27. Henry Burnett & Fanny Dickens at the Rusholme Road Chapel

The unaccompanied hymns at the Chapel had always been plain and hearty, led by a rudimentary choir.  But at the beginning of the 1840s two musicians, fresh from London and the stage, had joined the congregation and, as their contribution to church life, formed a new and inspiring small choir to lead the singing.

They were Henry and Fanny Burnett, the two young people mentioned in blogpost 7. Becoming a member of the Rusholme Road Chapel.  Theirs was a world beyond John Hopkinson's imaginings.  He was 59 when he first went to the theatre in 1883 and seemed to his son and daughter-in-law to be fairly baffled by it, while his wife dared not tell his sister Elizabeth, "she would have been so shocked."  

Henry and Fanny Burnett came to Manchester after the baptism of their second son in London in the middle of May 1841.  Three or four weeks after settling in, they were walking along the Rusholme Road one Sunday evening when they saw the lights of the Chapel and the people going in.  They followed and were shown to seats.  Something – they could never say exactly what it was – impressed them deeply with the earnest wish to come again.  At the end of the service, Fanny had turned to Henry and said, "Henry, do let us come here again: if you will come, I will always come with you."  He was quite taken aback because she had never said anything like this before.  

For him, a Nonconformist service was a coming home.  He had been an acclaimed and successful operatic tenor, trained in music from an early age – at the age of ten he had stood on a table to sing a solo in the Brighton Pavilion to the Court and seen the old king George IV, gout-ridden and wrapped in bandages.  But though his father had been persuaded by a friend that the boy's voice was too good to be wasted, that he could make an excellent living from it, it was reluctantly because theirs was a Nonconformist family.  Henry had lived until the age of seven with a pious grandmother and aunt and their early teachings left a lasting impression on him.  And so his success in the world of music had become less and less fulfilling.  He was, as Mr Griffin wrote in his memoirs

gradually coming to feel the emptiness of worldly pleasure, and to yearn in his "secret heart" after more substantial satisfaction

In the end, he could no longer bear the contradiction between the life he was leading and what he felt to be right.  He decided to leave the stage and make his living from teaching.  He and his wife were advised that Manchester was the place to go, as music was highly appreciated there.  

Fanny Burnett wrote to Mr Griffin in these early days that 

I was brought up in the Established Church, but I regret to say, without any serious ideas of religion

but of that evening in the Rusholme Road Chapel, she said 

More or less all through the service, I seemed in a state of mind altogether new to me; and during the sermon it was as if I were entering a new world.

Her old world had been very different.  She was the elder sister of Charles Dickens.  In the Revd James Griffin's description of her new life in the chapel we can see the distinctive world of John Hopkinson and his family. 

Fanny Dickens, 1836

Fanny (1810-48) and Charles (1812-70) were born in Portsmouth, the first of the large family of John Dickens, a pay-clerk in the Navy Pay Office, and his wife Elizabeth Barrow.  

In 1822 John Dickens was posted to London where Fanny was one of the fortunate children to get a place at the newly established Royal Academy of Music at its opening in March 1823, where she studied piano and singing.  The fees were 38 guineas a year, which wasn't cheap – as is recorded in A History of the Royal Academy of Music (1922) one of the committee members wrote to another, "we find that there are a great many schools where children do not pay so much".

At this point, her parents' Micawber-like attitude to money, their habit of living beyond their means, caught up with them.  In September 1823, to save school fees and boost the family finances they sent their bright little 11 year old boy Charles to work in Warren's boot-blacking factory at Hungerford Stairs, an experience which Michael Allen (in this article on the National Archives website) has shown lasted for one year and which certainly marked him for life.  

On 20 February 1824 John Dickens was finally arrested for debt and sent to the Marshalsea Prison  where he, Elizabeth and the younger children lived for three months.  They managed to keep paying Fanny's fees, a strangely unworldly decision.  Boys' education was usually prioritised because their far greater earning capacity frequently meant they would be relied on to support family in need.  Fanny, though very able and determined – after February 1827 when her father's debts had left her fees badly in arrears and she had to leave the Academy, she was able to keep receiving tuition by taking on part-time teaching there – didn't in fact have a voice for the operatic stage where high earnings would have been possible.  Charles' feelings about his mother were permanently soured by his experiences.  He always said he never felt jealous of Fanny, but the contrast in their fortunes was dreadful for him.

Fanny married Henry Burnett, who had also studied at the Royal Academy, in 1837.  When Charles, already famous for The Pickwick Papers (serialised 1836-7) and Oliver Twist (1837-9), began to write Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9), people hailed Henry Burnett as Nicholas because he looked exactly like the pictures.  Dickens' illustrator Phiz (Hablot Browne) had probably used Henry as a model – and in fact there was a likeness of character too between Henry and Nicholas Nickleby (cf this article in the Christian Science Monitor)

At the time when Henry decided to remove himself and Fanny and their boys from London, they were spending their Sundays as professional singers at the Chapel of the Sardinian Ambassador and their Sunday evenings in the lively jollities of Charles Dickens' house – "in a manner which, though strictly moral, was not congenial" to his feelings, wrote Mr Griffin.  Fanny later told Mr Griffin that she too 

seemed gradually to lose my relish for the pleasures of the world, but I was still wholly ignorant of gospel truths. 

Charles Dickens found his brother-in-law's decision incomprehensible.  He was never a friend of this sort of religion.  As is obvious from his books, he had a great love of conviviality, parties, parlour games, dancing and noisy family fun and he loved the theatre.  He didn't think "the world, and pleasure, and dress, and company" – the sort of life condemned in the story called The Dairyman's Daughter described in this earlier blogpost  – were necessarily blameworthy.  He campaigned fiercely against the Sabbatarian movement which tried for decades to have work, trade and travel banned on Sundays.  Sunday was the only day of the week on which the lower classes could enjoy the sort of pastimes and entertainments that the upper classes could enjoy at any time.  He saw Sabbatarians as totally un-Christian and in 1843 he voiced his condemnation through the Ghost of Christmas Present speaking to Scrooge in A Christmas Carol 

"There are some upon this earth of yours," returned the Spirit, "who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us"

But by the time A Christmas Carol came out, Fanny was delighting in Sundays as a day of holy rest spent at divine service and prayer.

 

Perhaps Fanny had found life darker and sadder because of her anxiety over her eldest boy, Henry, who was far from strong.  He was born in 1839 with a physical disability – Mr Griffin wrote of a "deformed back".  He described little Harry, whom he knew well, as "a singular child – meditative and quaint in a remarkable degree".  It's said that he was the inspiration for Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol.  Mr Griffin wrote that

He was the original, as Mr Dickens told his sister, of little "Paul Dombey."  Harry had been taken to Brighton, as "little Paul" is represented to have been, and had there, for hours lying on the beach with his books, given utterance to thoughts quite as remarkable for a child as those which are put into the lips of Paul Dombey.  But little Harry loved his Bible, and evidently loved Jesus.  The child seemed never tired of reading his Bible and his hymns, and other good books suited to his age: and the bright little fellow was always happy.

(Dombey and Son was published in instalments between October 1846 and April 1848)

A few weeks after their first visit to the chapel, Fanny and Henry approached Mr Griffin to talk about joining the congregation.  They soon became good friends of James and Eliza Griffin – interestingly, they were all born in Portsmouth – spending many evenings together over the following years.  One year they all spent a month on holiday in the Lake District, driving and walking about Windermere, Rydal Water, Keswick and Coniston.  

James Griffin thought that because Henry and Fanny might still be exposed to "strong worldly influences which it might require no common degree of Christian principle to withstand" they should take becoming members slowly.  A year later Fanny wrote to Mr Griffin describing her progress in her faith.  "By degrees," she wrote,

my eyes were opened, and I saw with shame and confusion my utter worthlessness in the sight of God, and that unless I came to Him through His dear Son, I could not be saved  

Now, 

I seem to have clearer views.  I delight in the ordinances of the sanctuary.  I feel great pleasure in mixing with God's people.  I feel anxious to be spiritually-minded and to devote myself entirely to the service of Christ

During this time she and Henry "greatly endeared themselves to the hearts of the good people" of the congregation, who were deeply moved at the meeting in which Henry and Fanny were received into the church.  I feel sure we can assume that John Hopkinson and his family, with their deep involvement in the chapel and John's closeness to his friend and mentor Mr Griffin, knew the Burnetts.

