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