I have already mentioned the times that the Hopkinson children spent with Tom and Maria Dewhurst's children at 'Whinfield' and the links between the Hopkinson boys and Bonny and Frances Dewhurst's sons.
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| John Bonny Dewhurst from the collection of Mrs Valentine Rowley |
Alice and her sister-in-law Frances led very different lives. Frances was a sociable committee woman, president of the Skipton Nursing Association and governor of the Girls' Endowed School. She died in 1897 at the age of 74 after some time of ill health (principally "due to old age" said the Craven Herald on 26 February 1897).
Bonny outlived her, dying in 1904 aged 84. While his younger brother Tom had mostly focused on the business, Bonny had been very active in public life. He was on the town council, the Board of Health, governor of the Grammar School, member of the West Riding County Council, magistrate, and chairman of the Skipton Liberal Association. Both brothers, like the Milnes, stayed with the Congregational Church and were trustees and generous supporters of the chapel in Skipton.
Several of Bonny and Tom's sons went into the family mill, and with their careers we can see how trade and industry changed at the end of the 19th century with the growth of cartels and monopolies. [1]
As the economies of the United States and Germany expanded, British industrialists worked to reverse the fall in their profits caused by the new competition. The response was to be Anti-Trust legislation in the USA and competition law in Europe. The Dewhursts banded together with thirteen other companies to form the English Sewing Cotton Co, with Algernon Dewhurst as the first chairman, his brother Lionel and uncle Tom among the fourteen directors and Bonny a trustee for the debenture holders. But the new company did not start well and it became clear it was over-capitalised. No impropriety was alleged, but Algernon resigned shortly before a very stormy AGM. Lionel carried on as a non-executive director but the family's involvement in the business really ended in 1902-3.
Lionel's daughter Miss Mary Frances Dewhurst is probably the most eye-catching of Bonny's grandchildren. She was born in 1885 and one feels that, over in Manchester, Miss Mary Hopkinson will have been rather startled by her occupation. Here is the Yorkshire Post of 8 January 1932
Miss M F Dewhurst, of Gargrave, is hunting her good jumper, Joe II for a few weeks before sending him back into training. There are few straighter women to hounds with the Craven and Pendle Forest Harriers, or indeed, any other northern packs. It was with the first-named pack and the Ribblesdale Buckhounds she began her hunting career. Born at Skipton, Miss Dewhurst lived for 16 years at Marton House, but ten years ago went to Gargrave, and during the war she served in the V.A.D. in France and Italy.
Although Joe II is the first racehorse she has had, Miss Dewhurst had a mare named Baylinda which was considered the best jumper ever seen in Craven. Joe won his first race in 1928, and in 1929 the Pendle Hunt Cup and the Adjacent Hunts Race in the same afternoon. Since then he has won steeple chases in Miss Dewhurst's colours – blue, red, white and black striped sleeves, red and white striped cap.
Bonny's daughter Hilda Dewhurst and her barrister husband Arthur Stanley Wills lived at number 27 in the Royal Crescent in Bath. Any member of the Wills family caught the attention of the press because of their wealth. When Arthur died, the Weekly Dispatch of London on 14 April 1935 reported that twelve members of the Wills tobacco family had died in the last 16 years leaving more than £41,000,000. Hilda and Arthur's son Wilfred Dewhurst Wills was in Parliament – he was Conservative MP for Batley and Morley – at the same time as Alfred's son-in-law Gerald Hurst and son Austin Hopkinson.
Alice's brother Tom outlived her by six years, dying during the First World War. The description of him by his obituarist in the Craven Herald of 23 June 1916 is endearing. He died "at the ripe old age of 86 years" having been in failing health for some time.
He was a typical type of the "old time English gentleman," alive to the responsibilities of his position, broad and tolerant in his views, able to appreciate and sympathise with the opinions of those who might differ from him on vital questions of Government or social legislation, courteous to all, and a generous supporter of all good works.
He wasn't involved in public life like his brother Bonny but he was for a time president of the Skipton Choral Society and, while never being a member of the Skipton Congregational Church, he was connected with it all his life and was one of its most generous supporters. The church building that we can see now on Newmarket Street – unfortunately it isn't used as a church building any more and when I last visited it was up for sale – was built largely by Tom. It was due, said the Craven Herald,
in no small measure to his unostentatious benefactions that the scheme for the erection of the handsome new church in Newmarket Street was carried to a successful issue in spite of unprecedented difficulties.
His wife Maria Stevenson had died aged 71 in 1907, "a most estimable lady," said the Craven Herald, and "sincerely mourned in the town". She was another sociable and active committee woman, quite unlike her sister-in-law Alice. This had struck Alice years before when they were on holiday together in July 1864. Alice had written to John
I am alone today, have been darning stockings … I have been enjoying solitude … Maria says she "hates to be alone." I cannot understand the feeling; to me the quiet is so charming and the view from these windows is never failing society [2]
Somehow it doesn't seem surprising that Tom and Maria's jolly family at Whinfield should go on to lead lives in which sport, and not just the usual country sports of shooting and fishing, features prominently.
