John also threw his energies into civic work. It was almost certainly the state of the River Medlock that spurred John to stand as a City Councillor, and the story of how he achieved his objectives shows his tenacity, his clearness of vision and his ability to get the other councillors to take steps.
He had tried three years earlier to get the council to do something about the state of the Medlock in 1858 but nothing was done. So the river was one of his earliest priorities after he had been elected unopposed as councillor for St Luke's ward in the council elections in the autumn of 1861.
Councillor Hopkinson "felt it his duty to bring this subject up again", wrote the reporter from the Manchester Courier on 11 January 1862. John described the state of the river.
The Medlock was obstructed by a bank of rubbish which had been building up over many years at the end of Riley Street. It was known as Barnes's Oyster Bed because it was mostly made up of oyster shells from a nearby market stall. Above Jackson Street (more or less under today's Morton Laboratory) people dumped domestic rubbish – broken mugs, old tin pots, and so on. The tin cans filled up with debris and sank like stones to the bottom of the river, which was now silted up to a depth of about 3 feet. In some places the original river bed was 7 feet under. The Hulme Street tunnel (where the loop in the river was culverted – the area between the river and the railway line to the north being known as Little Ireland) should have been 12 feet high but it was only 8 feet above the water line. The bridge at Downing Street only had 4 feet 9 inches clearance and in the flood of 1857, the water was 2 feet 6 inches below the arch. The next flood would bring disaster.
He showed the councillors diagrams of the bridges, and explained his suggested alterations for carrying away surface water. He suggested clearing out the river bed and protecting it from future rubbish. The council had the power to do this, but it hadn't acted. Scores of people were fined for obstructing the streets but only one had been fined for obstructing the Medlock.
Councillor Neil said this had been raised before, the fault was with the owners and they ought to bear the cost. Alderman Bennett recommended that Councillor Hopkinson should "get up a memorial of owners of property on the river, asking the Council to obtain the conservancy of the river". John replied that he had done just that in 1858 and that the owners who didn't throw rubbish in the river had the right to be protected from the ones who did. He had got an estimate for the work from one of the council's most experienced contractors. The councillors gave in, and the resolution was passed.
It didn’t produce immediate results but John didn't give up. In February 1863 he presented the council with another report on the river. Finally, in September 1864, the council accepted a recommendation from the rivers committee that had been set up under John’s pressure, and the work was carried out. The Corporation's professional advisers had suggested a relief tunnel. John supervised the much less expensive option which he advised and which the councillors accepted. By clearing the river bed, building retaining walls, fencing the banks to stop rubbish being thrown in, replacing fixed weirs with tilting weirs, and persuading and helping the property owners to bear their share of the costs, John's obituary in the journal of the Institute of Civil Engineers noted [1], the council got the result it wanted and the frequent floods were much reduced.
In July 1872 there was the most appalling storm over Manchester. Rain fell so heavily for more than 13 hours that in many places the Medlock had risen by more than 21 feet. The water tore through the City Cemetery next to Philips Park and washed some 60 bodies out of their graves in the Catholic section of the cemetery, strewing them along the river's course. The Times of 15 July 1872 reported that
the flood found its way into … the machine shop of Messrs Wren and Hopkinson, which was flooded to the height of two stories … A large quantity of water escaping from [the Gorton] reservoir swept over the populous village of Fallowfield, flooding the turnpike road to the depth of several feet, and filling and damaging the cottages of the poor, besides doing much other damage
The damage to the large factories was, according to The Times two days later, estimated at £40,000 and
Besides this, many thousands of workpeople are thrown out of employment. The scenes in the houses in the low-lying neighbourhoods near the river are described as most pitiable, almost all the inhabitants having been flooded out and deprived of their furniture.
John's son Alfred, who was 21 at the time, wrote in his memoirs of being involved in distributing relief among the poor
The rooms in some of the houses in low-lying districts had been flooded up to the ceiling with a mixture of mud and water, including even a few corpses that had been washed out of a cemetery adjoining the river. Back-to-back houses were common. One cheerful and fine-looking Irishwoman I remember was scrubbing her husband's trousers. Her house consisted of one room far below the level of the street from which it was approached by a steep flight of stone steps. It had no window except into a tiny flagged entry, and there was a deposit of three or four inches of foul black mud on the floor. She seemed fairly cheerful under the circumstances and grateful for a very small sum to help in replacing some bits of bedding and furniture. Owing to the action of my father and other members of the Corporation obstructions on the old river have been removed and such flooding is no longer possible . [2]
John's passionate and outspoken determination on the subject of flooding and the poor can be seen again in 1874, two years after the great storm, when a report on drainage was before the council. He suggested the report be referred back to the committee, wrote the reporter from the Manchester Courier on 10 December 1874, so they could consider not only how to deal safely with storm water from the valleys of the Medlock and the Irk, but also "the complete interception of the drainage of the city":
He did not understand why those persons who, because they were high and dry themselves, and lived in the wealthier quarters of the town, had no sympathy with the poorer portion of the population who were obliged to live in the valley of the Medlock. If they had seen the results of the last calamity with which those poor people were visited, he believed the council would be more ready to proceed with this work. It was not simply the houses of the living that were invaded by the last flood, but the dwelling-places of the dead.
