79. "Beautiful in character": John's sister Mrs Ellen Tubbs

Mrs Ellen Tubbs, the wife of the Revd George Ibberson Tubbs, was John's eldest sister.  She was the girl who had the presence of mind to stop him when he was in a great temper as a little boy and was shouting, "I will kill you.  I will kill you".  Ellen took up the carving knife and said "Do it, John."  She had never had any trouble with him after that.  

George Ibberson Tubbs
by Joseph William Cobb
CC BY-NC Reading Museum

Her niece Mary Hopkinson remembered her as being "beautiful in character, most gracious and refined in manner and very sweet in appearance" [1] and her sister-in-law Alice revered her.  On 21 January 1887 Alice wrote to her daughter Gertrude, who was staying with Aunt Ellen

I feel so glad you should have the privilege of intercourse with the dear Aunt … but you must not put your Mother in the same class.  Dear Aunt has advanced to higher forms in Christ's school whereas your Mother is still in the ABC class, so slow to learn [2]

In Alice's hour of need in September 1875, when Ellen and Mary were struck down with scarlet fever, and Ellen died, it had been Ellen Tubbs who stepped in and took the younger children to Southport and away from infection.  Ellen knew all too well about loss and death, her "higher forms in Christ's school" were reached through pain.  By the time she took the children to Southport she had lost five of her children: a little girl aged 6, two babies, and her eldest son and daughter as they began their adult lives.  

We don't know how well the Hopkinson children knew the Tubbs children.  The little girl that Ellen lost and the two babies were her third, fourth and fifth children and, had they lived, would have been much the same age as Alice's eldest six children.  Ellen's eldest Charles Malan Tubbs was born in 1841 and was eight years older than young John Hopkinson, and his sister Mary Ellen Elizabeth was born in 1843.

In 1861, 20 year old Charles went out to India as an ensign in the 33rd Foot, the Duke of Wellington's Regiment, a commission bought for him by his father.  Three years later Mary married Lieut Henry Reeves, a young assistant political agent on the Bombay Staff, and went with him to India where he had himself been born.  In early July 1865 the post from India brought her parents the news that she had given birth in Ahmedabad to a baby boy on 5 June.  

Then came grievous news.  On 12 August 1865 the Berkshire Chronicle tells the story

The last Indian mail brought the sorrowful intelligence of the sudden death by cholera, of Lieutenant Charles Malan Tubbs, of Her Majesty's Bombay Staff Corps, eldest son of the Rev G I Tubbs, of this town, in the 24th year of his age.  Separated so widely from his family, it has afforded them much comfort to know that he was most affectionately cared for and tended by his brother officers, and that everything was done for him that kindness could dictate.  He died very peacefully, beloved and esteemed by all who knew him.  Most of the European residents followed him to his grave in the Surat Cemetery, a lovely spot, shaded by tamarand trees, where he rests in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.

Young Charles had died on 4 July 1865, a few days short of his 24th birthday,  and been buried the next day.  And then, a week later, George and Ellen Tubbs heard that Mary Ellen had died of cholera at Ahmedabad on 11 July.  Her husband Harry Reeves had not let his young wife lie on her own in foreign ground so far from home.  He had her coffin taken at once to Surat – the new railway linked the two places – and she was buried beside her brother.  She was only 22 years old.  Her baby was baptised Henry Oliphant Reeves in Ahmedabad a week after his mother's death, but he died of severe diarrhoea before he was two months old and was buried at Surat.

The following May, a tablet to the memory of Charles and Mary was erected in the chancel of St Mary's Episcopal Chapel in Reading – "Lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided".  It was the gift of members of the congregation to their minister and his wife "as a testimony of sincere regard for the deceased, and an expression of deep sympathy with their parents".  

Eleven years later Ellen would hear of the death of her niece Edith Annie Tubbs out in India.  

Ellen Tubbs' daughter Alice Louisa was three years older than young John Hopkinson.  She was married by the time Ellen took the children to Southport when the Hopkinson were stricken with scarlet fever, and she might even have been out in Australia, where her second child was born.  Her husband William Gardiner was an Australia merchant, a director of the Australian Mutual Shipping Company.  From the description of Alice Louisa in the report of her marriage in the Berkshire Chronicle of 25 June 1870, she took after her mother.  It described her as a Sunday School teacher and visitor among the poor whose "kind disposition endeared her to many".  Back in England, she and William and their children lived from the 1880s in considerable style and comfort in a country house with extensive grounds outside Redhill in Surrey.  