Their son Arthur, who went into the Dewhurst mill, died in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1921. He and his wife were visiting their son Godfrey, who was a tea planter there and married to the tennis champion of Ceylon, Evelyn Marshall. After losing to Wimbledon champion Mlle Suzanne Lenglen, Evelyn turned professional and had a short British tour with Suzanne Lenglen. She wrote successful tennis manuals, and they can still be bought second-hand.
Arthur's brother Edgar, who also went into the mill, was a rugby player, but his career for Yorkshire was cut short by a knee injury. He went out to the Boer War with a Territorial Battalion.
Their sister Ethel was married out in India in December 1886, the year the Hopkinsons were busy with the weddings of Charles and Edward to the sisters Mabel and Minnie Campbell in Northern Ireland. Ethel's wedding was at Fort William, the citadel of the Bengal Presidency at Calcutta, and her husband was Charles William Thomas, an indigo planter and keen polo player and big game hunter. When they came back to England, Charles was agent to the owner of Gargrave House near Skipton.
Tom and Maria's son Jack was at Trinity College, Cambridge when Albert Hopkinson was at Emmanuel. He was a rugby blue and an England international player, and he went on to practise as a doctor in the Cotswolds. (Visitors to the churchyard of St Faith's at Havant on the South Coast will find the Dewhurst Garden, named in honour of Jack's son Dr Michael Stuart Dewhurst and his wife).
Tom and Maria's daughter Lilian and her doctor husband Dr George Edward Fisher had two sons. Lieut. Henry Brian Fisher was killed at the Battle of the Somme, but George Annesley Fisher became a doctor and carried on his father's practice in Skipton. He rowed for Cambridge in the 1913 Boat Race. Even Tom and Maria's son William, quietly farming at Witton-le-Wear in County Durham, had a sports connection – his Scottish wife Mary Aitken was a successful golfer.
The family of Tom and Maria's daughter Alice gives us another example of the Dewhurst-Hopkinson link. Alice, who was the same age as Gertrude Hopkinson, married a Welsh solicitor called Goronwy Maelor Evans, a charismatic advocate for the miners of the Rhondda Valleys and a popular public speaker. He disappeared from Alice's life four years after their marriage and was found to have gone to the Rhondda, where he died a couple of months after the decree absolute for their divorce on the grounds of desertion. Alice's daughter Ethel married Edward Hopkinson's son Campbell, but the marriage ended in divorce.
Just as Alice stayed close to Lizzie's widower, she kept in touch with the widower of her beloved sister Jane. Benjamin Harrison was a stuff manufacturer in Bradford but he came of a Skipton family so she had probably known him a long time. He had been left to bring up one-year-old John Frederick when Jane and little Alfred died of dysentery in 1850. In the census taken in the spring of 1851 the little boy was staying with his Aunt Milne in Cheshire, so we can see the family had rallied round. Alice and Benjamin kept up, wrote Ellen Ewing, "a lively but, on his side, well nigh illegible correspondence" [3]. In 1861 he wrote to her
How changed our lives since we used to hold such long correspondences … You are surrounded by gems of life so precious that you don't care to look beyond your own domestic circle to give you the highest happiness which this mundane sphere affords. [4]
And the contact carried on. Benjamin died at the age of 52 in 1866 – the year when the Hopkinsons and Dewhursts between them suffered five deaths – leaving his boy a 17 year old orphan. We don't know who took him in, but in 1878 he was a partner in Messrs Campbell and Harrison, woolcombers of Shipley. In that year he married Helen, daughter of stuff merchant Alderman Law. They lived for a time at Rawdon Hall, which may be a familiar name – it is thought to have been the inspiration for Charlotte Bronte's Thornfield Hall.
John Frederick and Helen retired to Craven, and lived at Halton Place near Hellifield. They had one son, Alan Duncan. His mother died in 1890 when he was 12, and his father ten years later of a stroke at the age of 51. (Their joint grave in Kirkby Malhamdale churchyard is very distinctive, as a tiny beck runs out from under the memorial and flows down the middle of the plot). John Frederick had been a keen Volunteer, the Colonel of the 2nd West Yorkshire Artillery, but Alan became a professional soldier and served in the Boer War. When he married in Settle in 1903, the newspaper account shows the Hopkinson connection in the list of wedding presents – they included a present from Dr Albert Hopkinson and his wife Olga.
Alan did not have a long life. He died of appendicitis in January 1915 in Tasmania, aged 36. The Benjamin Harrisons were not a lucky or long-lived family.
Notes
[1] K C Jackson, The Dewhursts of Skipton: a dynasty of cotton masters, 1789 to 1897, Yorkshire
Archaeological Journal, 75, (2003), p. 193 et seq.
[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. 40
[3] ibid., p. 15
[4] ibid., p. 32
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