From water, he moved on the supply of gas. When the Parks Committee made problems about building a new gasworks on Bradford Road near to Philips Park, the reporter from the Manchester Evening News of 1 March 1871 reported that John said
The question remained – Were they to have gas? If they had not new gasworks, they would in a few years be in darkness. ("No, no.") This winter the supply was reduced to such an extent that, had the pressure not been reduced, the street lamps would have gone out in another hour. He argued that it was the interest of the Council to make gas; that there was need for a further supply of gas; and that the works need not be a nuisance.
Perhaps his visit to Paris in 1867, when he wrote home to Alice
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
played a part in his firm belief in the possibilities of local government. At one council meeting the Manchester Times of 5 October 1872 reported him saying that
He had wide ideas, however, as to the province of corporations, and held that they might do for the public anything which they could do better than the public themselves, and he quoted as examples parks, libraries, cemeteries, the provision of water and gas, and abattoirs.
He supported the Liberal party in Parliament and Manchester's Liberal MPs. Gerald Hurst, who evidently read some of the original letters, mentions in his Preface several political events that featured in letters which were not included in the edited edition and are now lost: Disraeli speaking in the Free Trade Hall in 1844, John Bright in 1845 and hearing the exiled Hungarian revolutionary and statesman Lajos Kossuth speak at Bradford in 1850 [3]
His son Alfred's memoirs Penultima give us one vivid picture of John at election time. Alfred was six
years old when he saw his father campaigning for John Bright the Radical and Liberal MP, a great orator and promoter of Free Trade in 1857.
 |
| John Bright in 1870s |
I saw my father on the outside of a four-wheeled cab, with red handkerchiefs flying, driving voters to the poll for Bright and Gibson. I can never forget how he came home in the evening, sad and bitterly disappointed, because the great man whom we all admired so much had been rejected by our city. [4]
Bright lost his seat because, in the teeth of public opinion, he had waged an impassioned opposition to the Crimean War. (Gerald Hurst mentions the family celebrating the National Fast Day on 21 March 1855 called by Queen Victoria because of terrible losses in the Crimea; this is from another letter which has not survived).
In the Manchester Courier of 7 December 1882 we see another example of John's support of the Liberals. At a rather riotous meeting on 16 Jan 1882 when Jacob Bright MP and John Slagg MP addressed their constituents, John moved a resolution "expressing approval of the policy of justice, freedom, and peace pursued by her Majesty's Government, and confidence in the Liberal members for the city".
But Manchester had a substantial Irish population and this was the time of the Land War in Ireland over evictions and rents, and the Liberal government had passed a Coercion Act in 1881 suspending habeas corpus and trial by jury. An amendment was proposed to protest against coercion and to condemn John Slagg. Slagg rose to speak and was greeted by uproar – the meeting couldn't continue until "a considerable number" of the angry Irish had been ejected.
In 1885, John's son Alfred stood unsuccessfully as Liberal candidate for Manchester East and naturally John and the family were there to back him. John wrote on 25 November 1885
Tomorrow, Alfred and some of his family and myself with Mother and some of the girls are to have open carriages and pairs and drive about to the Committee Rooms and polling stations [p 89] [5]
But John did not like party politics intruding into local government, and he was forthright on the subject. When, in November 1873, four names were put forward for the committee on Free Libraries and Councillor Marshall objected that they were all Liberals and he thought "they ought not to make their committee one-sided", John, reported the Manchester Courier, said
if they were to take Mr Marshall's dictum, political considerations were to have a claim in appointing the committees. (Cries of "They have.") He trusted that in making the appointments no invidious considerations would be allowed.
And he was very quick and forceful in dealing with the opponents of the proposed gasworks who had actually gone to the lengths of making malicious and damaging allegations against him, the Manchester Evening News of 5 May 1875 reporting that
Alderman Hopkinson said there was not the slightest foundation for the statements made outside that he had purchased the Bradford site as a private speculation; and, secondly, that having purchased the site, he went to the Gas Committee and got them to take it off his hands. Throughout the negotiations he had acted as the agent of the Committee
And it was as a member of the Gas Committee that he settled miles of frontier with neighbouring authorities and had a hand in the laying out of the main lines of the Bradford Road works. The gasworks project, which would triple the gas supply, went ahead and John was asked to lay the foundation stone. He had given his professional services to the Corporation for nothing and, the Manchester Courier of 13 October 1877 reported, he was presented at the ceremony with a silver trowel and mallet.
