49. John, Alice & "nervous exhaustion"

Perhaps there are few letters after the late 1860s because after that John made sure that he had a proper holiday and stayed with the family instead of commuting to work.  In 1869 he drove himself – with his work in the business, as a city councillor, as superintendent of the Rusholme Road Sunday School – to the point of a breakdown in health.  We get a glimpse of his busy life from a letter to Alice on 23 February 1857

You will like to know all that goes on … Sunday.  Went down to school, had 19 or 20 present – attentive and I enjoyed the teaching … Took the first girls' class – their stillness and silence almost appalled one … I commenced with trembling but was enabled to speak with more freedom than I anticipated … After school, to united prayer meeting at Saville Street, then a pleasant time with the babies …

A fine lecture in the evening from Mr S. on the scripture proofs of the doctrine of Inspiration – for an hour and twenty minutes …

Have rectified the smoking nursery completely and improved front parlour at the same time.  Very busy at Works … Left at 6.25, took the new four horse bus to Hydegrove, came over field – washed – saw children – tea and down at meeting only ten minutes after time [1]

In 1869 Alice's brother-in-law Dr William Harrison wrote, warning him to stop all work for a month at least

I have not come to this conclusion abruptly.  Knowing so well how mischievous symptoms are which attend nervous exhaustion and how often they lead on to danger, it is found that, without early and decided treatment, there is often laid a foundation for disturbances which cannot be removed even by prolonged care and the best attention. [2]

Possibly after this crisis, John spent the holidays with Alice and the children instead of commuting back to work and keeping in touch by letter.  Alice took many breaks on her own in search of rest and recuperation.

Her parents and sisters had always kept a watchful eye on her strength – she seems to have a tendency to outrun her resources and become entirely depleted.  Soon after her marriage, her solicitous sister Jane advised her "to lay up a stock of strength for the Winter".  But the pregnancies and her inability to restrain herself from overwork frequently pulled her down and then she would escape household duties entirely.  Possibly her worst breakdown in health was in 1877 after little Harry's death.  That year she became steadily more reduced and from then on it seems Mary took the entire household management into her own hands.  In the spring she went to visit young John and his family and wrote to John at home

I feel no interest in shopping or sight seeing … I am very fond of the dear children; But I am changed; it seems impossible to get up the life and energy to win little children.  I think that will never come back to me.  I shall never win love, only hold that which is already mine [3]

By the summer she had become very unwell, unable even to walk up and down stairs, and was taken to Thirlmere in the Lake District by Mary ("the personification of patience and self-control").  At last she was able to write to John

These last 24 hours I seem to have risen to the surface after being submerged for a time.  My mind is clear and natural and my body seems to belong to me – Alice Hopkinson. [4]

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. 27

[2] ibid., p. 53

[3] ibid., p. 72

[4] ibid., p. 73

48. "Wholly given up to the worship of pleasure": Paris in 1855 & 1867

In 1855 Alice made her first trip abroad, going with John to Paris.  By this time they had been married nearly seven years and had four children.  When she got back to England, she wrote on 25 August from the home of her sister-in-law Ellen Tubbs to her "beloved sister" Alice Wills, who had been looking after some of the Hopkinson children at her house in Clifton, the affluent suburb of Bristol.  The trip had been something of a culture shock to her:

I have enjoyed our trip very much and am really very glad to have seen Paris.  But I love England all the better for the change.  Paris seems wholly given up to the worship of pleasure. [1]

In August 1867 John went to Paris with young John and Alfred to join some of the Wills family and to see Messrs Wren & Hopkinson's stall at the Paris Exposition ("quite one of the popular attractions in the Engineering Department" said John).  Young John was by now 18 and was very taken with the French, writing

I like the French very well; they are very civil and seem to enjoy themselves heartily; they do not appear to be troubled with self-consciousness in any form.[2]

Between Rue de l'Échelle and Rue Saint Augustin: demolition. 1877. by Charles Marville

Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the great Napoleon's nephew, after an adventurous life had become President of France in 1848 and made himself Emperor by coup d'état in 1852.  He had set about modernising France and radically changing the old mediaeval city of Paris.  

In 1854 Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann had begun work – the city would be a vast building site for twenty years – and John Hopkinson as an engineer and city councillor was inspired by the Haussmann vision and the new grands boulevards:

I am delighted with the magnificence of Paris – the boldness, and straightforwardness of the ideas in the streets, railways, etc and the development of the national power of arrangement and organization.  I should like to apprentice a few of our town councillors or aldermen here for a few years.  London and Manchester might well take a lesson.  I must go through some of the buildings in course of construction to see what new dodges can be picked up.  We English have a good deal to learn and one does not wonder that the French sometimes talk about our insular notions and prejudices.  There is nothing like going from home to have the conceit knocked out of one.  I should almost like to live here for a few months or years to understand better some of the social and governmental questions. [3]

Alfred aged about 16
(taken 1867 or 1868)

