78. Family ties: John's younger sister Mrs Alice Wills

John Hopkinson's younger sister Alice made the most socially advantageous match, marrying into the Wills tobacco dynasty of Bristol.  Indeed, her sister-in-law Alice Hopkinson had found the smartness and wealth of the Wills family rather too imposing when she stayed with them in 1865, and the neatness and the correctness of the children rather intimidating when they were on holiday together in 1863.  

Henry Overton Wills III (1828-1911)

I think Henry Overton Wills III probably met Alice through his business contacts with her brother John.  He and Alice were much the same age, but unfortunately we have no photographs or means of knowing how pretty she was, and no record of her character.  She is mentioned on several occasions in Ellen Ewing's account, taking in some of Alice and John's children while they go to Paris in 1855, going on a strenuous hike with John and young John and Alfred in the Lake District in June 1857, and joining the Hopkinsons at Penmaenmawr in July 1863. [1]

In 1871 Henry and Alice were living in a large semi-detached villa called 'Downside' in Clifton, in an area developed to attract Bristol's wealthy elite.  As time went by, and Henry grew even richer, they moved to even more comfort and privacy.  By 1881 they lived at Redland Knoll, a large comfortable villa standing in its own small park – which included an aviary, according to the OS map.  (I think the villa can be found on Blenheim Road, but the parkland is built over and the villa divided into separate dwellings)  Later Henry bought a small country estate outside Bath called Kelston Knoll outside Bath.

OS map 1883: Redland Knoll
National Library of Scotland

But in the late autumn of 1881 Alice fell ill.  She died at Redland Knoll at the age of 54 on 4 December 1881 from nephritis and angina.  Her 25 year old son Harry, who had been with her as she died, registered her death.  So Alice never had the happiness of seeing her brother John become Mayor of Manchester – but nor did she live to see the death of three of her sons.

Alice and Henry had seven boys:  George Alfred (later Sir George, Bart.); Henry Herbert ("Harry", whose wife Mary was the sister of Albert Hopkinson's wife Olga Cunliffe-Owen); Maitland; Henry Overton Wills IV; Walter Melville; Arthur Stanley (who married Hilda Dewhurst); and Frederick Duncan.  George was born in 1854 and was the same age as Charles Hopkinson, while Frederick was born in 1865 and was two years younger than Albert Hopkinson. 

I think the Wills and Hopkinson sons must have known each other pretty well, particularly as young men.  They evidently shared the same passion for mountaineering and three of the Wills sons, like three of the Hopkinson sons, were at Cambridge.  John Hopkinson had been at Trinity College several years before Maitland Wills arrived.  Walter Melville Wills went up to Emmanuel College in 1880, presumably just missing Edward Hopkinson, but was joined there by Albert Hopkinson two years later.  Albert and Arthur Stanley Wills were up at Cambridge at the same time but at different colleges – Arthur went to Trinity.

Their joint fondness for Norway must have meant that the Hopkinsons and Wills spent time together.  Even before Henry Overton Wills bought the Aak estate after Alice's death, he had been visiting Norway.  When John Hopkinson wrote in 1882 to the Revd James Griffin about the great question of accepting the Manchester mayoralty, he mentioned that 

Charles is my right hand here in business.  He and Mary go on Saturday to join their Uncle Wills in Norway [2]

And John and Alice had themselves spent a holiday touring Norway in June 1881 – this was the occasion when their son Charles scolded them so thoroughly for cutting short their trip.  I think Henry Wills had retired from business by this time.  The Bristol Times and Mirror of 5 September 1911 wrote after his death

He withdrew from active connection with the great business of W D and H O Wills more than 30 years ago for reasons of health.  For a considerable part of the time of his retirement Mr Wills spent the summer seasons in Norway, where he had a beautiful home.  He delighted to receive friends there, and indeed anywhere so long as he was able.... Mr Wills was one of Bristol's merchant princes, and one of the most worthy

Henry Overton Wills was in Norway in April 1885 when the news reached him that his third son Maitland had died at Aber Falls (Rhaeadr Fawr) in Eryri National Park (Snowdonia).  Maitland was 27 years old, articled to Bristol solicitors, and out on a short walking holiday with a younger brother and a barrister friend.  He had simply lost his balance as he came down by the waterfall, fell and rolled over the side of the precipice into a pool fifty feet below.  He died at once.  (The jury returned a verdict of "Accidental Death," and recommended that Lord Penrhyn should place boards on the path to warn people about dangerous places.)  

The Bristol Mercury of 8 April 1885 reported that Maitland had narrowly escaped death once before when he and one of his brothers had been climbing together.  The brother felt a piece of the rock beginning to give way beneath his footing 

he had just time to call out "Maitland, the rock is coming down," when a large mass became detached, falling precisely where that gentleman was.  Happily, a bush was growing near the spot, and by springing at and grasping it the young mountaineer contrived to escape being carried down to and crushed at the bottom

And the newspaper was quick to point out that people were talking about an earlier tragic accident in the Wills family.  In 1883 Henry's brother Samuel Day Wills had lost his 15 year old son Walter, who had been found dead on the beach at Newquay by a coastguardsman in August 1883.  The Express and Echo (Exeter) of 18 August 1883 reported that they could only think that he had fallen from the side of the cliff while attempting a climb.

In 1899 Henry and Alice's fourth son died.  Henry Overton Wills IV was an architect and a married man with children – his uncle the Revd George Ibberson Tubbs had conducted the ceremony in 1884 – when he died after a year of serious illness following blood poisoning.  He was 40 years old. 

Henry Overton Wills III was in his late seventies when his youngest son Frederick Duncan died at Chester, and his sister-in-law Alice Hopkinson had been a widow for four years.  What Alice made of the circumstances of Frederick's death, we can only imagine.  It was reported in the Exmouth Journal of 19 May 1906

In a great crowd of people struggling to reach the turnstiles and to enter the Roodee on the Chester Cup day was a well-dressed, gentlemanly man, about 40 years of age.  Immediately he got out of the crush he fell and expired.  Dr Lees, of Chester, was summoned, but life was extinct.  There was no one with deceased to identify him, and the only clue was the return half of a railway ticket from Llandudno to Chester.  A substantial sum of money was found in his pockets.  Later the body was identified at that of Mr Frederick Duncan Wills, of Brian Mellard, Ashley-road, Altincham, a member of the firm of W D and O Wills, tobacco manufacturers, Bristol.  Mr Wills had gone to the races from Llandudno, where he had been staying, and the struggle of getting on the course had obviously put too great a strain upon his heart

Henry Overton Wills III aged 82 in 1911, enormously wealthy and a philanthropist on a grand scale.  He had funded Bristol University and was its senior Pro-Chancellor.  Four of his seven sons survived him.  But the mountains had not finished with the family – in 1925 Walter Melville Wills' 28 year old son Harold, an antique dealer, died in 1925 in an avalanche when ski-ing in Switzerland.

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., pp. 25 & 27 & 38

[2] ibid., p. 80