Ellen and George Tubbs' youngest, born between Lily and Gertrude Hopkinson, was Harry Theodore Ibberson Tubbs.  He too went out to Australia.  He lived at Hillgrove Station in New South Wales, married, had a daughter and was appointed magistrate before coming back to England, where he worked as a builder's merchant and an insurance manager.  He died in 1912 aged about 50.

A couple of years older than Harry was Cyril Bazett Tubbs, Ellen’s fifth child.  He was an architect by profession, with a private practice.  But this wasn't his only occupation – while his cousin and contemporary Edward Hopkinson was designing the electrical equipment for the first London tube line, Cyril was for nearly 40 years the general manager, surveyor, architect and director of the London Necropolis Company.  This curious institution, a railway line for coffins and mourners, deserves a proper explanation.

London Necropolis Terminus
at 121 Westminster Bridge Road

The problem of the appallingly overcrowded and insanitary graveyards in London – depicted so horrifyingly at the time by Charles Dickens in Bleak House – had been answered in 1852 when the company created the largest burial ground in Britain, the Brookwood Cemetery near Woking.  A mass removal of centuries of burials in the City was carried out and new interments began to take place out in the countryside.  

Now burials could be both dignified and sanitary.  The Necropolis Company’s own private railway carried coffins and mourners – separately, the dead and the living were kept apart – on the hour-long journey by First, Second and Third Class tickets to the cemetery.  

This was described as a "vast and silent 'City of the Dead'" by the Surrey Advertiser of 14 April 1902 in its lengthy description of the opening of the company's new offices, mortuary chambers and railway station at 121 Westminster Bridge Road.  They had been designed by Cyril and had every modern convenience, being lit by electricity and with the various departments connected by their own telephone system.  

Mourners entering through Cyril's handsome gateway would find themselves in a lofty glass-roofed, white-tiled hall.  At the far end they would see the wrought-iron staircase that led to the railway station, where an oak-panelled private chapel awaited them, together with several waiting rooms.  These were "quietly but artistically fitted up" said the Surrey Advertiser – obviously First Class was the most dignified and artistic – and from there the mourners could be led to their own carriages.  There was no undignified scuffling and no risk of mourning parties becoming entangled.  Once at Brookwood, the mourners would alight either at the North Station (if it was a Nonconformist burial) or the South Station (if Anglican).  A licensed bar was waiting for them at both stations.  

It was, said the Surrey Advertiser, "certainly one of the most beautiful" cemeteries in the world and this was Cyril's work.  He had re-ordered the cemetery's layout.  The network of avenues was expanded, named and signposted.  A nursery was established for the sale of plants and wreaths.   There were areas set aside for Parsees and Muslims, there were chapels and plots for Catholics, Nonconformists, Anglicans.  Bodies such as the Oddfellows, the Chelsea Pensioners, the Swedish Church in England, all had their own plots.  An "Actors' Acre" provided for the people of the stage.  Brookwood catered for all London.  

(Nowadays, the cemetery is a Grade I listed Historic Park and Garden.  The ruins of the railway platforms can still be seen, and a short section of the old track.  Cyril's entrance gateway to the terminus at 121 Westminster Bridge Road still stands, but the railway station was destroyed in the Blitz.)

Cyril had a very successful career [3].  In 1901 when he was 42, the census shows that he and his wife and baby were living in Buckinghamshire and the household included a cook, housemaid, nurse, butler, footman, coachman and groom.  When Cyril died in 1927 he was of course buried at Brookwood – his cousin Alfred Hopkinson was listed as one of the chief mourners.

When Gertrude Hopkinson was staying with her aunt and uncle in 1887 to have severe treatment on her throat, George and Ellen were living about fifteen minutes' walk from George's chapel at 'Mansfield' in Coley Avenue, Reading, a road of large detached houses.  George became a well known figure, so identified with the chapel that it was still called Tubbs's for years after his death, and described by his obituarist in the Berkshire Chronicle of 6 May 1893 as "a very able and eloquent preacher, a thorough Churchman of the Evangelical school".  

After 37 years there, he retired and they moved to a recently-built villa on Sea Road in the new spa resort of Boscombe on the South Coast.  George died there in 1893 aged 80 but he was buried 75 miles away at Brookwood – I expect Cyril had bought a family plot.  When Ellen died in 1900 aged 82 at her daughter Alice Louisa Gardiner's home in Surrey, she too was buried at Brookwood.  She had outlived five of her children.  She and her brother John were the last of the Hopkinson siblings.

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. xvii

[2] ibid., p. 77

[3] See
https://architecture.arthistoryresearch.net/architects/tubbs-cyril-bazett  
https://architizer.com/blog/practice/details/designs-for-the-dead/