John's work – pressure of work, trips abroad in pursuit of contracts, business worries – crop up very frequently in the edited letters. Sometimes specific contracts are mentioned – for example, the work to be done on Isambard Kingdom Brunel's steamship 'Great Britain', and the contracts for gearing from Scandinavian mills – and Ellen Ewing ends her book with an extract from a piece about John in the July 1893 number of Manchester Faces and Places. More details of his work can be found in the obituaries published in the journals of the professional institutes to which he belonged, and the firm's name can be found in contemporary newspaper reports. All these combine to give us a glimpse into John's energetic and diligent life as an engineer.
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| French floating battery 'Lave' in 1854 |
The main business of the firm had always been mill-gearing. For example, in 1855, the year when Alice and John went on their trip to Paris, newspaper reports show that the firm had the contract for making the toothed gearing for the floating batteries to be sent to the Baltic for use against the Russian port of Kronstadt. The Crimean War had been underway since October 1853 and the French and British navies were building floating batteries – steam ships armoured with thick wrought iron plates – so as to attack Russian coastal fortifications. (As things turned out, the Russians sued for peace before the batteries came into operation.)
But John's interests and abilities had always gone beyond mill-gearing. In 1848, the year of his marriage, he had developed an early sewing machine. It was only a mechanical success and was not taken up commercially – his son Alfred later commented that it is never the pioneers who get the financial benefits of inventions.[1] (I thought there might have been a mention by Alice and her daughters in all their household chores of using a domestic sewing machine – but there isn't.)
In 1856, the year when John's fifth child Alice was born, Sir James Chance of Messrs Chance Brothers approached the firm to see if they could solve a problem for him. Messrs Chance were a major Midlands glassworks company. They had glazed the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851 and made the ornamental windows for the White House in America, and John's firm and its predecessors had been their millwrights for years. For the last five years Chance Brothers had been a major lighthouse engineering company and Sir James' request was for machinery for grinding and polishing the lenses needed for dioptric lights. (A dioptric lens, as I understand it, is one where light is refracted twice, once on entering the lens, and once on leaving it). John designed a complete equipment of machinery to do the job very satisfactorily; later, his son John invented a system of rotating optics for the company.
From 1868, the year when his last and thirteenth child, Harry, was born, he was very frequently consulted by the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company about the design and equipment of their goods stations and sorting yards. He rearranged yards in Liverpool and Manchester for them, equipping them with revolving capstans and power cranes.
He was the active head in technical matters for Wren & Hopkinson for 33 years. He designed buildings for their customers, while over those years the firm's business came to include slate-working machinery, cord power-cranes and hydraulic-press plants for baling raw cotton. After his partnership with Henry Wren broke up at the end of 1881, he worked as a consulting engineer in partnership with his son Charles. He gave expert opinion before Parliamentary Committees, and was instructed as an expert witness in the law courts and in valuation cases.
The big breakthroughs in electrical engineering came after his time, but John had always been interested in the subject. When he was an apprentice he made a cylinder frictional electrical machine, and in his old age he designed an electrical locomotive. It was his three engineer sons who excelled in that field, and so, he was very pleased to see, did some of his apprentices.
Alongside his other professional work, he held directorships. In 1866, the year that baby William Henry died at birth, John became a director and vice-chairman of Carnforth Hematite Iron Company, which had blast furnaces at Carnforth near the north Lancashire coast, and he was involved with the company until his death.
For a time he was a director of the Union Plate Glass Company, which had a major glassworks at Pocket Nook, St Helen's. Perhaps an attraction was its attitude to its workforce – a newspaper report of 1855 noted approvingly that there was a library for the workers "and other means have been provided by the directors for the improvement of the social and intellectual welfare of the workpeople".
And, as I described earlier, he was involved in the Chatterley Iron Company which cost him a great deal in time, money and expense of spirit, and was to lose young John and Evelyn all their savings.
Sometimes the family brought in work.
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| Dewhurst mill buildings in 2022 |
Between 1852 and 1854, John designed buildings for his father-in-law in Skipton – a weaving shed for 400 looms for the south side of their mill, and a 5 storey warehouse of 12 bays for the east side. In 1867, he designed a new mill for his Dewhurst brothers-in-law, built to the west of the existing mills, and with a frontage on Broughton Road.
The description of it given by K C Jackson in his article on the Dewhursts [2] gives us an idea of the work that John was doing. The new 5 storey mill was 20 bays long and 6 bays wide and of up-to-the-minute design. It had transverse brick-vaulted flooring and a sprinkler system against the risk of fire, the water coming from an impressive water tower finished to resemble a French Hôtel de Ville. There was an integral engine house at the east end equipped with two Wren & Hopkinson horizontal engines, rated together at 800 ihp (indicated horse power). Nine boilers supplied the steam, while the rest of the mill was driven by the pre-existing power supply which was rated at 600 ihp. A chamber was provided above the engine house in connection with a dust extraction system for the blow room. The mill was equipped with vertical shafting with bevelled gears because rope drives were not applied to cotton spinning mills until 1875.