The life of John Hopkinson and his family – described years later by his daughter-in-law Evelyn Oldenbourg as "their fine, almost austere, life" – and the ways of the people of the Rusholme Road Chapel could not have been more different from the life Fanny had known, the life loved by her brother Charles.  Mr Griffin wrote

the principles, the tastes, the pursuits, the habits of life, of those with whom she now came into daily intercourse, were almost entirely new to her …  

Thrown very much by the nature of her [teaching] engagements into worldly company, and with her natural buoyancy of spirits and fondness for society, her chief difficulty consisted in maintaining a spiritual and visible separation from the world.  No doubt it would demand much prayerful effort to make natural and educational tendencies bend to the requirements of religious duty and disposition 

She persevered.  She now felt that "a saving change had been wrought on her soul by the Spirit of God" and she "delighted to feel that she was now decidedly and irrevocably 'on the Lord's side,' for ever devoted and given up to Him".  She knew when she saw old friends that her "supposed fanaticism might be the object of their pity or contempt" but she kept on in her new ways all the same. When her parents came to stay, she told her husband not to miss out family prayer morning and evening.  John and Elizabeth Dickens stayed for many months and the Griffins got to know them well.  They went to chapel services and seemed to show great interest "in the new character and new associations of their daughter".

James Griffin's description of Fanny is very reminiscent of descriptions of her brother Charles – he wrote of Fanny's 

habit of endurance, fortitude, self-reliance, and firmness, in no ordinary degree – together with almost restless activity and practical energy

Her new life didn't change her attitude to her brother's work – she enjoyed equally the humour and the pathos of his books

She was no ascetic or recluse; nor was there any assumption or affectation of extraordinary piety ... She despised and detested affectation, assumed mannerisms, and shams of all sorts

Frank and open, a cheerful companion and hearty friend, she became "a general favourite.  She mingled freely with all classes, and apparently with equal interest".  She frequently asked at the end of evening service if they could go home with the Griffins and stop with them a while, even though this took the Burnetts quite out of their way.  The Griffins lived in Richmond Terrace in the hamlet of Old Trafford, more than a mile to the west of the chapel, while the Burnetts lived a considerable distance in the other direction.  They would have supper and family prayer and she would say, "Can't we have a hymn?" and they would usually sing the hymn  

When, O dear Jesus, when shall I

Behold Thee all serene …

O.S. map 1848: Richmond Terrace, Old Trafford
(National Library of Scotland)

Fanny's friends often feared that 

her incessant exertions were undermining her health.  It was difficult, however, to prevail on her to relax them

And then, about seven years after the Griffins first met her, Fanny's health began to show serious symptoms of decline.  She could not believe she was really ill, but in fact she had tuberculosis of the lung.  At last she was persuaded to go for medical care to London, where she stayed with her sister.  James and Eliza Griffin went there to see her for the last time, a "deeply affecting" and "touching" interview.  She died on 2 September 1848.

By her dying request, Mr Griffin went to London to take her funeral.  She was to be buried in "a secluded and picturesque nook in Highgate Cemetery".  All the men of her family were there.

Mr Dickens appeared to feel it very deeply.  He spoke to me in terms of great respect and affection for his departed sister – he had always so spoken of her – as I accompanied him in his brougham on my way to my brother's house.  His behaviour to myself was most courteous and kind.

Henry Augustus Burnett

Henry Burnett returned with his little boys Harry and Charles to Manchester.  Little Harry did not long survive his mother.  He died at the age of nine on 29 January 1849.  Mr Griffin wrote

He died in the arms of a dear, dear nephew of mine since passed away, John Griffin.

(John Griffin became a merchant in Manchester and lived in Bowdon.  When little Harry died, John was a youth of about 18)

I think this photograph of Harry, from the New York Public Library's digital collections, was possibly taken after his death, a not uncommon practice at the time.

Henry Burnett remarried in early summer 1857 and moved back south with his family in 1860.  

By then Mr Griffin had left Manchester, retiring from the Rusholme Road Chapel in September 1854 on account of his health.  He and his wife returned to their native South Coast where the climate did him so much good that he was able eventually to go back into the ministry in 1858.

Note:  James Griffin and his wife Eliza Marden knew Henry and Fanny well and he wrote of them at length in his Memories of the Past: Records of Ministerial Life, published in 1883.  I’m afraid this seems no longer to be available as a free e-book online.

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

26. John Hopkinson: out & about in Manchester in the 1840s

Living on the semi-rural southern edge of Manchester out of the smoking chimneys of the houses and mills of the town, John and his family would not have to see – unless they went expressly – the conditions of the vast numbers of people who were thronging to Manchester for work.

Friedrich Engels, who explored the worst areas, wrote in the Condition of the Working Class in England that a person might live in Manchester for years, 

and go in and out daily without coming into contact with a working-people's quarter or even with workers, that is, so long as he confines himself to his business or to pleasure walks

Less than a mile north of Wren & Bennett's works was the Old Town, lying alongside the River Irk, which Engels described as "a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of debris and refuse".  Mills, tanneries, bonemills and gasworks stood on the river and dry weather left slime pools 

from the depths of which bubbles of miasmatic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench unendurable even on the bridge forty or fifty feet above the surface of the stream.

He described in detail the narrow, winding streets of dirty and decaying houses, the courts and lanes and tangles of passages crammed with dwellings in "filth and disgusting grime"  

in one of these courts there stands directly at the entrance, at the end of the covered passage, a privy without a door, so dirty that the inhabitants can pass into and out of the court only by passing through foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement 

He wrote of the lack of ventilation of the streets and courts, the "filth, debris, and offal heaps" and the "multitude of pigs walking about in all the alleys."

South of the Old Town was the commercial district "perhaps half a mile long and about as broad."  Mostly consisting of offices and warehouses, much of this area was only alive by day but the main streets leading into town were lined with "brilliant shops" and here and there the upper floors were occupied and full of life until late at night.

Working-class housing stretched "like a girdle" that averaged a mile and a half in breadth around the commercial district.  Almost all the mills stood alongside the rivers and canals of the town.  The middle classes had moved out to places like Cheetham and Chorlton, and the most prosperous of all were furthest out still 

on the breezy heights of Cheetham Hill, Broughton, and Pendleton, in free, wholesome country air, in fine, comfortable homes, passed once every half or quarter hour by omnibuses going into the city 

As the town had grown, John's mother had moved from the centre of Manchester first north to the fresh air of Cheetham and then to Chorlton on the southern edge of town.  When John's sister Ellen was married in 1839, the family was living in Lloyd Street, Greenheys, to the west of today's Whitworth Park.  It was a countrified area described by Elizabeth Gaskell in her first novel Mary Barton (1848)

There are some fields near Manchester, well known to the inhabitants as "Green Heys Fields," through which runs a public footpath to a little village about two miles distant … thoroughly rural fields … here and there an old black and white farm-house 

By the spring of 1841 the Hopkinsons had moved to 41 Rumford Street, near to the Rusholme Road Chapel, and only about a mile from Wren & Bennett's works.  

O.S. map of Rumford Street 1849 
National Library of Scotland

Comfortable and spacious family houses with gardens were being built in terraces along Rumford Street, which was a very long road that ran southward from the edge of Manchester into the countryside.  (It lies underneath today's University District).  In 1842 Elizabeth Gaskell, her Unitarian minister husband and their family moved into Number 121, a larger and more expensive semi-detached villa at the farthest end of the road.  Mrs Gaskell described their house seven years later as "the last house countrywards" and "a mile and a half from the very middle of Manchester".  They could see fields from some of their windows – "not very pretty or rural fields it must be owned" – but all the same the Gaskell children could see cows milked and watch haymaking.

In 1845 John's mother took the tenancy of Number 1 York Place, the last of her moves in Manchester.  Except for six years in their early marriage, York Place was to be John's home for years – he and Alice and their family lived at Number 12 from 1855 until 1874.  

