30. 1848

1848 – the year of revolutions across Europe, Chartism at home and, out in California, the first Gold Rush – was full of courtship in Manchester and Skipton.

The Adamson family: National Portrait Gallery

We have no photographs of John and Alice when they were young – they would both have their 24th birthdays that year – but we can imagine that they and their friends looked rather like the Adamson family (left).  We will have to imagine the colours of the clothes by looking at websites such as this one.  As this was before the invention of aniline dyes, colours were not as intense and bright as they would be in the later 19th century. 

This calotype of 1844-5 from the studio of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson shows Robert Adamson (standing, left) and his brothers, two sisters and sister-in-law.  

Robert Adamson became a photographer when poor health cut short his apprenticeship as a millwright.  He was three years older than John Hopkinson.  His brother John Adamson (standing, right) was a doctor, physicist and lecturer.  His sisters (Melville with knitting and Isabella, standing behind her) were much the same age as Alice Dewhurst.

John Hopkinson's letter of proposal, filled with his devotion and longing to marry her, must have been very welcome and cheering to Alice Dewhurst.  Only three weeks earlier her schoolfriend Mary Harrison (described in 19. Alice Dewhurst goes to school in Halifax, 1836) had died at her aunt's home in Penrith.  

The doctors put her death down to typhus, which the newspapers were reporting as prevalent from Ulverston to Carlisle and for which the "morbid state of the atmosphere" was being blamed.  As there was still some confusion between typhus and typhoid fever and the causes for both were then still unknown – body lice in the case of typhus, contaminated water for typhoid – it was quite possibly typhoid.  The next year would see the second pandemic of Asiatic Cholera spreading across the country; it was another disease whose origin in water contaminated by faeces was still unknown at the time.

John's letter was written on 7 February.  He and Alice were formally engaged at Skipton on 11 February, John's birthday.  The next day he wrote in his book "February 12th.  Walked out with my Alice".

From this point on, they began to write to each other – rather formal and slightly stiff letters at first.  They told each other of going to chapel, of sermons heard.  Ellen Ewing in John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910 comments that they exchanged letters "the noticeable feature of which was enthusiasm, not for the recipient as might have been expected, but for the type of Christianity, then probably at its zenith".

But with visits and letters they grew to know each other better and to be increasingly comfortable in each other's company.  We only have the extracts quoted by Ellen Ewing but we can see a progression.

On 3 March Alice wrote 

On Wednesday I visited the poor woman who had lost her husband so suddenly; she appears to feel her loss deeply and yet she is resigned; … I always feel particularly pleased to find instances of this kind amongst the very poor; there are so many circumstances attendant upon their situation which appear to me calculated to blunt the finer feelings of our nature.  The middle walk of life seems the most favourable to the cultivation of the home affections

She signs herself

Accept my warmest love and believe me ever

Your affectionately attached

Alice

Knowing the influence on John of the Revd James Griffin and his deep sympathy for the poor, we can see that John's reply seems to be both encouraging and gently correcting Alice:

I am interested in the story of the poor woman whose sorrows you have been striving to heal.  I do think with you that there is much more true affection and tender feeling among the poorer ranks of life than we are apt sometimes to suppose – that generous, even refined feelings, are not infrequently hidden beneath a rough exterior.

They spent time together towards the end of April and explored the limestone uplands above Skipton.  "Do you remember last Good Friday, how gallantly I scampered with you over Malham Moors?" wrote Alice a year later.

Malham Moor by Trevor Littlewood

Ellen Ewing's quotation from Alice's letter of 12 May shows that her letters were growing livelier – and that she and her 20 year old sister Lizzie and brother Tom, then 18½, were still able to play boisterously like puppies

I have just been enduring a severe castigation from my younger brother and sister, and have returned from the wars with trembling hands and beautified with a variety of bruises.  I think, when you come, we must have a battle on even terms

(Perhaps readers will be able to remember, as I can, similar rather juvenile larks at that age?)

She was a physically active and intrepid girl:

If I had many walks with Tom as my leader I should become quite an accomplished climber.  He does not allow walls to be an impediment.  I had to scramble over several in our evening's ramble; he met with no serious objections to his mode of procedure

While Alice's letters became more playful, it seems from the extracts that John's were rather sober and plodding.  Sir Gerald Hurst, who wrote the Preface to John and Alice Hopkinson and who was married to their granddaughter Margaret, wrote

John Hopkinson had not a light touch and, I imagine, little sense of humour

By June, Alice was teasing John that he might prefer the quiet of a bachelor life to having

a saucy woman's tongue to interrupt your solemn musings, nothing to do when you come home but to make yourself comfortable

and John was assuring her earnestly

So quiet, so free, "no woman's tongue to interrupt my solemn musings" – pardon, 'tis that which constitutes my lack and makes a vacancy mind cannot fill.

