Early July 1883 brought to Manchester a man whose visit must have meant more to John and Alice and their daughters than any other event of the mayoral year. This was the 82 year old Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury – the "Poor Man's Earl".
Burdened by age, frequently intense physical pain, a lifetime of depression and steadily increasing deafness, Shaftesbury drove himself on to meet all invitations.
He had been asked to come to Manchester to speak to a mass meeting of children and, because of his enormous popularity among the working people, the engagements had multiplied. He had wished his reception to be "as private as possible", wrote the Manchester Times on 14 July. But this was defeated by his popularity.
John met him on the afternoon of Saturday 7 July at the London Road Station (now Manchester Piccadilly) and drove him northwards to Francis Street in Strangeways, where he laid the corner stone for a major extension to the Central Refuge of the Manchester & Salford Boys' and Girls' Refuges [1]. The building was being enlarged with a swimming bath, workshops and dormitories so that it could take 120 boys. This was the headquarters of the organisation set up in 1870 by two philanthropist businessmen and Sunday School teachers to provide homes for destitute and homeless children – in 1883 they had 13 homes and looked after over 300 children.
Flags, streamers and a dense crowd met the party in Francis Street, and Lord Shaftesbury spoke to the assembly of how, when he first visited Manchester fifty years before, "there was little or nothing of this description being done". But now he
found the inhabitants of this great city more active perhaps than those of any other part of the world in every operation which was for the honour of God and for the welfare of man.
That evening there was a great meeting in the Free Trade Hall so that representatives of some 75,000 Lancashire workpeople could present him with an address in gratitude for his work for them. It was an audience mostly of working men, and all but one of them were too young to have taken part in the early battles. He spoke to them, reported the Manchester Courier of 9 July, of the progress that had been made in the 50 years since he had first come to Manchester. He wouldn't dwell on the miseries of the past
None of them knew what it was. They might have heard of it in history, and by narrative, but it passed all description … He remembered the first thing he did when he came to Manchester to examine for himself, was to go to the gates of the mills and see the workpeople and children coming from their labour. The children came along slowly, with eyes cast to the ground, and looking as if they had just been disinterred
He had come back ten years later, when the Factory Act was in operation, and "out rushed the children in rivalry as to who could run the swiftest".
He spoke with pride of one prediction which had been fulfilled,
The Lancashire men of that day said to him: "We have been called seditious and disaffected to the Government of the country. We are not so. We only seek our rights, and if the Government will only do justice to the operative classes loyalty will be as strong in Lancashire as in the palace at Windsor." And so it had been. (Applause)
Lord Shaftesbury stayed that night in the State Apartments of the Town Hall, and in the morning he and John went to the service in the Cathedral – Shaftesbury was an eminent Anglican Evangelical – and he was shown round the restoration work.
That night he went with John to the poorest quarters of the city to see more evidence of Manchester's improvement, a subject so dear to John's heart. As the Manchester Evening News of 9 July 1883 reported, John explained at the City Mission on the following afternoon that
For three Sunday nights he had been – and last night he took Lord Shaftesbury with him – on a journey of exploration. His object was, on those three successive visitations to the humblest parts of Manchester, to see if he could find a drunken man, and he had not yet succeeded. (Cheers)
On the afternoon of Monday 9 July, John and Alice went with Lord Shaftesbury to Newton Heath, north-east of the city centre. The Anglican City Mission had arranged for Lord Shaftesbury to speak to the workmen of the Newton Heath carriage works of the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway Company. They held a weekly mission service there on Wednesdays with an average attendance of 700 but, while the works brass band played to fill the time before Lord Shaftesbury's arrival, it could be seen that there was a much larger crowd than usual and almost of them were workmen.
John presided at the meeting, and after the service Lord Shaftesbury spoke to the workmen. He told them that he did not hesitate to say that he had among the working men of England "some of the best, truest, and most beloved friends he had ever had in the whole course of his existence. (Cheers)." He praised the railwaymen "on whose sobriety, skill and good conduct the limbs and lives of thousands and hundreds of thousands of the people depended" and he hoped they would keep campaigning for "their perfect rights, times of recreation, the rights of mind and body. He looked upon them as a most invaluable body of men."
That evening, the Town Hall was filled with children. Some 2,000 children from the ragged schools and the Barnes Home Industrial School filled the gallery of the Great Hall. The bands from the Ardwick Green and Barnes Home Schools played. There were 1,500 members of the Children's Humane Society in the body of the hall and the general public sat under the galleries and wherever there was space. An organ recital filled the time before the meeting began. There was a choir of 500 on the platform, ready to sing hymns. John, Alice and Mary were all there to see Lord Shaftesbury presented with an address by "Four Little Children". It was a demonstration of children's gratitude for all that he had done and the huge assembly was there to remember his work for the young chimney sweeps and factory hands and in the cause of the ragged schools. As Lord Shaftesbury reminded them in his address, these ragged schools were needed to teach them "domestic habits and affections" so that children could reach the stage where they could benefit from the board schools, the schools provided by the state.
There was another section of Manchester society that wanted to express gratitude to the Earl. William Aronsberg, optician and instrument maker, born in the Russian Empire and Manchester's first Jewish magistrate, had written to Lord Shaftesbury after the visit. In his letter, printed in the Manchester Courier of 11 July, he wrote of his gratitude for Shaftesbury's "great influence and indomitable perseverance along with the late Archbishop of Canterbury" in relief of suffering Jews in Russia: "it was mainly by your lordship's instrumentality that I was enabled to send such opportune relief to my persecuted brethren". They owed to Lord Shaftesbury the Saturday half-holiday for Jewish factory operatives.
Workers in factories, members of co-operative bodies, children whose lot has been rendered more endurable by your foresight and kindness, all assemble to testify what they owe to you.
The newspapers do not record when Lord Shaftesbury left Manchester for London but before he left we know, from Gerald Hurst's Preface to Ellen Ewing's book, that he presented two of John and Alice's daughters with Bibles [2]. His experience of deafness must have struck such a chord of familiarity in Alice, and perhaps she could discern his tendency to serious depression. Age and infirmity did not prevent him driving himself on, and on the afternoon of Wednesday 11 July he was to be found hard at work again, presiding over the second annual meeting of the International Arbitration and Peace Society in the Westminster Palace Hotel in London.
Shaftesbury died two years later, on 1 October 1885. The nation insisted on his burial in Westminster Abbey and for hours the pavements on the route were filled with the poor, with costermongers, flower-girls, boot-blacks, crossing-sweepers and factory hands, waiting to see his coffin go by.
Notes
[1] For more on the Refuges see
[2] 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
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