York Place has now disappeared under the site of Manchester Royal Infirmary, but I think it was built by Richard Lane & Partners, who were the architects of Victoria Park.  The Wikipedia entry for Victoria Park, the exclusive gated development with its own tollgates, walls and police, built in the countryside to the south of the Rusholme Road Chapel, mentions that a "cul-de-sac of villas was built opposite Whitworth Park, and these were later demolished for the construction of the Royal Infirmary".  This description tallies with the maps.

O.S. map of York Place 1848-50
National Library of Scotland

A photograph of 5 York Place (which can be seen here) shows rather dimly a large, plain semi-detached villa on three floors, possibly with a cellar, and an advertisement for one of the houses shows their appeal

Manchester Courier, 7 October 1843

York Place, Oxford Road

To be let, and may be entered upon immediately, a very Excellent Dwelling House, most pleasantly situated at York Place, Oxford Road, lately in the occupation of William Cooper, Esq.  It contains dining, drawing, and breakfast rooms, six or seven lodging rooms, and every other convenience suitable for a family of respectability.

Apply to Mr Wilson, Solicitor, 37, Mosley-street

Rumford Street must have been particularly convenient for John for work, for his keen pursuit of further self-education and for Rusholme Road Chapel, but York Place was perhaps only half a mile further out of town.

John was, in the true Nonconformist spirit, always eager to improve himself and learn more.

In 1841, soon after he started work, he noted in his log book that he had bought himself a tool chest.  (His daughter Mary remembered how he later taught his children to use the tools and made them their own workshop in the cellar.)

In 1842 he made a note of buying chemicals, so he must have been making experiments.  Perhaps he had been inspired by going to a lecture – it seems very likely that he joined the Manchester Athenaeum.

He certainly was at the Athenaeum's Grand Soirée at the Free Trade Hall on Peter Street on Thursday 4 October 1844 – this was the brick-built Free Trade Hall of 1842, not the monumental building of 1853.  

Benjamin Disraeli as a young man

It was a grand occasion, attended by 3,000 ladies and gentlemen and all the great and good of Manchester, representatives of the Mechanics' Institutions, the libraries, the literary institutions and the local Literary & Philosophical Societies.  The Manchester Times of 5 October 1844 reported in detail the speech of the chairman, the Conservative MP and future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81).  He extolled the aims and achievements of the Athenaeum (its news room – library – lectures – classes in modern languages – debating society – gymnasium) and he exhorted the youth of the town, calling on them to "aspire":

The youth I address have duties peculiar to the position which they occupy.  They are the rising generation of a city unprecedented in the history of the world – a city that is at once powerful and new…

The elders of their community have not been remiss in regard to their interests:  let them remember that when the inheritance devolves upon them, they are not only to enjoy but to improve.  They will some day succeed to the high places of this great community:  let them recollect, then, who lighted the way for them; and when they have wealth, when they have authority, when they have power, let it not be said they were deficient in public virtue and public spirit.  When the torch is delivered to them let them be always ready to light the path of human progress to educated men!  

(Loud and long continued cheering)

In 1842 John went to a lecture by James Braid (1795-1860) who was a Scottish-born, Manchester-based surgeon, known for his innovative treatment of conditions such as club foot.  Braid was lecturing on what was then known as "Animal Magnetism", which he approached from the point of view of science, pioneering the use of hypnotism and hypnotherapy as a useful remedy.

in June 1842 John went to a lecture by the Revd John Curwen (1816-80).  Curwen was a Congregationalist Minister who advocated a Tonic Sol-fa method of teaching sight-reading, which he had adapted from earlier systems, including that of Sarah Ann Glover (that is, Do-re-mi with hand signals).

John's attendance might have been inspired by recent developments at the Rusholme Road Chapel. 

Note: The 1848-50 maps of York Place and Rumford Street can be examined on National Library of Scotland Map Images at Georeferenced Maps (search under England and Wales, Town Plans for Manchester, OS 1:1,056, 1848-50)

27. Henry Burnett & Fanny Dickens at the Rusholme Road Chapel

25. The disaster at the Brinksway Mill, Stockport in 1850

At 1:20pm on Tuesday 30 July 1850, during the dinner hour, when most of the workforce had gone home except for a few who had stayed to eat in the work rooms, suddenly and with a loud crack and a fearful crash nearly a quarter of the newly-built Brinksway Mill at Stockport fell in.  Four floors collapsed, carrying with them girls and women and crashing down on labourers and wheelwrights.  13 people were killed.

Wren & Bennett had drawn up the plans, were superintending the building, and building the water wheel, shafting and gearing, with the iron castings supplied by Williamson & Roberts of Stockport.  Work had begun in August 1849 on the site on the Lancashire side of the River Mersey about three-quarters of a mile from Stockport marketplace and by June 1850 the mill could be occupied – all that remained was the setting up of a water-wheel and installation of some cotton machinery.  As soon as he heard of the disaster, John Hopkinson – now a young married man and father of a little boy who had just had his first birthday – left Manchester, taking the 4:15pm train for Stockport.  He will have found a scene of shocking devastation.  

The mill was now a mass of rubble, debris of large cast-iron beams and smashed machinery.  The walls were standing, but highly dangerous.  The floors were gone and the basement, filled with collapsed masonry, ironwork and machinery, was open to the sky.  On nails in the wall, high up on the third storey, could be seen three dresses, hanging where the girls had left them before starting work.

For three dreadful hours men had worked to stabilise the ruins, trying to tie the beams of the different floors more firmly together.  At about the time of John's arrival they began to move the fallen mass and dig for the missing.  Two men had been heard crying out from under the masonry and ironwork, but only for a few seconds – nothing could be done for them and, wrote the journalist of the Manchester Examiner and Times of 3 August, "their voices soon ceased to afflict the ears of the bystanders."

Some people had been lucky enough to get out.  Bridget Larney, who worked in cardroom number 3 on the third floor, was sitting with half a dozen of her workmates having their dinner among the machines. She heard a crack and looking up saw the floor above them tumbling down over Ellen Ashton's bobbin frame.  She cried, "Good God, what's coming!" and got up and ran down the room – and then when she got to the door she looked back and she saw that where they'd been sitting, that part of the mill had fallen down and there was a hole up to the roof.  "All that I left in the room were killed," she told the coroner.  

Extra hands were taken on – the journalist doesn't say who was in charge, but as Wren & Bennett were superintending the building we must assume that John Hopkinson was part of this – and the first person was taken out at about 8:30pm.  They found five others after that, three of whom were dead.  The men worked on through the night until the Wednesday morning, the surgeon John Rayner standing ready in a nearby warehouse to give help when called and the Borough Police at hand to keep people clear.

There was so much to be moved, there were so many cast-iron beams, that progress was painfully slow.  It wasn't until Wednesday at four that they found more bodies – by then they were expecting to find seven people beneath the rubble.  The workmen worked on, in spite of the considerable risk from the walls which were in a very dangerous condition, desperate to find their workmates.  Mr Trimmer the factory inspector was on site on Wednesday at 11am, and work went on until 6pm when the weather worsened and the wind rose, and it was decided that they had better pull down the worse parts of the tottering walls – unfortunately the walls fell inward, adding to the amount to be moved.  At about 9pm they started again, frantically searching.  The journalist wrote

The interior of the ruined portion at this period presented a mournfully picturesque appearance.  The flashes of light from a fire placed in a portable grid, with the glare of several double oil lamps, threw a strong gleam over spectators and workmen, and with the associations natural to the beholder at such a moment, gave to the scene a thrilling interest.

Work went on without a break all night.  By 7 o'clock on the Thursday morning, they had reached the place where the women had been seen to fall through and disappear.  They found their bodies at 11am, dreadfully mangled and starting to decompose.  Then they found the body of a young labourer, Samuel Harrop, who had only been taken on for work on the Monday.

The bodies were quickly coffined and taken to the nearby Egerton Arms, ready for the Lancashire county coroner to come and hold the inquest.