This was the boys' first visit abroad and it gave them a glimpse of the startling events that were soon to come.  Alfred, remembering foreshadowings of the revolutionary Paris Commune that seized power after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, wrote 

Even then there was a strange sense of the undercurrents of feeling in Paris which came to the surface three years later. [4]

He remembered very well the British public's fascination with the Emperor Napoleon III, that "man of mystery", and knew people who were caught up in the conspiracy theories that abounded: 

By many earnest people the Prophetic Books and the Apocalypse were searched, with what they thought to be complete success, for references to the part he would play before the final battle of Armageddon.  One book which an excellent clergyman of my acquaintance and members of his family read with thrilling interest was 'Napoleon, the Destined Monarch of the World'.  The letters of the Emperor's name were taken to represent Greek numerals which made up the number of the Beast 666. [5]

There were many British people who thought that, like his uncle the first Napoleon, this Napoleon was a very real threat.  Alfred remembered the uneasiness of the mood in Paris.  He and Johnnie were on the balcony of their pension on the Avenue Wagram talking with the owner's daughter when she said "as though it were a matter of course, that a revolution would very shortly take place and that it might be expected at any time". [6]

At the time of their trip to Paris, their younger siblings were under the age of 14 – Albert was only four and May was three.  Not very many letters from the later 1860s and the later 1870s survived, so we have hardly any information on the younger children's holidays.

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. 25

[2] ibid., p. 50

[3] ibid.

[4] Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C., LL.D., Penultima (1930) pub. Martin Hopkinson Ltd, p. 20

[5] ibid., p. 21

[6] ibid., p. 22

47. "We want to teach them to go alone": Holidays in the 1860s

After that, John and Alice chose to go to North Wales.  They could usually be found at Llanfairfechan or nearby Penmaenmawr, favourite resorts of the Manchester middle and upper classes, with Liberal prime minister William Gladstone particularly favouring Penmaenmawr.  They were easy to reach by train and offered not just sandy beaches and clean air but mountains.  From this northerly tip of the Eryri (Snowdonia) National Park the boys could explore the mountain ranges of the Carneddau and Glyderau.  Alfred remembered 

As boys, first with my father and afterwards alone, we used to wander over the hills of Carnarvonshire, the Carnedds and Glyders, which were then very little known. [1]

They climbed Tryfan

and sought for traces of glacial action in Cym Tryfan and so knew what was meant by moraines and roches perchés before we had set eyes on an existing glacier. [2]

In July 1863 Johnnie was soon to be 14 years old and Alfred was 12.  Their parents believed in giving them freedom to explore on their own.  On 3 July Alice wrote to John from Penmaenmawr

The children are all good and tractable, the boys anxious to conform to your wishes.  I trust them a great deal, telling them I have the fullest confidence that they will follow out all your instructions, which I believe they wish to do [3]

and John replied the next day, having just come back from Liverpool where he had seen Isambard Kingdom Brunel's steamship 'Great Britain' – the first iron steamer to have crossed the Atlantic – come into dock.  She had been completed in 1845 and now took emigrants to Australia. 

We shall have a heavy and difficult piece of work there which will take a couple of months restoring the teeth of the great driving wheels, which have done very well for thirteen years regular work

commented John, and continued

I am very pleased to have your reports of the dear children.  I do think that a little of this sort of life is useful to their characters as well as to their health.  I think it strengthens their mind, develops their energies, awakens their powers of observation and, I trust too, that, surrounded as they are on every side by the proofs of the goodness and wisdom of the Creator, they are, in some degree at least, led up through nature to nature's God.  

I quite agree in wishing to trust them a good deal – we want to teach them to go alone – to think and act for themselves – in subordination to the wishes of their parents and to the will and law of their God.  And I believe that we shall be more successful in obtaining a ready compliance with those points on which we have to insist by conceding a fair amount of liberty in other and safer directions. [4]

Johnnie and Alfred had already learned a little about looking after themselves.  The year before, John had taken the two boys to London on the train to see the International Exhibition in South Kensington, the world fair held on the site where the Natural History Museum stands now.

The Palace of Art & Industry, 1862 Exhibition

Alice took baby Gertrude and little Mary to Skipton, while the other four children stayed behind with their nurse Anne Cookson.  John wrote from to Alice from the train on 25 June

We have had a lesson together as to what they would do if by any accident we should get separated and the rehearsal is quite satisfactory as I think they would use their wits rightly.  I trust that this journey will be of no small use to them as they are just at the age to take in readily by observation so much that is novel and instructive.  I mean to devote myself pretty much to them all this jaunt. [5]

Alfred remembered this first visit to London very well – it left two deep impressions.

One was the condition of the Underground Railway at Baker Street and Portland Road where the smoke was choking, and the other the contempt felt by visitors from the North for the two horse 'buses which slowly perambulated London in those days. [6]

Most of all he remembered the crinolines, which had grown larger and larger.

