will enable us to do a great deal in the way of restoration [7]
But of course it would take a good while to recoup the losses, and the following year he wrote to his mother on 2 March 1852 that, while they were managing the ongoing strikes quite well and the Manchester employers were determined to resist any attempt by the government to reimpose the Corn Laws
We are still feeling the effects of the fire and shall do so for many months; but we continue to do our best to get out of the mire which clogs our efforts. It has been necessary to put down some very costly machinery to expedite the restoration of the patterns, and we have had a great deal of trouble in trying to bring it to perfection, to which we approach step by step slowly. [8]
The year 1853 saw the business worries continue. John was travelling around the Northern towns by rail, coach, gig and on foot and occasionally going to London to make useful contacts and in search of orders. He went abroad for the first time in his life, going by sea to Copenhagen and on to Karlshamn in Sweden.
On 21 January 1853 he described his sea voyage to Alice
A Danish mariner spoke fractional English so I fraternized with him and also with the Danish Engineer on board who could speak no English; but I became very good friends with him by entering into the construction of his engines and describing other sorts in chalk upon the wall of his room [9]
Wren & Hopkinson were ready to take a firm line at the beginning of strikes, but John was very conscious of his responsibilities to his workmen. He didn't want to lay men off (unpaid) unless he had to – writing to Alice ahead of joining her on holiday, he told her that
I, and some of the young men, are staying late to arrange some matters so that the men may have some employment in my absence – for I cannot bear to think of sending men off work while I go on pleasure. Last night I was successful in obtaining an order for the Gearing of a small mill in Sweden, £1,500, which must be done in excessive haste – and happily gives work of a kind to spread over [10]
John Hopkinson, as Gerald Hurst wrote in the Preface, "lived through several business crises. The failure of one of his companies was disastrous." [11]
This was the Chatterley Iron Company. Both John and his son young John were involved in this company which at first was very promising. John had become chairman in 1874 and he put in a great deal of time and effort in improvements to their collieries and to providing access by private lines to their sale yards. But in 1879, when the coal trade was very slow and the Midland & Northern Coal & Iron Trades Gazette of 13 August was reporting that the "Chatterley Iron Company are putting out their last furnace", John's daughters were faced with the real possibility they would have to earn their own livings. And, before John became chairman, the company had incurred excessive royalty obligations. These became a heavy burden. The company faltered on but by the end of the 1880s it went into liquidation. To make matters worse, young John and his wife Evelyn Oldenbourg had invested their savings of about £7,000 in it; they lost them.
John was also very much aware that the family income depended on his efforts. He had put all his inheritance into Wren & Bennett. It's clear that during the thirty odd years of their partnership, he and Henry Wren did not always see eye to eye and, as the strains finally led up to its dissolution on 19 December 1881, Alice wrote
My notion is that he will follow out this plan as likely to be the most inconvenient to you and that his idea will be to buy in the concern for he will be well assured that he has the money advantage. Somehow my faith in his nobility is so small that I should give him credit for wishing to make it as awkward as possible for you. It is best that the upset should come now than later on in life, and your coolness will give you a great advantage [12]
Henry Wren had inherited his father's business, so it's hardly surprising that when he died in 1902 he left a gross estate of £315,276-0s-10d, while the value of John's estate was £45,100-9s.