Three of Wren & Hopkinson's millwrights had been found dead:

• Ephraim Kitson, aged 50, millwright, married with 3 children, he had been 15 years in the service of Wren & Bennett
• Wright Barker, aged 36, millwright, who left a widow
• John Bushby, aged 19, "a very promising apprentice", who lived with his parents in Manchester

Two labourers working with the millwrights had been found badly injured and had died in the infirmary:

• Joseph Orme, aged 53, who left a widow and five or six grown up children
• James Robinson, aged 28, single

The rescuers had managed to get Ellen Ashton out of the ruins where she had fallen three storeys deep, but she was shockingly mangled and died in the infirmary a couple of hours later.

Parents, siblings and friends gave evidence at the inquest of the identity of those who had been found dead:

• Mary Ann Macnamara, 14 years old, jack-tenter, daughter of a painter
• Elizabeth Sykes, 14 years old, jack-tenter, daughter of spinner David Sykes
• Hannah Cash, drawing-tenter, 19 years old, single, only daughter of James Cash, twister
• Ann Swindells, 30 years old, jack-frame tenter, mother of five, wife of George Swindells, self-acting minder
• Margaret Ardern, 30 years old, jack-frame tenter, single woman, mother of two and sister of John Ardern
• Bridget Silk, about 36 years old, drawing-tenter, single
• Samuel Harrop, 22 years old, labourer, son of James Harrop

As three people had died at the Infirmary, which was in Cheshire, while the others had died at the mill, which was in Lancashire, two inquests had been opened.  But the coroners, Mr W S Rutter for Lancashire and Mr Charles Hudson for Cheshire, agreed that the inquests should run together, beginning on Friday 9 August at 3pm.

John Hopkinson gave his first evidence at the Lancashire inquest at the Egerton Arms, Brinksway on the Wednesday and then returned to give his evidence in full at the joint inquest on 9 August before both coroners and the juries for both Lancashire and Cheshire.  During his evidence, journalists report him as using both "I" and "we" in his explanations, but it is clear that at least one crucial decision was made jointly by him and Mr Henry Wren.  

As the Home Secretary had turned down the coroners' request for somebody competent to survey the mill to establish the cause of the collapse – on the grounds that this wasn't necessary – they had called in two Manchester experts themselves.  These were formidably qualified men – the engineer and mathematician Professor Eaton Hodgkinson FRS (1789-1861) and civil engineer William Fairbairn FRS FRS (later Sir William Fairbairn, Bt) (1789-1874).

They were pioneers in investigating structural failure and in particular the question of cast iron.  John, 26 years old and a junior partner in the firm, would be facing two experienced men of sixty-one with strong views and many experiments and publications behind them – as well as the friends and families of the dead.

The interior of the mill was 14 yards (nearly 13m) long, consisting of 14 regular 10 foot (3m) bays, and was 60 feet wide.  Each floor was supported by two rows of cast-iron pillars running the length of the building at 10 foot intervals.  The mill was to be worked by both steam- and water-power.  After the plans were drawn up, the owner Mr Cephas Howard and the future tenant Mr Joseph Heaward decided it would be better to have the mill moved 11 feet closer to the River Mersey.  This meant a significant alteration to the plans.  

An old tunnel ran under the ground floor the whole length of the mill; it was in this tunnel that the water wheel was being fixed.  Cast-iron columns went through the tunnel to support the upper floors, and were fixed into solid rock on the floor of the tunnel.  But because the mill site had been moved, one of the cast-iron columns had to be left out to make space for the water-wheel.  So, to support the line of pillars above, a large cast-iron beam was placed over the water-wheel, resting on the two adjoining columns, which were accordingly made stronger.  One entire line of columns, four storeys in height, rested upon the centre of the large beam.  "We should have avoided," said John, "if it had been practicable, placing a row of columns on the middle of a beam."

Professor Hodgkinson and Mr Fairbairn both found that it was, as had been suspected from the beginning, this cast-iron beam that had given way.  As this interesting article entitled 'An Iron Will' by Clive Richardson explains, cast iron "was reliable for columns but treacherous for beams."

A crucial point was that it had been not a solid beam but an open-work beam.  When John was recalled to explain his calculations for the beam (made "according to a rule laid down in a book (produced)", noted the Manchester Courier of 10 August 1850) and the tests that had been carried out on the castings, he said that they had made the decision to make it open-work rather than solid when the "the drawing of it was executed … on account of its large size.  That was decided by himself and Mr Wren."

Professor Hodgkinson was brutally clear, citing the published research carried out by himself and Mr Fairbairn

the beam, to save metal, had, however, been made with apertures at the side, which, according to my experiments, greatly impairs the strength ... From the experiments I have made it is proved that beams with open work have great weakness.  Open-work beams ought to be discarded.  I am sorry that a want of knowledge of that fact led to the accident.  I think the accident has arisen from error of judgment … I attribute the falling of a portion of the mill to an error of judgment in the form of the beam and of the pillars; it is quite possible the form of the pillar led to the fracture of the beam; the brick-work of the mill seemed to be good …

John defended the pillars in his reply

I believe this form of pillar has been used by architects of the greatest eminence; I believe they have been adopted in the new houses of parliament by Mr Barry; the interior of the Manchester Athenaeum rests upon four columns of the same description, and all the pillars in the Free Trade Hall are of the same description.

William Fairbairn
in 1877

William Fairbairn – who had worked briefly for Thomas Cheek Hewes until a disagreement over the design over a bridge over the River Irwell – was equally condemnatory, though he spared the pillars from criticism

Cast-iron may be said to be of almost universal application at the present time in the construction of buildings.  Its use is at all events very extended, and the repeated occurrence of lamentable accidents, which have hurried numbers to their graves without the means of escape or a single moment's reflection, evidences a deplorable want of knowledge of its general properties amongst those who undertake the designing and erection of buildings, and seems to call for the interference of the strong arm of the law, or, at least, for the supervision of some higher authority than now exists to enforce obedience to those well-established principles and facts, which point out a way to its perfectly secure adaptation when duly and accurately proportioned to the duties it may be called upon to perform ...  

when its application is undertaken by, or entrusted to the management of, the unthinking and ill-informed, who possess no knowledge of, or have not taken the trouble to make themselves acquainted with its cohesive strength and powers of resistance, it becomes in such hands a most dangerous enemy, instead of a useful and powerful auxiliary ... 

I have, therefore, no hesitation in stating that I have come to the conclusion, that the unfortunate accident at the Brinksway Mill has arisen from the weakness of the large beam which supported the columns and brick arches over the water-wheel.  My opinion further is, that although the bearing powers of the beam had been very materially diminished by the openings made in it, yet it appears that it is in some measure owing to the unequal shrinkage of the casting during its cooling, occasioned by these very openings, that we must attribute failure.

As some consolation to John, Mr Fairbairn did, before sitting down – and presumably in answer to a question from one of the coroners – bear testimony to the skill and talent of the architects.

The journalist on the Manchester Courier on 10 August 1850, recorded John's response to these damning conclusions:

It would be improper for him to give any opinion as to the quality of the metal, as that would seem as if he wanted to throw the responsibility on other parties.  This he wished particularly to guard against, and take the whole responsibility upon himself and his partners.

John wrote to his wife at the end of his day at the inquest

For about two and a half hours I was on my legs with all sorts of questions on all hands.  I felt more comfortable than I have done since this deplored occurrence, the verdict condemns the beam as of imperfect construction and improper calculation, but fully aquits us of anything like want of care or negligence 

And on 10 August he wrote to her with more and very encouraging details

And for your ear only, dearest Alice, for are you not my second self.  The coroner, in summing up, remarked that the jury had had the fullest explanation and clearest evidence with regard to the construction of the building from one of the partners whose statements, he must say, had been characterized by a veracity, straightforwardness and moral courage which were infinitely creditable

We don't know whether any of the families took action under the Fatal Accidents Act 1846 against Wren & Bennett and we don't know how the loss – estimated at about £1,000 for the buildings and £7,000 for the machinery – was made good, and whether covered by insurance.  I don't know if Wren & Bennett changed the way they used cast iron afterwards.  But the experience must have been formative for John.