But nothing at the time left a stronger or more unpleasant memory than the dress of fashionable women at the Exhibition.  I remember one lady scowling at the young boy who was found to be standing on her dress though she must have been at least two yards away.  My poor brother had been suffering from an injured and inflamed leg due to a kick at football, and the horrible steels of the crinoline brushing by caused him acute pain, but he had his revenge by stooping down at a little distance, taking the metal hoop between his finger and thumb and breaking it.  We thoroughly enjoyed our attacks on those abominations. [7]

from The Railway Station (1862) by William Powell Frith

At this point the crinoline was beginning to change, becoming a sloping bustle at the back while the front was flattened, which must have proved useful for women who wanted to approach a display case without disturbing their dresses.  And the colour of any streetscape was changing and brightening with the discovery of the brilliant intensity of aniline dyes, which brought clear vivid mauves, pinks and magentas into women's clothes for the first time.  We have no idea when or whether Alice ventured into these colours!

The next year their cousins John Milne and Mary Tubbs holidayed with them in Llanfairfechan.  John was the eldest son of Alice's bright and sociable sister Ellen, who had married James Milne of the well-known Manchester retailers Kendal, Milne & Faulkner (later Kendal, Milne & Co) – it was at their house that John had met Alice for the first time.  The Milnes' country house near Cheadle in Cheshire was a very welcome country refuge for Alice, and her daughter Mary Hopkinson wrote of it gratefully

Belmont was a home to which we frequently went, enjoying the country surroundings and the company of our relations.  Aunt Milne was ever so good to us and we knew all our cousins well – Alice, John, Sydney, Herbert, Janey, Ellen and Clifford.  We had the opportunity of keeping in touch with them for many years and with some of their descendants.  [8]

In 1864 John Milne was 17 years old and Mary Tubbs, whose parents were Mary Hopkinson and the Plymouth dentist Charles Foulger Tubbs, was a few months younger.  John and Alfred were now 15 and 13 years old.  Alice wrote to John on 6 July

Poor Nellie is a little bit troubled with the boys' attentions to Mary and feels herself at times neglected.  I think it may be a useful lesson to her. [9]

But the main focus of the boys' attention was their expeditions.  We can see from other instances that Alice wasn't averse to girls and women walking – she enjoyed long walks herself, and we have seen her sister-in-law Alice Wills joining in the nine-mile walk with the steep climb in the Lakes in 1857 – but the boys had more ambitious plans.  On 7 July 1864 Alice wrote to John  

They really are good lads.  Johnny listens with loving respectful attention to my little discourses.  Mary Tubbs is very ambitious to take some of their long walks; but I told Mary this morning that, without express leave from home, I would not consent to her undertaking them because I feel sure Charles would say we were made to let her undertake so much, for, with unformed girls, there is a risk in such stretches [10]

Nearly a week later, on 13 July, she wrote 

This morning I roused the boys at 3.40 for their long walk [11]

We know "the boys" included both Johns and Alfred; there may have been more cousins.  The boys  were out till night.  Alice wrote on 14 July

The boys arrived home about nine last night, pretty well tired out but the two Johns consumed a noble quantity of food … They are all lame this morning from swollen feet, sprains or blisters and disposed to loiter about and have dinner at home.  They had a grand walk, over thirty miles.  They saw the eagle again [12]

This must have been the day that Alfred remembered years later

Specially I remember crossing the mountains to Llyncwlyd [probably Llyn Cowlyd], and as we descended hearing the strange cry of the golden eagle, like a peewit speaking through a megaphone, and watching for an hour or more a flight of two of these great birds across the lake, circling above the mountains almost out of sight and then swooping down until we could feel the shadow of their outstretched wings and see their open beaks as they cried.[13]

The children were always proud of their father's courage.  He had told them the story, Alfred wrote, of

how the Chartists had marched into Manchester, stopping the mills and works by drawing the boiler plugs, and there was fear of serious riots; how a threatening mob was once dispersed by a tremendous thunder shower; and how, when a young man alone in charge of engineering works, he refused to open the closed gates in spite of threats, and the crowd passed on [14]

and Alfred knew this for himself, remembering an anecdote about his elder brother

My father, I believe, was naturally rather a nervous man, but I cannot imagine him refraining from any course of action from want of courage, either physical or mental.  I have seen him in the old days, when drunkenness was much more common than it is now, stopping two or three fights on one day merely in passing down the street towards his works.  

He did not talk about courage, but I remember one occasion when my brother was a small boy and had been boasting of the brave things he would do and that he was not afraid of deep water.  We went down to the dam near my grandfather's mill at a very deep place and were about to try bathing in the river when my father, remembering the boast, said:  "Are you afraid of the water now you see it?"  The boy, who could not swim a stroke, jumped head first into fifteen feet of water and my father had to follow him with his clothes on and drag him out. [15]

This boldness and physical daring from a young age was to lead to the Hopkinson brothers' passion for mountaineering, and we can see that it started young.  On those holidays in Wales – we know they went there in 1865 and 1866 – Alfred said

We took young cormorants from a ledge of the cliffs overhanging the sea and tried to reach the puffins in the holes of the rocks. [16]

Notes

[1] Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C., LL.D., Penultima (1930) pub. Martin Hopkinson Ltd, p. 109

[2] ibid., p. 226-7

[3] 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. 37

[4] ibid., p. 37-8

[5] ibid., p. 34

[6] Penultima, p. 43

[7] ibid., p. 44

[8] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. XXV

[9] ibid., p. 40

[10] ibid., p. 41

[11] ibid.

