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?