And, very sweetly

I honestly told you my Alice that I liked you the better as I knew you better, and spoke the truth

He told her of his working day 

Armley Mills, now the Leeds Industrial Museum
by Mark Stevenson

After parting so reluctantly with you on Monday afternoon I was soon in Leeds whence, after making one call, I pursued my way to Armley Mill, where I found an accident had occurred on Saturday to the works requiring immediate attention.  I doffed my coat and hat and was soon at work, accepting by the way the offer of one of the workmen of some bread and butter and tea from a can (both capital) … I reached York Place at half past eleven – and was at the works at six …  This morning I left home at 5 o'clock …

He and Henry Wren were feeling pressure of work and criticism

Do what we will, Henry Wren and I are abused on all sides.  He is sorest now; I am getting case hardened and past feeling …

I do mean now to try to make my working hours shorter – and later must try, if it is possible by method, arrangement and punctuality to secure more despatch – that is, to do the same work in less time …Henry Wren has been asking more about my overhours work at Chapel etc, and suggesting, again very deferentially, that I should, for the present, exchange some of them for light outdoor exercise.  He proposed a riding horse for the firm and my scruples on this head are weaker than they were …

(Henry Wren, I am fairly sure, was an Anglican) 

By July Alice was making her views on women's abilities and rights to education very clear to John

In the meantime you can study Benjamin Parsons On the Mental and Moral Dignity of Woman.  He is a champion, though I am not quite sure that all his arguments are the soundest possible.  And we must also overlook a degree of coarseness; but his intention is so good that we will readily accord him every indulgence.  I mean we of the womankind ...

Alice was up-to-date with her reading – Benjamin Parsons' book (which can be read online) had only been published in 1842.  His subject was women's mental powers and education and he was forthright:

Most of us have seen boys and girls learning the same lessons and studying the same subject, but we never found that the girls were inferior to the boys … I never yet could detect any mental inferiority in girls, as scholars.  Indeed, my own observation would lead me to give them the preference over boys in their aptitude to learn … I am fully persuaded that experiment and observation can detect no inferiority whatever in the minds of females, during infancy, childhood, or youth.

But once the girls grew up – 

That young gentleman who aspires to her hand, although very polite and agreeable withal, is such an ill-informed personage, that an intelligent woman for a wife would quite bewilder him, and by contrast sadly expose his folly; and therefore he has come to the prudent conclusion that he will never marry a woman who knows more than himself; consequently, the lady is doomed to employ all her skill to contract her intellect to the dimensions of her lover's.  Books are abandoned or thrown away; French is forgotten, and perhaps English at the same time; and every effort is made to educe mental paralysis, until, perhaps, this seraph of a woman seems in part assimilated to the mere animal who is to be her companion until death

He thundered his conclusion:

To limit female education and acquirements, and doom husbands, son, and daughters to the sway of ignorance and caprice, is to inflict on society and on the nation one of the heaviest calamities.

Alice never attempted to hide her intellectual capabilities and literary tastes and John was proud of her.  Years later he quoted a remark of his sister Mary

Your wife's mind, John, is too good to be spent on secondary objects.

By August Alice was writing to John teasingly and her sister Lizzie was so much at home with him that she could tease him too

I feel concerned about your wounded leg, fearing that you will not take the necessary care.  It would be a serious affair if I had to make you.  But alas! that would be useless; you are such a master; I will not say My Master.  Oh no! "There's time enough for that, says I." I am still Alice the untamed, living in the land of liberty, town of Single Blessedness …

Lizzie sends her respectful compliments; she hopes you will take care of your leg as she certainly would not admire a cork legged bridegroom. 

On Saturday 4 September, a little more than a fortnight before the wedding, John had an unexpected setback.  It perhaps shows John Dewhurst's character, described by his granddaughter Mary as "quick-tempered, impulsive and outspoken" and casts further light on why his brother Isaac left their partnership.  When John Hopkinson proposed to Alice – as he explained to her in a stilted but heartfelt letter written on the Monday – it was with no thought of any private money she might have

I loved you for your own sake, and wished to marry you because I loved you – I do so still – I never have had any other reason

He hadn't even thought about the Dewhursts' financial position.  He had simply told Mr Dewhurst, in their first private interview, all about his own situation and prospects.  Mr Dewhurst had said something to the effect that "he could give his daughter something tidy".  John had assumed that this meant he was going to make some sort of marriage settlement.  But, he assured Alice, "money on your side found no item in my calculations".

On the Saturday, as he left Skipton, John thought he had better explain what he could do for Alice himself apart from what he earned in business – presumably he thought his future father-in-law was expecting him to tie up some capital sum in her name – and check out Mr Dewhurst's plans.  Slightly defensively and sounding rather hurt, he told Alice that he felt that this was  

A question with regard to the propriety of which I do not entertain the slightest doubt

Something seems to have gone rather wrong here.  John Dewhurst seems to have said that he had made the same provision for Alice as for her elder sisters, but John Hopkinson was left with no idea whether this meant on marriage or by his Will.  Now Alice had written to John, but as her letter didn't survive we don't know what had been happening in Skipton, what was said by Mr Dewhurst, or what had passed between Alice and John.  We have only his answer, quoted by Ellen Ewing.  It begins

My own dearest Alice 

The frankness of your note has relieved me from some perplexity, and I shall endeavour to answer it with equal candour. 

In our intercourse hitherto there has been no reserve on my part, and I do not intend that there should be any in the future.