John certainly wanted to earn enough for his family, their needs, educations and futures – and he never neglected the Rusholme Road Chapel. He wrote to Alice in January 1865 from Belfast
I wanted to give a help to the Sunday School Collection this time. If I should not be home to Service on Sunday morning, will you see Mr Clayton and tell him how I am fixed here and ask him to add £25 which I will give him when I return. [13]
John was not interested in money for itself, nor particularly interested in honours and recognition. His son Alfred wrote
It was characteristic of my father that he never grumbled at want of recognition or not gaining reward. The work itself, something to be accomplished, was what he thought of, and if anyone was disposed to grumble at the way the world treated him, he would say: "The world treats you as well as you can expect and probably rather better than you deserve." [14]
The family lived, Alfred said, "very plainly"
My father used to say that it was good to learn how many things there were people wanted which we would find we could do without. [15]
"See what you can do without" was one of John's favourite sayings. Evelyn Oldenbourg, who married Alfred's brother John, wrote in her memoirs of how she met the Hopkinsons through their daughter Ellen when they were at school together, and how she loved to spend time with the family – though "their fine, almost austere, life sometimes almost frightened me." [16]
Alice sometimes felt rather conscious of the difference between her and her sister-in-law Alice Wills, whose husband was Henry Overton Wills, the third of his name in a Bristol tobacco dynasty – W.D. & H.O. Wills was the first British company to mass-produce cigarettes and it was to be one of the first in Britain to issue cigarette cards. In early July 1863 she wrote to John, describing how Alice and Henry, with six children, two nurses, and their friends Mr and Mrs Duckham and their boy joined the family on holiday at Penmaenmawr
Their children are all so trim; I fancy they look at ours as if they were somewhat common. For myself, I am struck with the look of earnestness and power about our own in comparison with most others and am well satisfied that their greater energy should defy the niceties of dress. [17]
It was an uncomfortable feeling and made her uneasy, as we can see from the letter she wrote to John on 30 October 1865. She was staying with the Wills family in Bristol, and there were several young men of Henry's family about:
The young Wills's – Edward and William Henry – never know me, and Samuel very slightly acknowledges the acquaintance. I suppose my externals are not imposing enough to claim their attention and possibly my own pride increases the distance. This worship of externals! How it prevails here! Let us beware; it only needs to be fostered to make it flourish in ourselves. I feel it is a plant indigenous in my own heart and only needs to be put into the hotbed of riches and worldly adulation to make it grow. The Lord help me to watch and pray. [18]
But she never let the creeping feeling of inferiority interfere with her open hospitality in welcoming people to the family holiday and she was as careful with money as John. From the 1864 holiday to Llanfairfechan, where she was in charge of a niece and nephew as well as her own children, she told John of a quiet conversation with young John
Then, as to taking conveyances, railway trips and the like, I told Johnnie privately I did not feel disposed to incur the extra expense, that I denied myself constantly, was happy in doing so and expected them to do the same. [19]
A major factor in the family's expenditure was, of course, the number of children. There were an awful lot of mouths to feed. No wonder Albert told his daughter Alice Bragg that "nothing less than a baron of beef" could feed the Hopkinson family [20]. When young John's five children spent Christmas 1883 with their grandparents they found a strange disconnection between the palatial Grove House and the household habits – Ellen Ewing remembered that it was "too grand, so they thought, for all the small economies that were enforced at table and elsewhere". [21]
On 29 September 1883, Alice wrote to John
In regard to our means, we have had a very varied experience. It must be for some good end that we are tried in this particular. I trust we shall not miss learning the lesson intended. We must be slow scholars, needing recurring repetition … We have often said that our riches are in our children. And, being in them so richly blessed, we must not expect uninterrupted prosperity in other matters. Let us thank God for the higher gifts and seek to profit by the disappointments allotted to us in worldly things … I often think you are much nearer this mark than I. There is less covetousness in you to struggle against. [22]
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. IX
[2] ibid., p. 13
[3] ibid., p. 43
[4] ibid., p. 18
[5] ibid.
[6] ibid., p. 19
[7] ibid., p. 19
[8] ibid., p. 20
[9] ibid., p. 22
[10] ibid., p. 23
[11] ibid., p. X
[12] ibid., p. 79
[13] ibid., p. 43
[14] Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C., LL.D., Penultima (1930) pub. Martin Hopkinson Ltd, p. 229
[15] ibid., p. 228
[16] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 54
[17] ibid., p. 38
[18] ibid., p. 47
[19] ibid., p. 41
[20] Crystal Clear: The Autobiographies of Sir Lawrence and Lady Bragg, ed. A M Glazer and Patience Thomson (2015), pub. OUP
[21] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 84
[22] ibid., p. 83
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