Ordnance Survey map (Lancashire CIV.NE - surveyed 1905-7 and published 1909) Bradford Road Gasworks, Manchester National Library of Scotland
John put his professional expertise to use again in dealing with providing main sewage and purification works, road widening schemes and new traffic arteries, and campaigning for the Manchester Ship Canal.
It's no surprise to hear, given his own experience with fire, that he took a close interest in the reorganisation of the Fire Brigade and was chairman of the Fire Brigade Committee. In fact, he and a scientific friend contrived, but didn't develop, an early form of water sprinkler. His son Alfred described it in his memoirs
They arranged a sloping glass tube on a pivot, and a marble or disc was held in place at the upper end of the tube by some substance which melted at a low temperature. If a fire occurred, this substance melted, the marble descended and a lever was released which could either ring a bell or turn on a jet of water. [p 108 P] [6]
(Frederick Grinnell's automatic sprinkler was patented in 1881)
John was in the gathering in Albert Square in October 1891 when two new Merryweather steam fire engines were tested – very light machines in proportion to their power, ideal for Manchester's hilly districts. The public watched entranced as the engines raised steam from cold water to 100lb pressure in less than nine minutes, and threw enormous powerful jets of water 235 feet horizontally. John had been one of the men supervising their construction. The Manchester Courier considered them "handsome" with their shiny vermilion paint and 'Manchester Fire Brigade' in gold on the sides, and they delivered over 500 gallons of water per minute which was more than satisfactory.
Over the years John was on the Watch Committee, the Finance Committee, the Town Hall Committee and the Free Libraries Committee. He was at different times a city magistrate, the chairman of the Southern Hospital, was on the board of Owen's College, and was a Commissioner of Inland Revenue.
The highlight of his many years' work for the Manchester Corporation must have been his year as Mayor.
John had been returned unopposed at the council elections of 1864, 1867 and 1870, and in September 1872 when the alderman for All Saints' ward had died and left a vacancy, his fellow councillors had elected him alderman by 31 votes to his opponent's 24. He would be an Alderman of Manchester for the rest of his life. (The point of Aldermen, under the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, was to provide continuity and avoid losing experienced councillors, and the Act provided that they could be elected by the Council from among the councillors or from anyone qualified to be a councillor. A councillor's term of office was three years; an alderman's was six. But in Manchester an alderman was an alderman until death or resignation).
At the end of 1881 a new chapter of John's working life began. His partnership with Henry Wren seems often to have been an uneasy one and in 1881 the end was seriously under consideration. Alice wrote to John
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 [p 79] [7]
On 19 December 1881 John and Henry Wren parted company, the required legal notices appeared in the press, and John became a consulting engineer in partnership with his third son Charles.
And then in July 1882, out of the blue, a delegation came to him with the message that it was the Council's unanimous wish that he should let himself be elected mayor for the next year.
Very flatteringly, it was 75 year old Alderman Matthew Curtis who set himself to persuade John. Alderman Curtis, head of the cotton machinist firm Curtis, Sons & Co and deputy chairman of the Consolidated Bank, was a venerable link to Manchester's municipal past.
When John was a boy, the town was still run by the manorial court and the police commissioners. The commissioners had been set up in 1792 to run the night watch and fire engines and make, clean and light the streets – a job which they had not done with any great efficiency. Manchester, which had been given the right to elect an MP in the days of Oliver Cromwell only to have the right taken away when the monarchy was restored, by way of punishment for its strongly Parliamentarian history was not made a borough. It had been run as though it was a village through years of rapid growth and booming population. It finally became a municipal borough in 1838, and even then had found it a struggle to wrest control from the old authorities which wouldn’t even let the new council meet in the old town hall. Before long the borough council was referring to Manchester as a city, and this was made official on 2 April 1853.
Matthew Curtis had been elected in the first borough council elections in 1840 and had already been mayor twice. In his first mayoralty he had welcomed the Empress Eugénie of France to Manchester. In his second mayoralty, when the stupendous new Town Hall was being built, it was he who had placed on the summit of its tower the copper ball which represented Manchester's crest of a globe covered in bees. His arguments carried the force of knowledge and experience and he had known John for 40 years.
Notes
[1] The journal of the Institute of Civil Engineers, Vol CL https://www.icevirtuallibrary.com/doi/pdf/10.1680/imotp.1902.18314
[2] Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C., LL.D., Penultima (1930) pub. Martin Hopkinson Ltd, p. 304-5
[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. IX
[4] Penultima, p. 41
[5] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 89
[6] Penultima, p. 108
[7] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 79
No comments:
Post a Comment