Perhaps there was some question about whether they could afford to marry, whether John had been deterred by the question of money – he assured her that 

If we do not assume any wrong standard, I believe we may be comfortable.  I care little for the artificialities of life.  If I wish for wealth it is for your sake, that you may be a remove farther from want.  Do not oversestimate me in character, position or intelligence.  If you expect too much you may be disappointed.  Dearest Alice, I have long loved you for your own sake – the basis of my affection is unchanged.

He signed his letter

Your own true lover, 

John

Alice wrote back, Ellen Ewing noted, with "with religious reflections and contrition" saying

Weak, thoughtless and full of faults as I am, I would fain hope that the endeavour to promote your happiness, resulting from true affection, will not be altogether unavailing, I feel as if I had much to say: but my heart is too full to write

All was well between them.  Preparations for the wedding gathered pace.  On 16 September Alice sent John a very practical note

My dearest John 

Will you send by post six of the cards you said you would get for tieing round the cake; we wish to have the cake for Manchester packed.  If we wait till you come, there will be so many things to do, cards, directing, etc., that we should have rather too much bustle to do anything well.  

Ellen arrived in safety at half past six.  The various etceteras she brought are all approved.

We shall look for you by the half past four train on Tuesday. 

With kindest love to you Mother and sisters.  Believe me, in very great haste.  Your own affectionate 

Alice 

Skipton

Saturday afternoon,

1848

On Tuesday 19 September John arrived with his mother, sisters Alice and Mary in Skipton.  The next day he and Alice were married at the Zion Chapel by the Revd R Gibbs.  John Dewhurst rather characteristically put the announcement in a new weekly journal that he was evidently supporting.  It was called The Standard of Freedom and came out on Saturdays at a cost of fivepence.  It called for subjects dear to John Dewhurst's heart – Free Trade and religious liberty.

Meanwhile the newly married couple had left Skipton for York on their way for a fortnight's honeymoon in Scotland.  

The families wrote to them while they were away.  Alice's sister Jane sent a letter which, Ellen Ewing wrote, began with "the usual hopes" for their spiritual welfare and went on to say 

The party you left behind on your wedding day were as happy as possible to be under the circumstances.  Our dear father and mother kept up wonderfully and the two dear sisters, who were most certainly the greatest sufferers, bore up heroically … 

I feel very sorry to hear that dear John's leg is far from well; I do hope you will neither of you exert yourselves too much.  Remember now that you ought to lay up a stock of health for the Winter and not exhaust what little strength you have by trying too much …

I do not know when it became the custom – a sort of cult of sensibility – to dwell on the suffering of the families left behind by the young couple nor for how long this lasted.  John and Alice's daughter-in-law Esther wrote a very self-pitying letter to her daughter after Margaret's wedding in 1905.  In this case I think the "two dear sisters" were John's sisters.  Ellen Ewing comments on the "possessive quality of the sisters' affection for their only brother" shown in his sister Elizabeth Rooker's letter to him of 12 April 

Remember one visit to Skipton is equal to a dozen letters.  So, since you are able to pop over now and then, I cannot allow that it is needful for you to spend much time in writing also – this portion must be devoted to us I think … Do write very soon.  Remember you have three sisters here all longing to hear.

Alice's father wrote to them while they were in Scotland but no letters from Alice's mother from any period have survived.  There is no way of knowing whether she wrote too many to keep or whether she always left it to her husband and younger daughter Lizzie to write.  At some point, possibly before the elder girls' marriages, she began to suffer from very poor health and left the household management in her daughters' hands.  Alice spoke with admiration to her own daughter Mary of her mother's "uncomplaining patience and her great power of endurance" but we have no clue as to her illness.  

Ellen Ewing comments on John Dewhurst's lack of full stops (which was usual in his generation) and occasional spelling faults.  Here is his letter of 23 September 1848 in her transcription

Dear Alice, 

I am in receipt of your very welcome Letter dated Sunday 21 inst presuming you were well when you wrote as you say nothing to the contrary; you may probably get a sight of the Queen and prince Albert while you are in Scotland; they appear to be very much thought of in that part and they both appear inclined to make themselves very agreeable: your thanks for past favours are accepted and your pardon for all past faults but I do not recollect any (only the last) which cannot be repaired and that is leaving us: but John will say that is no fault, therefore I suppose we must take it for granted you must excuse all blunders as I have written in haste, may the Lord bless and protect you from all dangers and bring you both safe to your intended abode. 

I am Dear Alice, 

Your affecte Father, 

J W Dewhurst

His letters are in great contrast with the letters from the Hopkinson and Dewhurst daughters, who had all attended the sorts of schools which produced a uniformly decorous and formal way of writing.  The Hopkinson daughters were greatly given to pious reflections; possibly an awareness of their illegitimacy made virtue and piety even more imperative.  Ellen Tubbs wrote

You are the first sister we have acquired and it is delightful to have our circle enlarged and our affection strengthened by one who is one in heart with us and with whom we shall journey to the same everlasting rest.