[12] ibid.

[13] Penultima, p. 109

[14] ibid., p. 14

[15] ibid., p. 15

[16] ibid., p. 109

46. The near-disastrous holiday at Sunderland Point: 1862

 

Sunderland Point by Heather Bolton

The small village at Sunderland Point lies at the tip of a windswept peninsula where the River Lune comes out into the Irish Sea.  Here the Hopkinsons would find a wide horizon, a landscape of sea and river, salt marsh and mudflats, home to wading birds and wildfowl, with shingle beaches from which sandbanks could be reached farther out into the sea.  It had once been the port that gave Lancaster merchants access to the colonial trade – at the end of the 18th century, it had been the fourth largest port in England.  It had been a fashionable resort for sea bathing and had claimed to have the first bathing machine in North Lancashire.  By 1862 its glory days were over, but it was still popular for holidays.

One of its most notable things about Sunderland Point was – and is – that, though it is part of mainland Britain, it is reached by a causeway a mile and a quarter long across a tidal marsh and is cut off at high tides, when the causeway can be under several feet of water for up to four hours.  (My information comes from the excellent Sunderland Point website.  I recommend it strongly, it's full of information and beautiful, evocative photographs)

John with Gertrude and May in 1867 or 1868 

John noted in his logbook [1] that they left 12 York Place for their holiday lodgings in Sunderland Point on Monday 4 August 1862 in a large party of five adults and eight children.  

John was now 38 and Alice would be 38 in November.   Young John was just 13, Alfred 11, Ellen 8, Charles 6, Mary would soon be 5, Edward was 3, Lily nearly 2, and baby Gertrude was 3 months old.  Miss Maria Neild, the mother's help, came too, with 24 year old Annie Cookson the children's nurse and 25 year old Emma Wood.  While the family were by the sea, John would be at work and would come out to join them when he could.

Getting from Manchester to Sunderland Point was not straightforward – he would need to go by train and boat and then, if there was no conveyance for the last stretch, on foot.  He should have made a careful study of the tide tables.  

Somehow, he miscalculated.  

He set off from Manchester on the afternoon of Saturday 9 August 1862, arriving at the village of Overton on the Lune estuary quite late in the evening.  The family was expecting him, and his son Johnnie was out on the shore watching for his arrival.  John thought he had time to get to the house before the tide turned.

This is the record he made afterwards in his logbook, which Ellen Ewing abridged for the book [2]:

The Causeway by Andy Biggs

On Saturday Aug 9th I took train in afternoon to Lancaster and boat part way down the river, landed near Overton to walk to Sunderland – same road over the shore as our bus had taken on the Monday.  The tide was coming up … I walked as rapidly as I could towards Sunderland Point through the gradually rising water which covered all the road.  I saw a stake standing and, supposing that it might be to mark the road, made for it … 

I felt with my feet the ruts of the wheels and knew it must be on the road.  I called continuously:  "Boat ahoy.  Boat ahoy."   The water continued to rise above my hips so I unbuttoned my waistcoat and put the left flap over my shoulder to keep my watch dry and I felt the run of the tide past me and dare not leave the stake as I would have been carried off my feet … My voice failed with shouting but a handful of water restored it.   

And at last had the great relief of hearing the handling of the oars of a boat putting off.  I shouted to direct the boat where I was.  They rowed with a will, were soon alongside and seized hold to haul me in … The water was near my armpits and probably at the top of the tide … 

I learned that a woman, ironing her husband's shirt with the cottage window open, had heard my shouting and ran to tell the boatmen to get the boat out.  John was on the shore, knew my voice and that I was taking the shore-road from Lancaster, and knew that I must be in danger.  The boatmen were sure that the voice must come from the opposite shore.  My boy insisted on their going towards Lancaster.  And he was right as they soon found.  Each of the boatmen received a family Bible, inscribed: "To – in memory of [illeg] help in time of need" [3]

This is the 1840s Ordnance Survey map, with the route marked by Bill Morris.  The landing stage at Overton is marked in green and the causeway in red.

There is another version of the episode.  It appeared in the Lancaster Gazette on 16 August and was written by a 21 year old solicitor from Kendal called Joseph Swainson junior.  He was lodging with Richard and Jane Nicholson who ran the Maxwell Arms, the licensed hotel on Second Terrace, and farmed the 30 acres of  Point Farm.  This is young Joseph Swainson's dramatic letter, published under the heading 'Narrow Escape from Drowning'

Sir,

Perhaps you will allow me to trouble you with the following narrative of a very narrow escape from death by drowning which has just occurred here.