Next: 26. John Hopkinson: out & about in Manchester in the 1840s

24. Messrs Kershaw & Leese: factory conditions in the 1840s

John had mentioned to Mr Wren "my acquaintance with your business connection" and this can clearly be seen in his chat with Thomas Eskrigge.  Perhaps it isn't a coincidence that, like John, the partners of Kershaw & Leese were all Congregationalists.  They were also good examples of the tough, energetic businessmen and industrialists who were forming a new type of ruling class in Manchester, to the fascination of outside observers.  

James Kershaw (c1795-1864) was the son of a handloom weaver.  As a boy, his first job had been sweeping up in a warehouse and had worked long and hard, from 6 o'clock in the morning till 8 o'clock at night, teaching himself the skills to become an office clerk then a sales representative and he had risen to be the best cotton buyer at the Manchester Exchange.  He became a mill owner, Mayor of Manchester and Liberal MP for Stockport. 

Joseph Leese (1783-1861) had begun as a draper but he had made his fortune in textile manufacture.  He and his partners worked a twelve hour day with a break of 75 minutes for dinner.  His character is caught in a conversation quoted in the Manchester City News of 21 January 1865 – he is talking to the Liberal industrialist and Unitarian Sir Thomas Potter (1774-1845)

I tell thee what, friend Tom, I wouldn't give thee sixpence for all thou knows, and I'll sell thee all I know for sixpence – the fact is, as your own experience has proved, that if a man wants to get on in Manchester, there's nothing for it but downright hard work, and sticking to it. 

Joseph Leese's first wife Ann was buried in 1837 at the Nonconformist graveyard beside Rusholme Road Chapel – the Rusholme Road Cemetery, now a park called Gartside Gardens.

John's friendly adviser Thomas Eskrigge (1800-58) had become managing partner at Kershaw Leese & Co after he was bankrupted by a fire in his cotton factory in Warrington.  He was an influential town councillor and, according to his political enemies, was not above dirty tricks.  It was before the secret ballot was introduced and party allegiances were known in advance.  A few months after the fatal accident at the India Mills, his son Thomas, it was alleged, "bottled" voters – that is, he kidnapped them and shut them away, well supplied with alcohol, until voting was over so that they couldn't vote against the Liberal candidate.

Mr Eskrigge has the dubious distinction of being named by Karl Marx, a frequent visitor to Manchester, in Das Kapital ("Ein gewisser Eskrigge, Baumwollspinner von der Firma Kershaw, Leese et Co") as an example of the control that millowners had as magistrates.

Even before John was born, anxiety had been growing about conditions in the new steam-powered textile factories.  Sir Robert Peel in 1816 had told a Committee of the House of Commons that whenever he had visited his own factories he "was struck with the uniform appearance of bad health, and, in many cases, stinted growth of the children."  The Parliamentary battle to regulate factory conditions had been under way since John Hopkinson was a little boy – a long struggle to establish an effective inspectorate and enforcement of regulations.

Medical men across Europe noted the physical effects of long hours standing working in the noisy, dusty, cramped conditions of the factories, constantly attending inexorable machinery – the physical deformities produced by the different types of work – the disruption of traditional family life from all members of the family working all hours – the exposure to contagious diseases in crowded conditions – the indiscriminate, unsafeguarded mixing of girls and women with all sorts of men and boys – the sheer length of hours constantly worked – the lack of normal childhood exercise – the lack of education for the children.  In England, the question of their education was further complicated by the battle between Nonconformists and the Established Church as to who should run the schools.  Male commentators found the fact of working women very unsettling – what had happened to the laws of nature and morality?  How could a decent life be maintained?  What was the link with prostitution?

Reformers concentrated their efforts on child labour, essential to the working of early mills, as restricting children's hours could lead to their goal, a ten-hour working day for adults.  

Children worked as pieceners or piecers, joining broken threads.  They walked all day alongside the spinning mule as it went constantly back and forward and when a thread broke on the whirling spindles as it was stretched and twisted, a child had to run forward at once and with skilful small hands join the broken ends together.  The littlest children worked as scavengers, crawling under the machinery to clean oil and dirt from the working parts.  The millowner and Radical MP John Fielden, who had started work himself as a child of ten and who drove the Ten Hours Bill through Parliament in 1847, calculated that a child in his factory walked 20 miles in its working day.  

For the millowners, anxious for their companies' position in the competition for trade and keen to watch their profits, children suffered no lasting harm from this work – and, if there was harm, it was unavoidable.  Children were small, nimble workers – their work was essential – they were cheap and kept costs down – their earnings supplemented the family income of the poorest parents.  

On the one side, the millowner's interests – on the other, the parents' interest in maximising family income.  There was nobody but the state to look out for the children's interests.  Their position was pitiable.  Reformers pointed out bitterly that, when slavery was abolished in the colonies, the Act provided that former slaves should work no more than a 45 hour week.  Children in Britain were working 12 or 14 hours a day.   As a spinner described to the parliamentary Commission in 1833

I find it difficult to keep my piecers awake the last hours of a winter's evening; have seen them fall asleep, and go on performing their work with their hands while they were asleep, after the billey had stopped, when their work was over; I have stopped and looked at them for two minutes, going through the motions of piecening when they were fast asleep, when there was no work to do, and they were doing nothing; children at night are so fatigued that they are asleep often as soon as they sit down, so that it is impossible to wake them to sense enough to wash themselves, or even to eat a bit of supper, being so stupid in sleep

The early Factory Acts – because of the dependence on child labour – allowed for the children to work in shifts (the "relay" system) so that the adults could continue to work up to 15 hours a day.  

A relay system was permitted if approved by the local magistrates.  Meanwhile, some were using a "false relay" system to get round the legislation – when children were allowed to choose their own meal breaks, it was impossible to track the hours they worked.  

Thomas Eskrigge proposed a relay system for his mill.  The factory inspectors refused and a few months later, another mill owner called Robinson ("ein Individuum namens Robinson, ebenfalls Baumwollspinner, und wen nicht der Freitag, so jedenfalls der Verwandte des Eskrigge" – "if not his Man Friday, at all events related to Eskrigge") appeared before the local magistrates to face charges of operating a similar system.

Marx wrote that Robinson appeared before Stockport borough magistrates on the charge of introducing into his own mill the identical relay system invented by Eskrigge.  Four magistrates were on the bench, three of them cotton spinners with Eskrigge at their head.  Eskrigge acquitted Robinson and then introduced the system into his own factory.  The composition of the bench in itself was in violation of the law, Marx pointed out – by Sir John Hobhouse's Factory Act, it was forbidden to any owner of a cotton-spinning or weaving mill, or the father, son, or brother of such owner, to act as Justice of the Peace in any inquiries that concerned the Factory Act.

We don't know John's thoughts on the hotly debated issues of the 1840s – but we do know that he spent decades of his adult life on Manchester Council working for civic improvements and was particularly remembered for ending the frequent flooding of the River Medlock with all the hardship that caused.  And we know that he was deeply influenced by his guide and mentor the Revd James Griffin, who wrote movingly of his father's exhortation always to "consider the poor" and that, far from ignoring the slums inhabited by the poor, two of the young men of the Rusholme Road Chapel went into Little Ireland, which lay only about half a mile from the Chapel.

Friedrich Engels, who was sent as a very young man to work in the family firm in Salford in 1842, described Little Ireland vividly in his Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England (1845), published after his return to Germany in 1844.  (It was published in England in 1887 as The Condition of the Working Class in England):

in a rather deep hole, in a curve of the Medlock and surrounded on all four sides by tall factories and high embankments, covered with buildings, stand two groups of about two hundred cottages, built chiefly back to back, in which live about four thousand human beings, most of them Irish ...

ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten doorposts, or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench … 

in each of these pens, containing at most two rooms, a garret and perhaps a cellar, on average twenty human beings live … in the whole region, for each one hundred and twenty persons, one usually inaccessible privy is provided …

Plaque to Little Ireland: by Nick Harrison

A few years after the accident at Kershaw & Leese's India Mills, when John was a partner in Wren & Bennett, there was a far more serious accident in which 13 people were killed.  The story gives us a glimpse into the practices of the firm in which John was trained, and into the difficulties faced by engineers at the time. 