She adds in a more chatty tone

You sent us a noble piece of cake, and very excellent it is.  For all the wedding symbols accept our thanks

Elizabeth Rooker "after elaborate expressions of regret" (Ellen Ewing's comment) that she could not help to prepare 1 York Place for Alice's arrival, wrote

We must not expect your lot to be perfectly exempt from trials; for, during our earthly pilgrimage, the cloud will sometimes obscure the brightest path; but, as far as human foresight can devine, there is every prospect of yours being a truly happy home, and most sincerely do I rejoice with Dearest John and yourself in the happiness which is at present your portion and which seems to be laid up in store with you.  To have such a pastor as our beloved Mr Griffin is no ordinary privilege.  May our Heavenly Father continue to smile on you …

John Dewhurst was much more down to earth about the Revd James Griffin.  Possibly he had listened to what he felt was excessive praise of Mr Griffin from his daughter Ellen and from the visiting Hopkinson women – he was clear-sighted about the dangers of creating a cult around a highly valued pastor

I hope he will continue long amongst you and that his labours will be blessed as they appear to have been, and that you may not make too much an Idol of him as sometimes there is very great danger in doing so with men of his worth.

On Thursday 5 October, showered with good advice and prayerful wishes by their families, John and Alice came home to 1 York Place.  They would begin their married life in Manchester in a household shared with John's mother and sister Alice.

28. John Hopkinson at chapel & at home: 1840-1848

Outside work, John’s time was absorbed, then and for many decades to come, by the Rusholme Road chapel and its activities.  Just as his elder sisters had done, he became a Sunday School teacher, starting at the age of 16 after he had left school.  In the letter he wrote to his mother on 28 May 1846 – she was away in Wiltshire visiting his married sister Ellen – he gave her the latest news from the Sunday School before turning to the subject of his prospects at Messrs Wren & Bennett.

Kinder Downfall, by Stephen Burton

He was writing on the Thursday just before the Whit Sunday weekend.  On Whit Tuesday, he told her, he planned to join a walking party to climb Kinder Scout, setting off early by train to Mottram or Tintwistle and walking the rest of the way "making a good day's work of it, and returning by train in the evening".  This can't have been an expedition he had made before because he had to explain to his mother that "Kinderscout" was "the highest mountain in Derbyshire, and within sight of Manchester".  In fact, Kinder Scout isn't so much a mountain as a plateau of high moorland; part of it, at 636 metres (2,087 ft) above sea level, is indeed the highest point in Derbyshire.  John knew the Pennines from his time at school, but perhaps this was the serious beginning of his lifelong passion for walking in the uplands and mountains of Britain and Europe.  

An adventure like this had been opened up for him and his friends by the railways.  Mottram station (now Broadbottom) was opened in 1842 on the Sheffield, Ashton-under-Lyne & Manchester line, and it lies 10 miles east of Manchester Piccadilly station.  It would depend on the route they took, but I think Mottram station to Kinder Scout would be a 10 mile walk.  A long energetic day.

Three days later, on the Friday, he would be back at Mottram station with the Sunday School children.  They were going "to the field as usual" on the Thursday and the next day were "to have an excursion to Mottram, where a field is engaged and a tent is to be fixed, the scholars to pay their own fares by the railway train and to take their dinners."

The letter shows that John at 22 years old was evidently a level-headed young man with a good deal of common sense and wry sense of humour, and he had done his best to scotch this plan only to find that, as a safe pair of hands, he was landed with the work:

I made quite a speech at the teachers' meeting in opposition to the proposal of taking the children out of town on account of the risk, responsibility, etc; but all my objections, in common with many others of the prudent teachers, were over-ruled.  And, being quite beaten, I had the amiability to say that, as they had thus decided to go out of town, I would go with them and do all I could to promote the safety and pleasure of those who went, which they have so far appreciated as to give me, with some others, the duty of seating the children in the carriages and seeing them safe there and back.

His letter gives us a glimpse of his mother's social life in the chapel – "very many of the friends enquire particularly and frequently about you" – and home life at York Place.  Only he and his younger sister Alice, aged 19, were in Manchester and Alice was running the house.  "Our maids go on pretty well" he says

Alice makes a very good mistress; but she is not afraid to speak when there is necessity for doing so.  Jane does far better than Anne, so much more ready to oblige, manifests more interest in her work and in us.  Alice is looking out for servants in place of Anne and Jane, as the former has given notice because there is so much work to do, the place is so hard, but was not a little surprised when Alice accepted it most cordially.

(He doesn’t mention the wage that Anne was clearly trying to negotiate.  I would think it possible that employers were in a strong position in Manchester, safe in the knowledge that there were always more young women newly arriving in town and looking for work)

Ellen, the eldest, had been the first.  Her husband was George Ibberson Tubbs, the Congregational minister of the Independent Common Close chapel at Warminster, a market town on the western edge of Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire.  When the census was taken on the night of 6 June 1841, Elizabeth, the second of the sisters, was staying with Ellen at her house in Boreham Road and Ellen will have been glad of her company and support as she was expecting the first of what would be a large family.  Her niece Mary Hopkinson wrote that Ellen had five boys and four girls in all and was "beautiful in character, most gracious and refined in manner and very sweet in appearance".  

By the end of the decade Ellen had four children and her husband George had left the Congregational church and become an Anglican clergyman.  