About ten o'clock on Saturday night last Mrs Nicholson, the wife of Mr Richard Nicholson, who farms this property, having occasion to go to a neighbour's house on the other Terrace, heard cries of distress which appeared to proceed from the direction of the road across the Sands to Overton.  She immediately gave the alarm to myself and her husband, and the nearest boatman having been at once roused, a boat was with all possible haste procured, and in the absence of a fourth experienced boatman, I most willingly accompanied them to pull the fourth oar.

The cries of distress which were borne along the water to us were truly pitiable, and such as to call forth the most strenuous efforts on the part of the men.  We proceeded as rapidly as possible in the direction from which the cries came, and when approaching the post which indicates the first small bridge on the road to Overton, we found a gentleman up to the chest in water clinging to the post in an all but exhausted state.

On our return, after drawing the gentleman in safety into the boat, we found that he was a Mr Hopkinson, from Manchester, whose wife and children, are staying down here for a few weeks, and who were all, with the exception of his eldest boy, in happy ignorance of the occurrence.

He was on his way from Lancaster, having arrived by the evening train, with the intention of spending Sunday at this place.  The tides at this time rise very rapidly, and the boatmen all say, that there cannot be the slightest doubt as to the fate of this gentleman had the boat been longer than five or ten minutes in reaching him, for, in addition to the great increase which that period would have made to the water (it still being an hour and a half from high water) it would have been impossible for Mr Hopkinson, judging from the weak state in which we found him, much longer to have retained his hold.

James Spencer

The rescue of this gentleman from a death gradually but certainly approaching, was no doubt due, under Providence, primarily to the mere accident of Mr and Mrs Nicholson's not having gone to bed at their usual early hour, and also to the strenuous efforts of Thomas Dickenson, James Spencer, and John Bagot, with whatever assistance I may have afforded.  The persons who live in the cottages which are nearest to the place where this occurrence happened, were not aware of it until next morning.

The road between this place and Overton, when the tide is out, is almost as safe and hard as any turnpike, but when covered with water it is of the most dangerous description, from the many and deep pools which abound near to it.

My reasons for troubling you with this narrative is that a warning may not be lost to strangers of the extreme imprudence of venturing across the sands without first ascertaining the state of the tide, especially at night time.  And, also, that I may redeem a promise made to the men that I would do my best that the great anxiety to do their utmost and the strenuous exertions they made should not be lost sight of.

I enclose my card, and I am,

Yours very obediently,

Jos Swainson, Jr.

Mr Nicholson's, Maxwell's Terrace, Sunderland Point, 12th August 1862

PS - The boatmen here have often before been instrumental in saving lives

John thought it was "probably at the top of the tide" when he had been rescued; young Swainson thought it was still 1½ hours to the full.  Who was right?  Unless Joseph Swainson misheard comments about the height of the tide, he was in a better position to know than John.

And there's another oddity.  Joseph Swainson describes John being rescued by three highly experienced fishermen who were probably also river pilots, plus himself.  Bill Morris, editor of the website of the Sunderland Point Community Association (and to whom I am deeply indebted), tells me that the fishermen of the time generally worked in pairs, one to use the oars and the other to work the net.  The boats could take two fishermen using two sets of oars.  Two men to row and another man to help John into the boat would be swift and efficient.  Bill's comment is that

Given the urgency, having four in the boat, with each taking a single oar and one being inexperienced, is highly unlikely

However, that is what Joseph Swainson wrote, so we leave it there for readers to make their own minds.   

The story doesn't end there.  Alice, whose first realisation of the near catastrophe must have been when John was brought in amid excited scenes, soaked, chilled and weary, wrote to him on the Monday when he had gone back to work

I feel intensely lonely today and such a weight of oppression, I suppose the reaction after the excitement.  The crowning mercy of Saturday night seemed to fill all my thoughts … When I think of what might have been!  But I must banish that thought; it quite overpowers me [4]

Joseph Swainson wrote to the Lancaster Gazette the next day, and it appeared in Saturday's paper.  Alice was very cross and wrote to John

It is just a worked up tale.  Had I seen that letter I should have kept at a more convenient distance from Mr Swanson and deemed him a young puppy who wished to appear in print … Do not forget the Bible for the boatmen; I fancy they look for some reward. [5]

Perhaps she felt rather more kindly towards Mr Swainson after the next development.  Somebody had told the other Lancaster newspaper that John had not given the boatmen any reward.  Mr Swainson wrote again to the Lancaster Gazette saying that they had in fact been rewarded most handsomely:

A paragraph in last Saturday's Lancaster Observer having been pointed out to me, stating that Mr Hopkinson had not thought fit to reward the men for their exertions, I venture to trouble you again to contradict a report that John Hopkinson had not rewarded the boatmen.

So far from being the case, Mr Hopkinson has rewarded each of the men most handsomely, in a much more suitable manner than by a pecuniary recompense, and, moreover, in a way which will afford a lasting memorial of his appreciation of their prompt and efficient exertions.

He means the inscribed Family Bible.  

