73. "Aunt Milne was ever so good to us": the Milne family

The Dewhurst and Hopkinson relatives must never have been far from Alice's mind, especially as her life centred so much on family and home life.  The sisters and sisters-in-law seem to have been in constant touch by letter, they took holidays together and shared family news.  With such a large family on both sides, John and Alice's world was full of people.

In their turn the cousins kept in touch with each other.  In their generation and the ones that followed, the family spread into the wider Empire – into Australia, India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and, with the army in the Boer War, to South Africa.  Over time, they left behind their roots in the peculiarly Puritan Nonconformist world of the mill owners and engineers of Lancashire and the West Riding and merged with the rest of the late Victorian middle classes and haute bourgeoisie.  

The lives of the women of the family who were engaged actively in charitable work, particularly in Alice's children's generation, often included a great deal of "visiting".  This was a form of social work done on a voluntary basis, and I think that Katharine Chorley's account of her mother "going visiting" is the best description I can give:

This did not mean paying and returning social calls.  It meant looking up the housewives of Ancoats from an accredited list, in her case provided by Aunt Mary [Hopkinson], listening to the tale of their difficulties, giving sympathy and advice and arranging for material help.  It mean getting to know how they really lived and how they could really be helped within the compass of their circumstances (nobody thought of altering the compass).  It meant bridging the gulf between Alderley Edge and Ancoats with that bridging stuff which is the hardest of all to handle, the thin silken strands of human sympathy.  If it were done sensibly and sensitively, and mother did it that way, then I think Ancoats accepted it with gladness but if it were done in a prying and patronizing spirit, and sometimes it was, then it became the most revolting insult. [1]

The Hopkinsons often visited Alice's elder sister Ellen Milne and her family at 'Belmont' near Cheadle for a welcome break in the Cheshire countryside and to enjoy themselves with their six cousins.  Ellen, who was described by her niece Mary Hopkinson as a "very bright, energetic and sociable girl" and "ever so good" to her nieces and nephews, was left a 45 year old widow in November 1866.  Her husband James Milne, a partner in the well-known department store Kendal, Milne & Co, had been 61 years old.  

O.S map surveyed 1872, pub. 1882 
National Library of Scotland

Ellen was 74 years old when she died on 23 February 1895.  Alice outlived her by fifteen years.  

But Milnes stayed on at 'Belmont'.  

Finally, after the First World War, the family sold it to the Manchester and Salford Boys and Girls Refuges which was looking for good country air for the children in their care, feeling that Strangeways was not good for their health.  The charity built four homes on the Belmont estate and the Milne family were generous donors to their cause.

Ellen and James' eldest son John was the intrepid youth who had gone on the 30 mile hike with young John and Alfred in 1864.  He and his brothers James and Sydney went in due course into Kendal, Milne & Co.  

Sydney stayed only a short time.  By 1884 he was living in Iowa and he died on Christmas Day 1884 in Hot Springs, Arkansas aged 36.  Perhaps he was there for the thermal baths.  

John Milne became a serious and influential man in Manchester civic affairs.  His uncle John Hopkinson thought so highly of his judgement that John Milne was the only family member he consulted while he considered whether to accept the offer to be Mayor.  When John Milne died aged 63 in 1910 – dying a month before his aunt Alice Hopkinson – his cousins Alfred, Charles, Edward and Albert were all at his funeral.  

Malcolm Midwood Milne
(1887-1954)

He and his wife Lucy Midwood had seven children, but it is his son Malcolm Midwood Milne and daughter Hilda Milne who catch the eye.  

Not only did they both become artists – Malcolm, who studied with Walter Sickert, was more well known than Hilda (the Tate, the British Museum and the V & A hold examples of his work) – but the photographs of their pleasant, attractive faces show such a clear likeness to their aunt Alice Hopkinson. 

These photographs are courtesy of the Henfield Museum in West Sussex  [2], which holds several paintings by Malcolm.

 

Hilda Lucy Milne
(1874-1959)

In the mid 1920s John Milne's daughter Frieda Dyson-Perrins visited the homes at Belmont.  (She was married to Charles William Dyson-Perrins of the Lea & Perrins' Worcestershire sauce family – he had one of the most important book collections in the world). 

Struck by the fact that there was no sanatorium for ill children, Frieda promised that the Milne family would build them one.  It was opened in 1927 and dedicated in memory of her father John Milne who, in the words of the commemorative tablet, "lived and died there".  

The Alderley & Wilmslow Advertiser of 3 June 1927 reported its official opening.  It should have been done by Frieda, but her mother Lucy was ill and she could not be there, so she asked her father's cousin Alfred Hopkinson to take her place.  He was now a very suitable dignitary for the task, being Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C, M.P. 

Alfred told Frieda, he said in his speech, that 

he should certainly put it before anything else if it was her wish and of her family.  He looked upon himself as a connecting link between the past and the present.  His memories went back to its earliest time, some 70 years ago, soon after his uncle bought it.  Some of the happiest days of his life had been spent in those gardens.  That building stood on the site of the old fruit room, on which in earlier days and days of good digestion they used to make raids, and sometimes they had painful recollections of the after effects of those raids.  (Laughter).  ... He remembered his uncle laying out the place for planting many of those beautiful trees with his own hands

The Manchester and Salford Boys and Girls Refuges eventually evolved into the Together Trust.  The old house was most recently used as a care home, but it has been empty some time.  It was given Grade II Listing after a fire destroyed the roof and planning permission was granted a few years ago to turn it into flats, but it may still be simply deteriorating and decaying.

Notes

[1] Katharine Chorley, Manchester Made Them, pub Faber & Faber Ltd (1950), p. 158

[2] see this blogpost by curator Alan Barwick
Hilda and Malcolm Midwood Milne: Henfield's Sibling Artists