Perhaps doubts had crept into his mind and, from careful study, he had come to believe that he had been wrong all along and that the church should, as the Church of England held, be run by bishops.  We don’t know how the Hopkinson family reacted, but it had no effect on the relations between John’s family and Ellen’s.  His wife Alice and her sister-in-law were close and supportive of each other throughout their lives.  

His congregation in Warminster was certainly sorry to lose him.  The Patriot of 13 May 1847 reported that the members of the Common Close Chapel had held a meeting where they unanimously adopted a resolution expressing their "most unfeigned regret" at the resignation of their "beloved pastor".  They deeply deplored "the circumstances which have made it appear to him his imperative duty to sever those bonds which they had fondly hoped would have been long perpetuated" and decided to send a deputation to wait upon him "to request him to reconsider".  It was no use.  The Church of Ireland, traditionally of the Low Church tradition, was a natural home for him at least at the beginning of his ministry and he was ordained deacon for the diocese of Lismore in the Cathedral Church of Waterford on 19 Nov 1847.  In 1848 he was priested and until late 1849 he was curate at Innislormagh.  

The main result of Mr Tubbs' decision as far as John’s mother was concerned was that Ellen and the children were living on the other side of the Irish Sea and so she may not have been able to visit them.  However, in early 1848 when John was proposing to Alice Dewhurst, Ellen was in Manchester with her mother for the birth of her fourth baby, and as the decade ended Ellen and George had moved to London where he was curate at Trinity Church in the parish of St Mary Newington.  

Ellen’s marriage clearly led to the marriage of the third sister, Mary.  On 25 June 1844, Mary married Charles Foulger Tubbs at Rusholme Road Chapel.  He was her brother-in-law George's younger half-brother.  He was then a 28 year old dentist with a practice in Gosport, which lies across the harbour from Portsmouth, the birthplace of James and Eliza Griffin and Henry and Fanny Burnett.  Mary was five years his junior.  When she died in 1866 at the age of 43, her sister-in-law Alice, who had known her for nearly twenty years, wrote to John urging him to 

say something of our dear Mary in a Sunday School address.  Her earnest piety, great prayerfulness, unobtrusive but earnest endeavours to bring others to Jesus, her gentle meek spirit, altogether there was such a sweet savour of Christ about her that it seems as if the perfume of such life should be shed abroad …

John’s sister Elizabeth married on 19 September 1845 at the age of 26.  Her husband was 31 year old solicitor Alfred Rooker from Plymouth on the Devon coast.  Alfred was, of course, another Congregationalist.  His father William, a Congregational minister in Dorset, came up for the wedding and Elizabeth's two married sisters came from the South of England to be there.  "Twenty friends and relations were at the wedding breakfast" wrote John's daughter Mary.  Mary’s fondness for her aunts Ellen and Mary doesn't seem to have extended to her aunt Elizabeth.  She comments on Elizabeth’s rather sententious letters and her "customary little homilies" while praising Uncle Alfred Rooker as a "standby in the family" and a "valuable helper".

The census of 1841 had found John’s younger sister Alice still at school.  She was 13 years old and at a boarding school at The Elms in Lance Lane, Wavertree.  Wavertree was a genteel area, a place to which wealthy Liverpool merchants moved out of the city, with Georgian town houses in the High Street and new villas being built.  It was a very suitable school – its headmaster Thomas Sleigh was a Congregational minister.

By the time John reached his 21st birthday in 1845, three of his sisters were living far from Manchester – Ellen was in Warminster and Elizabeth was in Plymouth where she would soon be joined by Mary and her husband Charles.  Their mother Alice could now get a complete change of scene by visiting her married daughters.  When John wrote to her on 28 May 1846 from 1 York Place, only he and 19 year old Alice were in Manchester 

I am really glad, dearest Mother, to find that you are so much enjoying the pure air of Wiltshire and the society of our dear ones

It was after the move to York Place in 1845 that John first met his future wife, Alice Dewhurst.

Next: 29. Alice Dewhurst: Skipton 1840 to 1848

4: Death of John Lomax: 1827

By the beginning of 1827, Alice and her four children had moved north of Manchester to the fresh air and pleasant surroundings of semi-rural Cheetwood in the southern part of the township of Cheetham.  Was John Lomax living with them now?  We don't know.  Alice would be 40 years old on 15 January and she now thought she might be expecting her fifth child.

John Lomax had various business ventures:

• he had been buying property in Manchester, which will have been a profitable trade as the town grew ever bigger and busier.  He owned warehouses, land and houses.  We know he had bought the London Road Inn because when it was advertised to let in 1825, interested persons were to enquire at the Mathers, Lomax & Co warehouse or at 11 George Street, which was John Lomax's address.  (It was a "large and commodious" inn with two kitchens, five parlours on the first floor, dining room, 21 other rooms, stabling for 20 horses and "convenience for Carriages")

• he was still engaged in the affairs of Messrs Mathers, Lomax & Company.  His partners were now his 56 year old nephew Richard Hampson and the 33 year old John Philips Mather, presumably the son of John's old partner John Mather and his wife Susanna Philips.  John Philips Mather lived in Everton and must have run the port of Liverpool end of the firm's business.