Next: 25. The disaster at the Brinksway Mill, Stockport in 1850

23. John Hopkinson looks to his future: 1846

A year before this accident John had reached a turning point in his career.  He was out of his apprenticeship but finding it very difficult to get a clear answer from his employers about any future he might have with the firm.

On 28 May 1846 he wrote a long chatty letter to his mother, who was away from home visiting his sister Ellen Tubbs, giving her the news from home and all about the latest developments at work

Well now, dearest Mother, since you went away I have been very anxiously trying a new move respecting business.

He had seen an advertisement for a manager for extensive slate quarries but on finding out that the quarries were in Ireland, that there had been a great number of applicants and that he had no real hope of getting the post, he had decided to drop the plan.  But it had proved useful in another way.  Needing a referee, he had given the name of Mr Thomas Eskrigge (1800-58), the managing partner at Kershaw & Leese – he must have come to know him pretty well during the work on the India Mills.

Naturally, he had to tell Mr Eskrigge of this and so, as he told his mother, he explained to him that it was 

no longer worth while to remain with W. and B.  He expressed the utmost surprise that I should wish to leave or that they should allow me to go and said "Have you tried the old folks hard up?"  I told him I had gone as far as my delicacy would permit.  In the course of a long conversation he showed considerable interest in my position, said that he should himself tell Mr Wren that it would be unwise to part with me, and I could perceive that he knows much better than I supposed the state of affairs between Wren and Bennett.

John decided to write to Mr Wren 

and submit some definite proposition to him in which I hope to get a decisive answer which I find I can never get in conversation.

He thought Henry Wren junior was in favour of him staying with the firm and he knew that 

It is Mr Bennett who stands most directly in my way – at the same time that he likes me better than the others do.  in fact Mr Wren has never expressed a word of satisfaction at anything I have ever done.  I told Henry plainly that I was looking out for another situation or rather that I had one in view and that I certainly would not stop unless they put me on a different footing, both as regards position and pay.

I tell you all this, dearest Mother, because I know how much interested you ever have been and ever will be in every concern of mine and it is not the first time we have talked over such matters.  I feel the necessity for seeking Divine direction and council and doubt not that whatever the result may be, whether agreeable or adverse, that it will be for good ultimately.

So John wrote a careful letter on 10 June 1846 to Mr Wren senior, who had indicated in the past that a future partnership was possible but that, while Mr Bennett stayed in the business, no definite plan could be made.  John stated plainly and politely that he was willing to wait on that chance but that in the meantime he expected to be paid, pointing out that

You will see that, in giving a premium of £100 and receiving no wages for above five years, my position is at least £45 a year worse than that of an apprentice who is bound on the usual terms with the expectation of ultimately becoming a journeyman.  Besides which, it seems that, with the education I have received and my acquaintance with your business connection, I might be much more usefully employed and with more satisfaction to all parties than to continue working as a journeyman millwright.

Within weeks, he had an interview with Mr Wren and Mr Bennett and matters were arranged.  Eighteen months later, in January 1848, John used his inheritance from his father John Lomax to buy a share in the partnership of the firm.

Next: 24. Messrs Kershaw & Leese: factory conditions in the 1840s

22. Messrs Kershaw & Leese: the India Mills, Stockport

Messrs Kershaw & Leese were building one of the largest mills in the country, the India Mills on Heaton Lane, Stockport.  It would hold 70,000 spindles and 1,000 looms and John – though still an apprentice – was given the brief of designing the buildings and supervising the erection of the iron-work and the gearing. (The building that John designed was, I believe, replaced at some later point in the century.  The India Mills are no longer standing).

A near accident and a fatality at the India Mills must have impressed him deeply and personally with the responsibility and the dangers of his work.  In the words of his daughter Mary

While engaged in starting the Mills he had a remarkably narrow escape.  Slipping, he fell some twenty feet on to a stone foundation between two pairs of revolving wheels, but fortunately without receiving any injury

She tells another, undated, story

On another occasion, when a heavy iron ball falling from a height of sixty feet and passing close to his face, buried itself in the ground at his feet, he had another narrow escape

But she doesn't tell the story of the fatal accident that happened in July 1847 to one of Wren & Bennett's own workforce at the India Mills.  The interior of the engine house was still unfinished – it had no floor and access to the pipes was by planks laid in different directions – when a steam pipe burst at the starting time of the engine.  

John Hampson, the engineer, was in the engine house with a 24 year old assistant, George Knight, a "steady sober young man", according to the Manchester Examiner of 27 July 1847.  John Hampson may have been about to turn on the steam into the cylinders.  George, it was thought, was greasing pistons while standing on a plank about fourteen feet (4.25m) above a feed pipe.  The pipe was about twelve inches (30cm) in diameter and connected the boilers and the engine cylinders.  There was a hole and flange of about the same diameter in the pipe with a lid screwed down on top.  Suddenly, before the steam had been turned into the cylinders, there was a loud explosion and this lid was blown off.  The engine house filled with steam.

John Hampson escaped, though burned.  The heat in the engine house was so fierce that, although they opened windows and did all they could, it was half an hour before they could get in to look for George Knight.  They thought, when they found his body, that he must have fallen or been thrown by the explosion off the planks and that he had died of scalding because they could see "the skin peeled off his body."  The doctors later said he had been suffocated by the steam.  It was thought that the small valve which let out the cold water had not been opened before the steam was turned on – whose responsibility this was is not clear from the newspaper reports – "as the box valve has before frequently borne a far greater pressure."

"It is expected," reported the Manchester Examiner matter-of-factly, "that it will take four or five days to repair the damage, during which time the mill will have to be stopped."

Next: 23. John Hopkinson looks to his future: 1846

21. John Hopkinson, millwright & engineer: the 1840s

A little while after John recovered from smallpox, he went to an interview with the partners of Messrs Wren & Bennett and on 30 May 1840 he was bound an unpaid "gentleman apprentice" for a five year term, his trustees paying a premium of £100 for his training.

Sixteen year old John would walk in from the outskirts of town into the smoke and noise of Manchester every morning to start the 12 hour working day at 6 o'clock.  

Messrs Wren & Bennett's works were at 31 Dale Street and 6 Newton Street in today's Northern Quarter, a little north of the Rochdale Canal.  There would soon be a new railway station on Store Street, a short way south of the Canal – opening on 8 May 1842, it would much later be called Manchester Piccadilly Station.

O.S. map of Messrs Wren & Bennett's works 
(National Library of Scotland)

The works were on a split site, which can be seen on this O.S. map of 1851: firstly the Newton Street Iron Works, which were bounded by Newton Street, Friday [Faraday] Street, Hilton Street and Port Street (this building was clad in concrete in 1960 and is today a listed building called Marlsbro House); secondly, the small L-shaped 'Iron Yard' across the road; and thirdly the "Machine Manufactury" on the corner of Newton Street, Port Street and Dale Street, a large 6-storey workshop.

There is a drawing of the premises in Dale Street as they were in the mid-1830s by James Nasmyth, famous for his development of the steam hammer.  He was a good friend of the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell's family and is said to have been the model of Mr Manning in Mrs Gaskell's Sylvia's Lovers.  He had rented a place there from Wren & Bennett and Mr Bennett had helped fund his work – in fact, Mr Bennett married his sister, the painter Anne Nasmyth.  The drawing was made years later from memory, and it's not entirely to be relied on – too many stories, for a start – but it gives a vivid idea of the tall buildings and the smoke stacks that John will have known. 

The newness and strangeness of Manchester, its people, its industry, its amazing growth was a source of huge fascination, a mixture of admiration and horror.  The historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), the commanding cultural figure of the day, wrote of 

Sooty Manchester … every whit as wonderful, as fearful, unimaginable, as the oldest Salem or Prophetic City.  

The MP and future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81) described in his novel Coningsby of 1844 how his hero

had travelled the whole day through the great district of labour, his mind excited by strange sights, and at length wearied by their multiplication.  He had passed over the plains where iron and coal supersede turf and corn, dingy as the entrance of Hades, and flaming with furnaces; and now he was among illumined factories with more windows than Italian palaces and smoking chimneys taller than Egyptian obelisks.