The causeway was notoriously dangerous.  A man from Overton drowned in 1869; the innkeeper of Sunderland Point's Temperance Hotel drowned in 1877.  There were numerous rescues.  In 1870 fishermen rescued a farm boy from Sunderland Brows and went back into the water up to their necks to rescue his two horses.  In 1897 a char-à-banc from Morecambe carrying twenty people slipped off the road into a rapidly rising tide; all were rescued.  

We don't know if the boatmen felt a Family Bible was sufficient reward for their speed and expertise and chancing their own safety to save John; we can only hope that John thought to give these working men a cash reward as well.  

As far as I know, the family did not return to Sunderland Point.  If any readers would like to visit this uniquely beautiful place, make sure to check https://www.sunderlandpoint.net/ for the tides first.  

Rescue of Visitors by Alan Smith

Next:  47. "We want to teach them to go alone": Holidays in the 1860s

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. 35

[2] ibid.

[3] ibid., p. 35-6

[4] ibid., p. 36

[5] ibid., p. 36

45. "Intense love of the hills": 1850s

The Hopkinson boys' earliest experience of hills and fells was on visits to Skipton.  In the summer of 1856 Alice wrote to John that she was taking long walks with the eldest three – John, who was 7 at the end of July, Alfred who had recently had his fifth birthday and Ellen aged nearly 3 – and their nursemaid

Nelly requires a good deal of carrying and Alfred a helping hand.  Johnny bounds away like a wild one. [1]

In old age Alfred remembered

As early as the age of five I recall going up the River Aire to Gordale Scar, than which there is no more impressive scene in the country.  To a young child the grandeur of it was almost overpowering.  And then came the delight of climbing up the rocks at the side of the falls and crossing the moor to the great Cove above Malham. [2]

William Cecil Slingsby on Vesle Skagastølstind
with Storen in the background 1908

It was when they were in Skipton that the boys first went out on the moors with one of their future mountaineering companions, William Cecil Slingsby (1849-1929), always known as Cecil.  He was their second cousin, part of the Skipton cousinage – his grandfather Isaac Dewhurst and the Hopkinsons' grandfather John Dewhurst were brothers.  

One of Cecil's earliest great expeditions to Norway was in 1874 with Algernon Dewhurst, Bonny Dewhurst's son, so we can probably assume that there was quite a small gang of Dewhurst cousins going out together on the uplands of Craven.  Alfred wrote Cecil's obituary for the Alpine Journal, explaining to readers 

I knew Slingsby for nearly 70 years, from the time when as boys we walked together over Pen-y-ghent and the hills of Craven.  [3]

Cecil had written the Alpine Journal obituaries for Alfred's brother John and for John's son Bertram, remembering 

Every member of my generation of my cousins, the Hopkinsons, has been endowed from earliest childhood with an intense love of the hills, a love which deepened naturally as years rolled on.  This was inherited from their father, as was the case with me and my father.  In boyhood days I had many a good walk with a few climbs thrown in amongst the fells of Craven

And when he wrote Charles Hopkinson's obituary for the Journal in 1920, he explained the intense love of the hills was inherited "from both of their parents".  [4]  Walking on the hills and fells of Craven, just as their mother Alice had done from childhood, was the beginning of the Hopkinson brothers' lives as mountaineers and their love of it was nurtured by both their parents.

John and Alice's habits were clearly frugal and their way of life struck Evelyn Oldenbourg as austere, but they certainly put a high value on their annual holidays, though the whole large family did not always holiday together.

In June 1857, John took the two oldest boys John and Alfred to the Lake District to join his sister Alice Wills, now a 30 year old mother of two little boys, and her husband Henry.  John wrote to his Alice on 18 June 1857 from Grasmere

We had yesterday another famous time on the mountains.  Alfred, Johnnie, Henry, Alice and myself set off to walk over the pass by Grisedale tarn between Helvellyn and Fairfield to Patterdale understanding the distance was six miles.  And so it is, but as the crow flies or a direct line on the map.  By the road it is certainly nine miles beside the ascent of some 1,600 feet – as it is one of the highest passes.  They all managed it comfortably.  Alfred coming in at a run. [5]

Alfred's memory was still vivid many years later

When I was six my father took us to the Lake District for the first time and we bathed in Easedale Tarn, climbed Helm Crag under his guidance, and another day reached the top of Fairfield with some friends.  A boy's whole spirit was filled with the joy of the first ascent of one of the higher mountains and the widespread view around.  [6]

At least two of Alice Wills' sons became mountaineers, and it seems likely that they climbed with the Hopkinson brothers.  Her third son Maitland was at Cambridge at the same time as Edward Hopkinson and his death must have been one of the Hopkinson family's earliest experiences of climbing fatalities.  Maitland died at the age of 27 in an accident in Wales in April 1885.  He had walked to Aber with a younger brother and a friend, and they were descending by the Aber waterfall when Maitland, who had been jumping from crag to crag, sprang, lost his balance and fell about 50 feet into a pool below.  He died instantly.  But this was not the first climbing tragedy in the Wills family.  His 14 year old cousin William Wills had been found dead on Newquay beach two years earlier; they thought he had been climbing the cliff.  