John Lomax was close to his family and particularly to three of his nephews:  Richard Hampson (son of his sister Hannah), John Bentley (son of his sister Ellen) and his brother's son Robert Lomax.  Richard Hampson was of much the same age as John and had evidently been his friend and partner for a long while.  

John Lomax probably felt a rather fatherly protectiveness towards the other two nephews.  John Bentley had lost his father when he was a baby.  Robert Lomax lost his father when he was nearly 16 and then, when he was 24 and busy building up a business of his own, he had lost his mother and one of his unmarried sisters within six days of each other.  His sisters Ellen and Margaret were still at home with him.  

On 10 January 1827 John Lomax made his Will – or perhaps he was driven to make a new Will so as provide for the unborn child.  It seems to have been made in something of a hurry, which suggests that he was anxious for it to be executed as soon as possible: 

• the clerk at one point uses a standard abbreviation rather than the word in full
• the handwriting is poor, evidently written in haste
• there is an omission in the terms of the Will and the solicitor had to draw up a Codicil immediately after the Will was executed
• spaces were left for some names, which were then squeezed in by the clerk
• the order of the legacies suggests some afterthoughts  

He had reached the age of 63 in the striving, urgent merchant world of Georgian Manchester.  Perhaps his health had now failed and he was putting his affairs in order in case he didn't recover.

His Will covers 23 pages (of A3 paper) and most of it is taken up with the trusts he set up for Alice and the children

• Alice is described as the "Daughter of the late John Hopkinson Stone Mason of Bury or of Birch near Bury" and the children as "the three Daughters (Ellen Lomax Hopkinson Elizabeth Lomax Hopkinson and Mary Lomax Hopkinson) of the said Alice Hopkinson and John Lomax Hopkinson the son"

• his executors were his solicitor Samuel Kay and his three nephews Robert Lomax, John Bentley and Richard Hampson

• the trustees for Alice and the children were both young men – chosen, no doubt, because they would be most likely to see the children through to adulthood.  They were John's partner John Philips Mather and the Manchester solicitor Samuel Dukinfield Darbishire.  
• Darbishire was a young man of 28 whose family owned slate mines in Wales.  He was a Unitarian and he and his wife later became great friends of the writer Mrs Gaskell – whose husband was a Unitarian minister – and her family

• the nephews and the trustees obviously knew all about Alice

Mather and Darbishire were to raise £25,000 from the estate

• £5,000 each was allocated for Ellen, Elizabeth, Mary and John.  The maintenance, education and expenses of each child were to be paid from his or her share 

• by way of comparison, John Lomax's brother Robert had left his daughters £2,500 each and had allowed £80 a year per child for maintenance, education etc

• each daughter, when she reached 21, was to get the income on her share.  It was to be paid into her own hands, free from control by her husband.  This was long before the Married Women's Property Act of 1882 and John Lomax was ensuring no husband could deprive them of their money.  But the daughters only received the income, not the capital – they could dispose of that by Will, and if they didn't leave a Will it would go to their children, if any

• but so that Alice would still have funds, a daughter wouldn't receive her income in full while her mother was still alive because Alice was to be paid £100 of the income first (unless she had married)  

• John was to receive £1,000 of his share outright, as a capital sum, at the age of 21 and the remainder due to him at the age of 23 – but again, to provide for Alice, when John reached 21, the trustees were to invest £2,000 of his money and pay the interest to his mother

• the income from the last £5,000 was to be paid to Alice unless she married (in which case, she was assumed to be provided for by her husband).  If she died or married the income was to be used for the upbringing of "the child with which I apprehend the said Alice Hopkinson may be now enceinte [pregnant]" and would be that child's share

John Lomax intended to provide handsomely for Alice and the children.  The usual rate of interest through the 19th century was 4% or 5%, although railway investments could bring in 8%.  His son would have a good start in life and his daughters' income – say £200 or £250 – was very comfortable.  Some literary comparisons:

• Miss Bates and her mother in Jane Austen's Emma lived together on £100 a year

• Mrs Dashwood and her three daughters in Sense and Sensibility found themselves sharing an income of £500 and went to live for free in a cottage in Devonshire as a result

• Sir Walter Elliot of Persuasion had a fortune of £10,000 to be divided between his three daughters

• Mr Darcy of Pride and Prejudice had £10,000 a year (no wonder Mrs Bennet was quite overcome) 

• the Revd Patrick Brontë's yearly income at Haworth (where he lived from 1820 to 1861) was £170; as governesses, his daughters might earn £25 a year

(We normally think in terms of inflation when comparing money, but since 1810, which is roughly when Jane Austen's novels were published, there had been deflation – which was to recur during the 19th century)  

John Lomax left legacies to his family

• 10 guineas each to his sisters Jane Orrell and Betty Stepford, his seventeen nieces and his nephews George Stopford and Richard Orrell 
  

• £100 to his cousin Edmund Pilkington, the son of his mother's sister Mary Knowles

• "my small silver Teapot which I now use" to his niece Ellen Lomax – it must have held a sentimental meaning for her   

All the rest of his household goods and furniture, pictures, printed books, plate, linen and china were for Alice's use during her lifetime and afterwards to be divided between her children.  There is no mention of any horses or carriages, but he clearly kept a good cellar:

• his three nephews Robert Lomax, Richard Hampson and John Bentley were left all his "Madeira Port and Hock wines" apart from 

• 10 dozen bottles of Madeira and 10 dozen bottles of Port which were to go to Alice.  She was also to have "all my other foreign and homemade wines and all my spiritous liquors for her own use"

• Alice was also to have the sum of £500

He gave his real property – warehouses, land, houses – and any remaining personal estate (ie everything except land, but including leaseholds) to his three nephews, Robert Lomax, John Bentley and Richard Hampson.

