On the day that John became Mayor, he told his fellow councillors and aldermen that he had been asked if he planned to attend the traditional Church of England service in Manchester Cathedral. His answer to this question was picked up by newspapers as far away as Aberdeen – this is from the Aberdeen Evening Express of 10 November 1882
A Nonconformist Mayor and Union amongst Christians
Mr Alderman John Hopkinson, who was yesterday elected Mayor of Manchester, is a prominent member of the Congregationalist body in the city. At the meeting of the Council yesterday, he said he had been asked by friends if he intended to go to the Cathedral on Sunday. In connection with this matter he could not forget a recent occurrence at Bristol, where for the first time the clergy of the Church of England sent a deputation to the Congregational Union to offer to the members of that Union, his co-religionists, a fraternal greeting. As his own individual and humble response to the desire thus expressed for more union amongst Christians of all denominations, he did intend to go to the Cathedral on Sunday. The announcement was received with applause.
John's faith and his membership of the Rusholme Road Chapel were, and always had been, central to his life. He was known as a Congregationalist, and this determined how he saw the world and how he was seen by other people. His faith guided his decisions and his behaviour, and his membership meant that a significant proportion of his time and money was devoted to the chapel. In fact, both he and Alice would have liked him to spend more time on the church than in the Council chamber. Alice wrote to him on 2 October 1876
I think the town gets too much out of you. I would rather the town had less and the church more
And he replied two days later
I should like, with you, to give the town less and the church more. Yet somehow I feel as if I could do the one work better than the other. And both are necessary to be done by someone. And at present I feel I have some power for good in reference to things. [1]
As a Congregationalist he was far from unusual in Manchester, where Nonconformity was dominant. When in 1844 a member of the Manchester Athenaeum translated two articles [2] from the Revue des Deux Mondes by Léon Faucher, economist, journalist and French politician, he annotated Faucher's comment
Manchester contains more Methodists, Quakers, and Independents, than adherents to the Established Church
with the footnote that out of 137 churches and chapels, the Church of England had only 39.
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Gateway to Lancaster Castle
1890-1900 |
This was a time when all matters of religion were thoroughly discussed in the press. Doctrine, practice and theology within denominations were important matters, as was religious affiliation.
The Manchester press in the year of John's mayoralty carried detailed reports of the long-running case of the Anglican vicar of Miles Platting, who spent 12 months imprisoned in Lancaster Castle rather than remove the candles from the altar, stop kneeling during the prayer of consecration, stop using the sign of the cross towards the congregation, and give up all the other actions which his parishioners considered "false doctrine and deadly error". (Lancaster Castle was used as a gaol for centuries).
It wasn't unheard of for priests and ministers to move from Established Church to Nonconformist chapel and vice versa, and high profile conversions to Catholicism attracted attention. There were chapels, churches and meeting houses whose message of meaning and comfort particularly attracted the working classes; there had once been Mormons
(see this story from North Yorkshire), though most of them had left for Utah by the time John became Mayor.
The references to God in the speeches of John and his fellow councillors in the Council chamber might give us the impression that Manchester was a uniformly Godly city. But they knew only too well that this wasn't so. On Sunday 30 March 1851 an Ecclesiastical Census had been taken which had been an unexpected disappointment to churches and chapels across England and Wales. It was a bad blow to the Church of England to realise just how popular Nonconformity had become, but it was a blow to them all to realise that, in the words of the census report, "a sadly formidable proportion of the English people are habitual neglecters of religion". Taking into account age, infirmity, work and so on, it had been estimated that 58% of the population were free to attend worship, but it turned out that nearly half of this 58% didn't.
Friedrich Engels wrote in 1845 in The Condition of the Working Class that
The working man does not understand religious questions, and does not trouble himself about it. . . . All the writers of the bourgeois are unanimous on this point, that the workers are not religious and do not attend church.
Léon Faucher in 1844 described the middle class families on Mosley Street "walking along in silence, and with a reserved and formal attitude, towards the churches and chapels" while the workers loitered about waiting for the pubs to open. He thought this was because the "bigoted Puritanism" offered to the working classes left them "sunk in an immoveable stupidity" and turning to drink, as the "sombre and gloomy aspect" of the religion offered to them addressed "neither the senses, the imagination, nor the heart". (He evidently did not encounter Primitive Methodists, who were generally working class and used to walk in procession through the streets to their services singing hymns which were set to popular tunes).
Since the 1840s John had been among the many people who had devoted a great deal of their time to trying to remedy this godlessness. In addition to his devotion to his professional work and his commitment to his public duties, John had been a Sunday School teacher since he was a teenager and since the age of 28 he had been a deacon, an office he only resigned because of the move to Bowdon. He had been invited to be a superintendent of the Sunday School in 1864, but when he suffered a breakdown in health in 1869 and his brother-in-law Dr William Harrison advised him to cut back on his work, he had to resign. But I can see he returned to it because he is named in the Manchester Evening News of 10 June 1878 as one of the superintendents in the Whit Monday procession of that year. The Whit Walk was the great Lancashire Sunday School carnival and thousands of excited children took part, with bands and banners and ribbons and white dresses – in 1878, it was under heavy rain. Even today some towns still hold their Whit Walks.
His son Alfred described his father's working week:
It was the regular habit to go early in the morning to business and stay till late with a break for mid-day dinner, and the partners themselves did much work of a kind which would have been as well done as a matter of routine by others. I remember one of the heads of a firm which has become one of the most financially successful within living memory saying in his old age: "I believe I have spent half my life doing routine work which would have been better done by a clerk at thirty shillings a week"
On Sunday morning, however, in spite of his hard work all the week, my father regularly started early to go to the Sunday School and conduct a large class of grown-up men. The school opened at nine, and was something totally different from most of the ordinary Church Schools as known in the South of England. People grew up attached to the school, and there were cases in which the grandparents attending the senior classes brought their grandchildren to the infant class [3]
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. 64
[2] Published as Manchester in 1844: Its Present Condition and Future Prospects (London: Simpkin Marshall and Co., 1844)
[3] Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C., LL.D., Penultima (1930) pub. Martin Hopkinson Ltd, p. 112-3
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