John was daily among these illumined factories and smoking chimneys and he was at the cutting edge of industry in possibly the most exciting town in Europe.  And around him all his young life had been the noise of the great socio-economic debates of the time, with the 1840s the most turbulent decade of all:  

• the long struggle to reform conditions in mines and factories

• Chartism, the mass movement with a violent fringe, with its vast meetings and huge petitions demanding electoral reform so that the voices of workpeople would be heard in Parliament – the workforce at Wren & Bennett's walked out for a time in August 1842, when approached by some of the Chartists.  At that point there were over 2,000 troops in Manchester in case of disorder

• the depressions in trade and the waves of strikes and protests by desperate workers against working conditions, new machinery and cuts in wages

• the arrival in Manchester of the emaciated, starving and destitute Irish seeking to escape the Great Irish Famine (1845-52), the result of Europe-wide potato blight combining with the disastrous laissez-faire politics of the Whig government in Westminster to produce an enormous death toll

• the Anti-Corn Law League, with the efficient campaign of industrialists and middle class employers against protectionist tariffs on imported grain, a campaign depicted in graphic colours as a fight against the injustice of the landed interests of the countryside hampering exports and starving the poor by pushing up the price of bread

• the call for Free Trade and low regulation, with businessmen and industrialists at the forefront

• the battle between Nonconformists and the Established Church over who should educate the children of the poor and how 

• the battle of Nonconformists for the final end of discrimination against them and for full civil rights

• the growing concern, and increasing use of statistics, of medical men and public health officials across Europe as they examined the appalling conditions in the new towns and cities

He was learning the skills of a mill architect, millwright and mechanical engineer from two engineers in their fifties, working for them at the premises in Manchester and travelling about the country with them on business.  

The partnership between Henry Wren and William Bennett was only about eight years old, but the business itself was much older.  

It had first been established by Thomas Cheek Hewes (1768-1832), pioneer of the suspension wheel.  The son of an Essex farmer, Hewes had settled in Manchester in 1792 as a maker of water wheels and millwork and then, towards the end of the decade, he had started making steam engines.  

Hewes was a highly respected millwright.  He built the great waterwheel at the Quarry Bank Mill at Styal in Cheshire (which is a National Trust property today) and his firm, and its successors Wren & Bennett and Wren & Hopkinson, were employed as millwrights there until the 1900s, installing and repairing gearing, advising on improvements to the power system and liaising with Boulton and Watt.

Quarry Bank Mill by David Dixon

Henry Wren (1782-1858) was born in Dalston near Carlisle, where the baptismal record of his brother Timothy shows that their father was a "house carpenter."  He came to Manchester as a very young man and worked for Thomas Cheek Hewes, who made him his partner.  They traded very successfully as Hewes & Wren – one historian of factories, Jennifer Tann, has written that "the partnership of Hewes and Wren and later of Wren and Bennett marked the zenith of the millwrighting trade".

When Thomas Cheek Hewes died in 1832, Henry Wren took Nottinghamshire-born millwright William Bennett (1788-1866) into partnership, and the business became Wren & Bennett.  

When John started as an apprentice, both men lived near the works.  They hadn't yet moved out to the middle-class suburbs and the Bennetts were renting in Lever Street and the Wrens in Dale Street itself – there are still early 19th century houses to be seen in both streets.  The Wren family's house at Number 43 had, according to the Rate Book, a gross estimated rental value in 1841 of £40 – interestingly, the value for John's family home in Rumford Street was £45 – while Mr and Mrs Bennett, at 9 Lever Street, lived in a house with a gross estimated rental value of £60.  

Also in the business was Henry Wren junior, known in the firm as Mr Henry; he was about four years older than John Hopkinson and he was obviously destined to take over the business from his father in due course.

John soon proved his worth to his principals.  His aptitude for the work, his education and enquiring mind together with his early experience working on building sites around his home meant that before he was out of his apprenticeship he had been entrusted with a major project.

Next: 22. Messrs Kershaw & Leese: the India Mills, Stockport

9: What was John Hopkinson like?

His childhood activities show he was

• intelligent, practical & active

• determined – he made a good attempt at running away from school – and hard working – spending his holidays with the workmen

• deeply committed to his religion and well taught by his pastor

• strong-willed and loving truth & justice – and his upbringing clearly curbed the passionate temper of his early childhood

We have a physical description of him in old age

• a very pink face with masses of beautiful white hair

• we can see from photographs that his eyes must have been blue

• a booming voice

After his death, his daughter-in-law Evelyn – the widow of his son John – described how he had supported her, writing of

• his "warm love and understanding"

• "such warmth of heart, such tender sympathy"

• "a great teacher" 

• the "patient tenderness" with which he taught the young

And Ellen Ewing describes him as "by nature, more unselfish" than his wife Alice.

These are qualities which he must had from his early days.

Meanwhile, in that part of the West Riding of Yorkshire known since ancient times as Craven …

Next:  10: John Dewhurst of Skipton (1787-1864): the father of Alice Dewhurst

8: John Hopkinson goes to school: 1829-1840

John's granddaughter Mary gives us three stories from his early years, recorded by him in his notebook:

When he was about 5, he was sent out with Nurse and his sisters for a morning walk.  He was dressed in

The Yellow Boy by Sir Henry Raeburn
National Galleries of Scotland 

"very clean nankeen frock and trowsers" with very strict instructions to keep them clean and tidy

• at this point, the fashion for skeleton suits (high-waisted trousers buttoned onto a short jacket, as shown in the 'Basket of Cherries' below) was beginning to go and, from now until the 1860s, boys aged between about three and seven wore tunics over trousers like Walter Ross, portrayed by Sir Henry Raeburn in 'The Yellow Boy' of 1822.  The tunics might be loose and worn with a belt, or they might have a fitted waistband; there were a variety of styles

• John's suit was made of nankeen – pale yellow or buff-coloured cotton

• they must have been walking along Upper Brook Street, past scattered houses and villas and alongside open fields.  The fields weren't fenced or walled but enclosed by earth banks, behind which were deep wide ditches that filled with water after it had rained

• John ran ahead of the others – and the top of one of the banks was so inviting that he climbed it – only to topple over and fall into the water.  (I can't quite make out whether it was into one of the ditches or into the pond at the corner of Plymouth Grove and Upper Brook Street)  

• luckily one of his sisters saw him disappear and Nurse ran up and fished him out.  There was, he wrote, plenty of water to drown in

• even after 70 years he could still feel how uncomfortable he was in his clinging wet, dripping, draggled, dirty clothes – and "the internal and mental anguish" as he thought anxiously, "What would Mother say?"  She scolded him, just as he feared, and she sent him to bed for the rest of the day with no dinner

• his 8 year old sister Mary came up secretly to bring him something to eat.  He was very hungry but he wouldn't take the food – he preferred, he wrote, "loyally to endure the just sentence."

When he was five or six, he had a fight with Miss Stothart the governess

• she was a tall, gaunt woman with "no notion of children" – rather an odd choice for the job, we might think – and she had taken a toy from John's two year old sister Alice.  (This picture gives us an example of a little girl of the time)

  

  Children in 1828:
  'Basket of Cherries' by E W Gill

• John called Miss Stothart a thief and she took him bodily out of the room and into the passage at the bottom of the stairs.  There she held the struggling boy and unwisely dared him to say it again – so, of course, he had no choice.  "You are a thief, Miss Stothart," he said with utter conviction

• he couldn't remember what the consequence was, but years later one of his sisters wrote in a letter that when he was a little boy, "he loved truth and justice".

John was clearly a strong-willed and passionate child

• his eldest sister Ellen used to tell the story of how, when he was about 5 or 6, he was such a furious temper that he shouted out to her, "I will kill you!  I will kill you!" 