Five months later, on 5 June 1827, he died.  

He was buried on 11 June at the chapel at Ainsworth where his brother Robert, sister-in-law Mary and niece Betsey lay.

Ainsworth Unitarian Chapel by Alexander P Kapp

The notice of his death appeared in the newspapers – on 12 June in the Tyne Mercury (which came out on Tuesdays) and on 15 June in the Chester Chronicle and Liverpool Mercury (which both came out on Thursdays): 

On the 5th inst. in the 64th year of his age, John Lomax, Esq. of the firm of Messrs Mather, Lomax, and Co. of Manchester

Thirteen years later in 1840, his nephew Robert Lomax – who must have left the Unitarians for the Church of England – built Christ's Church, Harwood.  He commissioned Messrs Patteson of Manchester to  make two memorials – one for his parents Robert and Mary and the other, on behalf of himself, Richard Hampson and John Bentley, for their uncle John.  (The WWI memorial is directly beneath it, which is why you can see part of a poppy wreath in this photograph.)

A tribute of respect

from his affectionate Nephews

to JOHN LOMAX Esq

of Manchester

youngest son of Richard & Ellen

Lomax of Harwood,

who departed this life on the

fifth of June 1827

 aged 63 years

Not long after John's death, on 16 July, Alice's baby was born.  She named her Alice Lomax Hopkinson, and had her baptised on 26 August at St John's, Manchester.

Alice was left alone to raise five children under the age of ten.  John was only 3½ – he and his baby sister had no memory of John Lomax, but the older girls must have remembered their father.  Unfortunately, we don't have any stories from them.  They were long dead by the time Mary Hopkinson wrote her memoir and she had only her own memories of her aunts and the letters they had written to her parents.  

Alice stayed in Cheetwood for another couple of years but by September 1829 she had moved the family a couple of miles across to the other side of Manchester, to Rusholme Road in the township of Chorlton-upon-Medlock.  It had been marked for building a couple of decades earlier – maps show the outlines of housing plots – but not very many had been built as yet, and it was still a semi-rural area.

     Alice Hopkinson    –    John Lomax

                                                 1787-1852                 c1764-1827

                                                                     |

                                 |-------------------|-------------------|-----------------|----------------|

                           Ellen               Elizabeth              Mary                 John               Alice

                      b Sept 1817       b July 1819       b Mar 1821      b Feb 1824      b July 1827

                     d Aug 1900        d Jan 1887       d June 1866      d Mar 1902     d Dec 1881

Next:  5: The Rusholme Road Chapel & the Rev James Griffin

3: Alice Hopkinson (1787-1852): the mother of John Hopkinson

 Alice Hopkinson was born in the parish of Bury in Lancashire in 1787.  

People had always made cloth for their families, of course, but by the early 17th century the thriving market town of Bury, in the fertile valley of the River Irwell, had become one of the centres of a new style of cloth with a worsted warp and a woollen weft.  Merchants supplied the weavers with the raw materials and paid them for the finished cloth.  But by the end of the 18th century, the woollen trade was dwindling – cotton manufacturing was taking over.

The baptismal register of the Bury parish church of St Mary the Virgin records that Alice was the daughter of John Hopkinson of Walmersley, and that she was born on 15 January 1787 and baptised on 21 January, when she was six days old.  

• Walmersley township and the village of Walmersley – we can't tell if Alice's family lived in the township or in the village itself – lay north of Bury in hilly country where streams run down the valleys towards the River Irwell at the boundary of the township.  The township would soon become a centre of the cotton industry, with mills and bleach- and dye-works

• the Bury parish registers show increasing numbers of Hopkinsons from the early 17th century.  From the 1780s, the registers record the place of abode.  In the 10 years after Alice was born, the children of 9 Hopkinson households were baptised.  Between 1780 and 1820, 12 Hopkinsons from Walmersley were married in Bury, and 28 Hopkinsons from Walmersley were buried

• so Alice probably grew up in a place where her family had lived for many years and surrounded by relatives  

• unfortunately, the only time the mothers were named in the baptismal register was when they were not married to the father, and so it isn't possible to construct any sort of family tree

• I can find only one Probate for this period and that is for a farmer called William Hopkinson in 1798; this suggests that the Hopkinsons were not people of means 

• occupations are not given in the parish registers but we know that Alice's father John was a stone mason

• this was remembered by her granddaughter Mary (who had John's name incorrectly as Thomas) and is referred to in the Will of John Lomax, in which Alice is described as the daughter of "the late John Hopkinson Stone Mason of Bury or of B[…] near Bury".  (I think it says "Birch", which would be the hamlet of Birch in the township of Hopwood, about four miles SE of Bury – so John Hopkinson had left Walmersley by the time he died)