In 1859, two years after the holiday in the Lakes, John took Johnnie, now nearly 10, and Alfred, who would very soon be 8, to join his sister Elizabeth Rooker and her family at Llangollen in the valley of the River Dee.  John and Alice's entire holiday philosophy can be found in this little exchange:  Alice wrote to John on 19 June

I was quite grieved to find that your Bible was not put in the box. I understood, when I enquired, that the Bible and testaments were there.  I like the dear boys to hear or read some portion of God's word every day

while on the same day he was writing to her

The dear boys greatly enjoy the scenery and are learning something every step.  I like their companionship and am glad to have them find their best pleasures in their parents' society … We are just going to have a Bible lesson, having borrowed one from the landlady [7]

Very observant and knowledgeable himself, John had the rare ability of "finding little forms of life of all sorts", as his granddaughter Ellen Ewing later put it, and making them interesting for children without in any way making them feel they were being taught or lectured.  Alfred called this "having attention directed to anything of interest without any obtrusive attempt at giving lessons on any subject".  [8]

At Llangollen they had the Berwyn Range and the beautiful Clwydian Range of hills to explore, and their cousins, 12 year old Alice and Marian (whom John calls May), who was the same age as Alfred, to play with.  On 20 June John wrote

The cousins are very happy together.  May and Alfred are well matched and Alice and Johnnie equally distinguished by their own individuality.  [9]

The Parade, Llanfairfechan between 1890 & 1900

The following years saw seaside holidays.  In July 1861, when the children were recovering from whooping cough, we find the family at Abergele on the North Wales coast, easily reached by train from Manchester, and where there were shingle and sandy beaches and wooded hills.  Alice's letters home ask for old slippers to protect feet from the stones on the seashore.  But from 1863 they took their holidays at Penmaenmawr or nearby Llanfairfechan, where the younger children could play on the beach and John could take the older boys up into the hills and mountains.

In 1862, however, they had a holiday at Sunderland Point on the Lancashire coast.  It was to prove rather too memorable.

Next:  46. The near-disastrous holiday at Sunderland Point: 1862

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. 26

[2] Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C., LL.D., Penultima (1930) pub. Martin Hopkinson Ltd, p. 225

[3] Alpine Journal 1929, Vol 41 

[4] Alpine Journal, November 1920 Vol. XXXIII, No. 221

[5] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 27

[6] Penultima, p. 226

[7] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 30

[8] Penultima, p. 226

[9] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 30

44. Visiting the Dewhursts in Skipton

Frequent visits were paid to family – these were bonds that were highly valued by them all.  For the first fifteen years of her marriage, Alice's main concern in her trips to Skipton was seeing her parents.  They died in 1864 and 1865, so that her younger children had no memory of them.

Alfred remembered his grandfather every time he voted.  John Dewhurst, a supporter of the Whigs (forerunners of the Liberals), boosted his party by creating more votes for them – he transferred to relatives undivided shares in two or three cottages in Skipton to create more "forty-shilling freeholder" votes.  Alfred benefited from this for years, and had a vote in Skipton as a "forty-shilling freeholder" until that property qualification was abolished in 1918.  (As Alfred thought "One man, one vote" was an absurd idea, this rather underhand scheme seemed entirely right to him [1])

Alfred's elder brother John was 15 when their grandfather died.  He talked of him to his own son Bertram, who wrote in his memoir of his father [2] 

As John knew him, he was a fine old Yorkshireman, impetuous, even fiery, but possessed of the kindest of hearts.  He was much troubled with rheumatism, but he fought his malady with the most indomitable courage and tenacity.  His grandson had a vivid recollection of his hobbling round his garden, determined not to give in to his infirmity.

Possibly old John Dewhurst?

Mary was only seven when John Dewhurst died but she had

childish recollections of our Grandfather, with snow white hair, sitting in the chimney corner, smoking his long "church warden" [pipe] and our grandmother looking very old but very happy in a high backed rocking chair near the table, busy with her knitting. [3]

(I think this unnamed photograph from the Hopkinson album passed down in my part of the family may be old John Dewhurst)

They were cared for as they grew older and more infirm by Alice's unmarried sister Lizzie.  In 1864 their health grew more precarious.  In the early part of the year Alice went to Skipton to help nurse them, taking her turn to sit at their bedside at night.  That August John Dewhurst became very ill with bronchitis.  On 28 August 1864 Alice wrote to John

Our beloved father's suffering were ended sooner than we had any of us anticipated.  At a quarter past eleven he 'bowed his head and gave up the ghost.'  Literally this describes his departure, no struggle told the moment when the spirit departed, we scarcely knew when he breathed his last.  Poor Mother looks a wondering, wistful gaze at all of us; at times she realizes what has happened and then she weeps.[4]

John Dewhurst was 77 years old.  He was buried at the Zion Chapel in Newmarket Street.  The Cheshire Observer of 3 September 1864 reported his death, remarking

His name has for half a century been largely associated with the commercial prosperity of Skipton.   In politics Mr Dewhurst was a staunch Liberal.   By his liberality and judgment he earned a name which will long be remembered with sincere esteem.