For life on the other side and what it was like to work on the machinery – the implications and responsibilities that must have been very present to John's mind – an accident that happened at the Bellevue mill in 1872 will give an idea.
An experienced and intelligent young woman of 29 called Mary Jane Simeon was working at a thread winding machine. She was winding or spooling – that is, taking cotton off the larger bobbins and winding it upon the smaller bobbins. Under her machine frame, a shaft revolved at about 600 times a minute. Every so often she had to change the brass pinions at the end of the spindle, and sometimes one would drop into the hole through which the material came, and fall on the floor. This happened on 19 March 1872. As she stooped down to search for the pinion, her shawl – she wore the same sort of shawl as all the other women – was caught in the machine and her head was drawn down to the shaft. Before she could be dragged away by the other women, her hair and scalp were torn right off and her bare skull was fractured. Some of it had gone, leaving the brain membrane visible. She was terribly injured.
She lay between life and death for some time during her 16 months of treatment at the Huddersfield Infirmary, and her surgeon thought the wound was unlikely ever to heal and that she would not again "be fit for the ordinary duties of life".
She brought an action against the Dewhursts to recover £1,000 as compensation for her injuries on the grounds that the machine should have been fenced. The case at the Assizes was widely reported, but the story went on from there and I can't find the final result. At the Assizes, the judge had been extremely displeased at Mr Dewhurst's discourtesy in not attending court –
he was treating the Court and the plaintiff with the greatest disrespect. He could not conceive a case in which the presence of the defendant was more desirable. Had it about a horse or a dog he would have attended. [3]
The Dewhursts' QC had claimed that Mary Jane had contributed to her injuries by her own negligence because, they said, she had tried to reach the pinion from the front of the machine and not the side. The jury had found that there was some contributory negligence and awarded her £75. For the Dewhursts, this was a victory.
But the case came up again before the Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer Sir Fitzroy Kelly with an application for a new trial on the grounds that the Factory Acts had been passed expressly to protect young children and women, and mere negligence by Mary Jane in the course of her duties would be no answer to an action to recover damages. The Lord Chief Baron commented that, if she was entitled to a verdict, the damages awarded appeared to him to be wholly inadequate to meet the justice of the case.
Her QC said it was clear to him that the amount of damages was a compromise reached by the jury because they had a difference of opinion over the amount. The Lord Chief Baron commented drily that "possibly there were some millowners on the jury." And her QC replied that there were two. [4] (Sir Fitzroy Kelly, a strong Tory, was rather unlikely to feel much sympathy for Liberal Nonconformist millowners.) As Sir Fitzroy granted the rules sought by Mary Jane's QC, I rather think the Dewhursts will have given up and settled the case because I can't find any more references to it. They had fenced the machine before the case ever came to court.
Sometimes John's work brought in new family.
In 1850 John was in contact by way of business with Henry Overton Wills III of the Bristol tobacco manufacturing dynasty. It seems very likely that it was through John that Henry met John's younger sister Alice. Henry was a more than suitable match – he was born to be one of Bristol's merchant princes, he was from a Congregationalist family and was much the same age as Alice. It was a very advantageous marriage, and they were wed in Plymouth in the spring of 1853.
John's work in Ulster was eventually to bring him two daughters-in-law. Belfast was growing at a terrific rate in these years on the back of the linen trade and by the end of the 19th century it was the linen capital of the world. Wren & Hopkinson had always done a good deal of work there – they were making the shafting for Ulster linen factories from the 1850s – and one of John's best-known buildings was the nine-storey warehouse he designed for the York Street Flax Spinning Company in Belfast. But it was his contact in 1865 with John Campbell of Mossley Mill that was to prove most significant to the Hopkinson family.
Mossley Mill was about 10 miles north of Belfast, and John and his wife Nannie McCulloch and their three daughters and four sons lived in nearby Mossley House. Later they moved to 'Rathfern', a country house in extensive grounds outside the village of Whiteabbey. John's continuing business with the Campbells led to his son Charles' marriage to Mabel Campbell at the beginning of 1886. A few months later Charles' brother Edward married Mabel's sister Marianne ("Minnie") Campbell.
(The York Street Flax Spinning Company was once the largest flax spinning mill in the world, but it was destroyed in the Blitz of Belfast on Easter Tuesday 1941. Mossley Mill is now the civic centre for Newtownabbey Council, and housing estates have been built on the grounds of 'Rathfern')
And what was John like as an employer? His obituary in the journal of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers records [5]
He will long be remembered amongst the most progressive of engineering employers in Manchester for his generous and farseeing views in regard to the relations of employers and employed, and the part he took in establishing the fifty-four-hour week. The interests of his own employees and those of the companies with which he was associated were always promoted by him with characteristic generosity and disinterestedness.
Notes
[1]Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C., LL.D., Penultima (1930) pub. Martin Hopkinson Ltd, p. 107
[2] K C Jackson, The Dewhursts of Skipton: a dynasty of cotton masters, 1789 to 1897 Yorkshire
Archaeological Journal, 75, (2003), pp. 181-205
[3] Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 11 August 1873
[4] Dewsbury Reporter, 15 November 1873
[5] 1902 Obituary of John Hopkinson
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