• in 1825, a William Hopkinson of Bury, stone mason, and a John Hopkinson of Elton, stone mason (Elton is less than a mile west of the parish church) stood sureties for one John Hamer – given that trades often ran in families, this gives us a tantalising possibility that these were near relatives, perhaps even brothers, of Alice's

Alice went out to work as a servant

• according to her granddaughter Mary, Alice became housekeeper to John Lomax

• she would by then be in her late twenties, which seems a little young for a housekeeper, but we don't know what style of household John Lomax kept.  I think we can assume, though, that Alice was an upper servant  

At the end of 1816 or in early 1817, in the raucous days of the Regency and not long after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815, Alice fell pregnant with John Lomax's child 

• the baby was born in the autumn of 1817 – according to Mary Hopkinson, in September

• Alice was then 30 years old and John Lomax was aged 53

On 5 November 1817, the babe was baptised Ellen Lomax Hopkinson in Runcorn

• Runcorn, on the south bank of the Mersey, had been known since the late 18th century as a health resort and even the growing industrialisation and the building of four important canals was not affecting its reputation.  So perhaps Alice was there for her health – her place of abode is given as Manchester  

• in the baptismal register, in the column for the 'Quality, Trade or Profession' of the father, the clergyman wrote "Baseborn"  

• she gave her daughter the middle name of Lomax – either she had a great nerve or John Lomax, from the beginning, had acknowledged responsibility for the child

In 1819, Alice gave birth to her second child and named her Elizabeth Lomax Hopkinson  

• she was born, according to Mary Hopkinson, in July – I can't find a baptism record for her 

Peterloo, 16 August 1819

• a month later, on 16 August, working people gathered for a mass rally in St Peter's Field to call for parliamentary reform.  Many were in their Sunday best.  It ended in the Peterloo Massacre and the deaths of 18 people.  The first to die was a 2 year old boy, thrown from his mother's arms in Cooper Street, where John Lomax had been living in 1800

On 6 March 1821, Alice's third child was born

• she was baptised Mary Lomax Hopkinson at the age of 1 at St John's, Manchester on 6 April 1822 (her birth date is given in the register)

• the name of Mary's father is given as John Lomax, gentleman

• Alice's address is given as Richmond Street

On 11 February 1824, John was born

• he was baptised John Lomax Hopkinson at St John's on 14 March, a month later

• again, his father's name was given as John Lomax, gentleman, and his mother's address as Richmond Street

At this time, John Lomax was living five minutes' walk away from Alice and the children

• his address is given in the 1825 Directory as 11 George Street

• George Street was in the fashionable residential area centred on St James's Church (built 1786) in Charlotte Street  

• nearby was the Scientific & Medical Society Building (later Owens College Medical School).  The Manchester Lit & Phil had its meeting room on George Street, where the scientist John Dalton and Roget, author of the thesaurus, were members.  The Portico Library was built nearby in 1806, and the Institute of Fine Arts. 

For a man like him – a well-to-do merchant in Georgian Manchester – to have a woman in keeping would have been no surprise to anybody.  But we don't know

• if they actually lived at any point in the same household together
• what John Lomax's friends and relatives knew about Alice Hopkinson and the children
• if Alice kept in touch with her family 
• if she lived discreetly – a quiet Mrs Hopkinson with a husband who went away on frequent voyages – or if she was sometimes a hostess when John Lomax's friends came to dine
• why he didn't marry her

The question of why he didn't marry Alice Hopkinson has fascinated their descendants for years.  We don't know whether Alice's children knew the reason.  If John Hopkinson knew, he never passed it on.

It seems unlikely that it was a question of class.  At his age and with his money, John Lomax could marry whomever he wished and he clearly thought that Alice would find a niche among the comfortably-off middle-classes when he provided for her in his Will.  

Was he already married?  John Lomax was quite a common name and the newspapers and parish registers of the time were sparse in their details, so I can't find out whether he was, or had ever been, married.  In 1827, when he made his Will, he mentioned only Alice and her children; there is no mention of any wife or other children.  And so if he, like William Makepeace Thackeray, had a wife confined to a lunatic asylum because of incurable mental illness, he had provided for her by a separate settlement.

I don't believe it can have been because Alice was already married, perhaps to some absent scoundrel – if she had been, John Lomax's solicitor would have made provision in the Will to protect her money from her husband, who might otherwise reappear and claim it.  A married woman's property belonged to her husband, not to her.   

Perhaps he had simply always been a bachelor who preferred unofficial liaisons.

At any rate, the relationship between John and Alice endured.  It didn't come to an end with Alice accepting financial support for Ellen in 1817.  Perhaps she simply fell for him and felt that their relationship mattered more than the status of being a wife.  And she evidently trusted him.  She must, in fact, have trusted him to look after the children if anything happened to her – death in childbed, for example.  John Lomax acknowledged the children as his, he undertook to provide for their future and he kept Alice and the children in comfort.  And she always had the comfortable knowledge that her children would have a proper education and would begin life with money behind them.  She was the daughter of a stone mason and had worked as a servant, but her children would be members of the middle class.  

Next:  4: Death of John Lomax: 1827