And the Lancaster Gazette noted

His efforts have ever been to improve the social prosperity of the town.  His remains were interred yesterday (Friday) morning, when most of the shops of the town were closed, and many gentlemen and tradesmen joined in the funeral procession.

Alice's mother Alice Bonny had endured very poor health for years.  

I have heard our Mother speak with admiration of her uncomplaining patience and her great power of endurance

wrote her granddaughter Mary Hopkinson.[5]  By the time her husband died she was frail and confused and she did not long outlive him.  On 25 February 1865 at the age of 76 she died at home of "Decay of Nature".  

In the burial ground of the Zion Chapel was the stone in memory of their 15 year old son James, who had died in 1838.  Engraved below his name was a verse by the 18th century Baptist hymn-writer Anne Steele, which had been written 'To a friend, on the death of a child'

Hope looks beyond the bounds of time

When what we now deplore

Shall rise in full immortal prime

And bloom to fade no more

Gravestone of James, John & Alice Dewhurst 

Beneath the inscription John and Alice Dewhurst had left plenty of space for their own names.  Today the stone slab lies flat in the ground in front of the now disused St Andrew's Methodist & United Reform Church, which stands on the site of the old chapel.  (The congregation of St Andrew's has moved to Westmoreland Street)

Alice still had plenty of family to visit in Skipton after her parents had died, and so her children spent a great deal of time with their own multitude of cousins.  Alice's brothers Bonny and Tom carried on the family business and Bonny's three sons and two of Tom's boys followed in their footsteps.

Alice's daughter Mary seems to have known her uncle Tom's family best and she particularly remembered times at 'Whinfield', the new house on the Keighley Road built by Tom when Mary was in her early teens. Tom and family had been living at Number 6 Belle Vue Terrace, just to the east of the Belle Vue Mills, but he and his wife Maria Stevenson, who came from a local farming family, needed plenty of room for their growing family.  'Whinfield' was a spacious new villa which stood in extensive grounds to the south-west of the town, out of way of the smoke from the mill chimneys.  (Decades later it became the General Hospital).  

Eleven of Tom and Maria's thirteen children survived infancy:  Arthur, Alice, Ethel, Jack, Lilian, Edgar, Elizabeth, Maria, Nellie, William and Norman.  The eldest was born in 1861 and the youngest in 1878, so there was an overlap with the younger Hopkinson children and Mary Hopkinson remembered them with great affection.   

We all have the liveliest recollections of the generous hospitality at Whinfield, Skipton, the table groaning with good things in true Yorkshire fashion, and of our Uncle and Aunt's sympathetic forbearance with all the pranks which we, led by our cousins, indulged.  The younger members of our family each found a special companion of his or her own age, and the friendships so formed have been lifelong. [6]

John and Alice's granddaughter Katharine Chorley encountered a Yorkshireman in the late 1940s who reminded her how her uncle Bonny Dewhurst used to hold a conference every Saturday with the firm's travellers after their week's journeying.  Bonny heard their reports himself, kept up with successes and failures and listened out for comparisons with other firm's goods – then, if the Dewhursts were being beaten in something, the mill would set to work to outstrip their competitor. [7]

Bonny was deeply engaged in his business but he had a longing to be something of a country gentleman and do a bit of farming as well, so he took out a substantial mortgage and bought Aireville Hall and its estate.  This stood to the north-west of the town on the other side of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal from his mills.  It made a grand setting when Bonny and his wife Frances England celebrated their Golden Wedding with a day of amusement and entertainment for all the workpeople and their nearest relatives – some 2,000 people in all.  (The estate is now a public park, and the hall buildings are the town's comprehensive school, the Skipton Academy).  

Five of Bonny and Frances's children lived beyond the age of twelve.  Born between 1851 and 1864, Algernon, Frances, Lionel, Harold, and Hilda were the same ages as the Hopkinson children.  We don't know how often Bonny's family joined the Hopkinsons on holiday, but we are told that they were at Penmaenmawr in North Wales in 1863 at the same time as Alice's sister-in-law Alice Wills and her family – an example of the links between the three families that culminated in Gertrude Hopkinson being among the bridesmaids when Hilda Dewhurst married Arthur Stanley Wills in 1890.

Next:  45. "Intense love of the hills": 1850s

Notes

[1] Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C., LL.D., Penultima (1930) pub. Martin Hopkinson Ltd, p. 40

[2] Original Papers by the late John Hopkinson, D.Sc., F.R.S. edited with a Memoir by B. Hopkinson, B.Sc (1901), Vol 1, pub. CUP, (available online at archive.org), p. xi

[3] 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. XIII

[4] ibid., p. 42

[5] ibid. p. XXIV

[6] ibid., p. XXVI

[7] Katharine Chorley, Manchester Made Them, pub Faber & Faber Ltd (1950), p. 50