• Ellen, with great presence of mind, picked up the carving knife and said, "Do it, John."  It stopped him short and Ellen couldn't remember any outburst after that

In 1829 he was sent to a "ladies' school" – a genteel version of a dame school, I think – in Bloomsbury, Rusholme Road.  (I find on old maps that Bloomsbury was the name given to the western end of Rusholme Road beginning at Oxford Street.  I find, for example, the notice of an auction of very upmarket furniture to be held in 1844 at No 118 Bloomsbury "a few doors from Oxford Street")  

When he was 7½ and at the ladies' school, on 8 September 1831 Manchester celebrated the coronation of King William IV and Queen Adelaide with a grand procession.  John saw it go by from an upper window of a shop in Downing Street, which led to Ardwick Green – Alice must have obtained places for the family there

• all the windows on the route were packed with people and it was a pity that the weather was bad.  It had started with heavy rain and it drizzled most of the morning, so that many of the tens of thousands of Sunday School children in Manchester and Salford couldn't turn out

• John will have seen the Sunday Schools go by with their flags, and the 8th Hussars and the 18th Light Infantry – who would stop and fire a celebratory volley on Ardwick Green – and there were also bands, town dignitaries, the firemen with their fire engine, the freemasons, the Friendly Societies and all the trades, from tailors to organ-builders

• the trades had assembled at their club-houses before taking their places and their carriages must have been the best sight of all – the tin-plate workers had a man in a suit of scale armour, the farriers had a forge and four men at full work, the stone masons had a man working on a block of marble ... Messrs Fairbairn & Lillie, millwrights, had a waggon carrying an ancient mill and a modern steam engine and Mr Nathan Gough's men had a waggon bearing a steam engine at work, turning an organ playing national airs ...

• from his earliest days John took a deep interest in the work of artisans – perhaps this was one of the sights that first caught his attention.

At about the age of 8, boys graduated from tunics.  They began to wear short jackets, usually short and single-breasted, with trousers, which were generally narrowly cut

• in this practical outfit, John  began the next stage of his education at the boys' school at the

  

  Fairfield Moravian Church by S Parish
  CC BY-SA 2.0

  Moravian Settlement at Fairfield, which stood in the countryside some four miles to the east of his home

• Moravians were the earliest Protestants and their Settlement in Fairfield was opened in 1785.  It functioned as a self-contained village and, as education was an important part of their culture, they were known for their schools.  It isn't clear from Mary Hopkinson's account whether John was a boarder there or not

• he stayed at the Moravian School for two years  

At about this time, the family moved to Upper Brook Street, perhaps towards the southern end where short terraces of houses with gardens laid behind them made way for villas set in their own grounds.  There they lived 6 or 7 years.

In 1834, when he was 10, he left the Moravian School to become a boarder at Greenwood's School at Warley near Halifax, about 25 miles from home.  I think this must be the school advertising the new term here in the Leeds Mercury of 27 June 1835:

The Rev B Greenwood, A.B., begs to return his most cordial Thanks to his numerous Friends for their Patronage of his Establishment during a Number of Years.  He hopes that the Improvement of his Accommodations for Pupils will secure to his Academy a Continuance of that Support which it will be his Study and Ambition to merit. 

Terms for Board and Education from £20 to £26 per Annum, according to the age of the Pupil.

The School Re-opens on Monday, July 20th.

Spring Garden Academy, Warley, near Halifax

Spring Garden School later became Warley Grammar School – according to Malcolm Bull's Calderdale Companion it was on Burnley Road, Sowerby Bridge

• John had bright memories of receiving a Simnel cake from home, of a visit from his sister Ellen, then aged about 17 or 18, and of a journey to Bolton Abbey

• but when his finger was broken, it was set crooked and his mother went to see Dr Robertson (it isn't clear if this was the doctor or a master)

• and this can't have been a happy time for John, because he ran away from school and managed to reach Todmorden, about 10 miles off, before he was caught  

So it isn't surprising to find that after 18 months his mother removed him.  

In 1836, when he was 12, she sent him to Thomson's School at Bradford.  This was, according to White's Directory of 1837, at Westbrook House in Horton Road and was run by the Rev Andrew Weir Thomson.  As far as I can tell, this is the Westbrook House in Great Horton, a couple of miles south-west of Bradford. This advertisement in the York Herald of 4 January 1834 shows that Mr Thomson had started his school only a couple of years before John's arrival:

Boarding School Establishment

West-Brook House, Bradford

The Rev Andrew W Thomson will resume his Public Duties 

on Monday, 13th January next

Terms

Board and Tuition ... 35 Guineas per annum

Washing ... 2 Ditto ditto

Entrance, One Guinea

Drawing, Music, French, &c. on the usual Terms

Vacations at Midsummer and Christmas, One Month each.

A Quarter's Notice previously to leaving School.

Reference is kindly permitted to the Rev T Taylor,

Messrs Milligan and Forbes, Bradford; to William Tetley,

Esq., Asenby Lodge; and Mr Henry Masterman, Stationer, Thirsk.

Dec 23, 1833

It was in the Midsummer vacation of 1838 that John recorded in his notebook the great celebration in Manchester of another coronation – that of the young Queen Victoria, who was not quite 5 years older than John himself.  Another huge procession took place, the streets were packed, every window and doorway jammed and there were stages built wherever they could be fitted.  Among the 50,000 Sunday School children in the procession were those of the Rusholme Road Chapel.  It was a splendid occasion – interrupted by the chaos caused by a sudden and luckily brief thunderstorm.  

At Christmas 1838 he left the Rev Thomson's school.  He was nearly 15 and had reached the final stage of growing up – he must by now have been wearing a coat with tails, as the men did

• in January 1839, his mother sent to him to Mr Dougal's school at Chorlton Hall, which I think must have been the nearby Chorlton Hall in Chorlton-upon-Medlock.  A few years later it was being run as an early business school for young gentlemen, where they could learn practical skills such as mechanical drawing – I wonder whether this had started in John's time there

• by now he was spending most of his holidays with the bricklayers, joiners and other trades on the building sites springing up around his home, and he'd recorded in his notebook that work on the Manchester and Leeds Railway had begun.  

Manchester was now a phenomenon, one of the wonders of the modern world, the place where industrialisation could be seen going full pelt – and a place that horrified people.  The town astounded visitors with the noise, the smoke, the contrast between the huge factories, the vast workshops, the splendid stone buildings and the hovels and cellars, the squalor and wretchedness of the urban poor.  

The family was now living in Lloyd Street, Greenheys in the south-western part of the township of Chorlton-upon-Medlock.  It was semi-rural, if not actually rural, but building sites were never far away as Manchester extended ever further.  

Life for the Hopkinson family was about to change because the first of them was to leave home 

• Ellen was to marry George Ibberson Tubbs, a 26 year old Congregational minister, born in Mildenhall, Suffolk

• we don't know how Ellen met George.  Perhaps he was related to somebody she knew in Manchester or perhaps, like the Rev James Griffin, he came to Manchester to take services or preach in one of the chapels

• Ellen was married on 21 February 1839 in the Rusholme Road Chapel, Mr Griffin officiating

• Ellen had now passed her 21st birthday and come into the income left her by her father

• it's interesting that the space left for father's name in the register was left blank by Mr Griffin and Ellen's name is given simply as Ellen Hopkinson, missing out her middle name Lomax, but we can see her irregular birth did not prevent her making a very respectable marriage and becoming a minister's wife

• Ellen and George left Manchester for Warminster in Wiltshire, where he was a minister, and it was there that the first three children of their large family were born.  

In February 1840, John had his 16th birthday.  In the early part of the year he had a mild attack of smallpox, but luckily it left no scars.  He had reached the end of his schooldays and the beginning of his working life:  

• he became a Sunday School teacher at the Rusholme Road Chapel.  (His sisters were all Sunday School teachers there – James Griffin describes them as "among the most beloved and devoted teachers in the school") and

• on 30 May 1840 he was bound for 5 years as a "gentleman apprentice" to Messrs Wren & Bennett, Millwrights and Engineers

• this meant that a £100 premium was paid and he would receive no wages

So we can see that his mother Alice – who had taken up his part with Dr Robinson after his finger was set crooked, and who had let him spend his vacations out and about with the workmen – let him follow his talents and aptitude when it came to choosing his path in life.  She didn't insist, as some might have done, that he spent his vacations at his books and that he became a lawyer or a doctor.  She was devoted to her children and deeply interested in their concerns and she backed John's choice.

Next:  9: What was John Hopkinson like?