7: Becoming a member of the Rusholme Road Chapel

I don't know how many of the large regular congregation packing the galleries at Rusholme Road became members of the church, because no records remain.  Becoming a member was a serious matter

• when James Griffin first knew the chapel, there was a membership of 28; a year later it had increased to 36 people drawn from "a few wealthy families and a few others well-to-do, though not wealthy, with only a very few persons besides of a poorer class" – it was then that he began the informal afternoon services

• we know that Alice Hopkinson was in the congregation and that her children were to become members – we don't know if she became a member herself.

We know the membership process that James Griffin followed, because of his account of two young people, Henry and Fanny Burnett

• the Burnetts had attended a service almost by chance, on seeing the chapel lights and the people going in.  After a few months of increasing involvement, they approached Mr Griffin about becoming members

• in those days, applying for membership was slow and protracted, involving serious conversation with the minister and much deliberation.  All young ministers naturally wanted to increase their membership, but Mr Griffin "was aware of the serious injury that might be done to souls and to the character of the Church by hasty and incautious admissions, and was anxious to avoid it"  

• successful applicants were received into the church at special meetings held on a Saturday evening.  The congregation loved these meetings because

• Elder and younger believers often felt their spiritual comfort and strength renewed.  The deacons, the Sunday school teachers, and other workers in the vineyard, found fresh stimulus to their gratitude, faith and zeal, as the letters of the candidates were read by the pastor, and the brethren gave their testimony respecting them

I think when Mr Griffin wrote to John Hopkinson with these questions (which are quoted by Ellen Ewing in John and Alice Hopkinson, as one of "the earliest papers concerning John"), it may well be a prompt for the letter to be read at such a meeting:

(1) Will you please state what you perceive in your feelings and sentiments that lead you to suppose a work of grace has begun in your soul?

(2) Can you mention by what means that work appears to have commenced and carried on in your mind?

(3) How do you expect to find acceptance before God as a sinner?

(4) You will oblige me, my dear young friend, by answering these enquiries freely in the form of a letter.  And the Lord and Saviour guide and bless you.

As there aren't any records from Rusholme Road, but there is a lucky survival in Northallerton Archives from the Silver Street Congregational Chapel in Whitby, I'll quote this letter in full.  

It was written by  the 24 year old Mrs Sarah Buchannan of Lythe, near Whitby, who was applying for membership in 1808.  (She was my 4 x great-grandmother).  It's a story like The Dairyman's Daughter – we have no reason to think she is writing of anything more than a girlhood spent thinking of little worldly pleasures like dress and fun.  I have altered the punctuation slightly so as to make it more readable:  

Sirs,

For 24 years I lived in a state of sin and wickedness although often reproved yet I did not see the misery of it until going with some friends to hear Mr Arundell preach he observed that he saw such a beauty in religion that he would not change if he was shown there was no hereafter        

This somewhat alarmed me as I always thought it the gloomiest thing in life.  

I pondered this is my mind for some time and one Sunday evening after leaving my companions and sitting alone I began to think in what an unprofitable manner we had spent the day in regard to [our] Poor Soul[s]        

No sooner had the thought ceased in my mind than it pleased God to open my eyes to see myself in such a dreadful state my sins all rushing in upon me so that I began to despair of ever finding mercy for I was terrified day and night that I had committed the unpardonable sin and when I prayed I thought I only provoked God      in short I was so tormented in my mind that I thought hell itself could not be worse and was often tempted to take away my own life          

But it pleased God he spared me a little longer and continuing in prayer to God to keep me from this evil it often came to my mind my grace is sufficient for others 2 Cor.12.9   And being in great distress of mind one day sat down to read and open'd in the 7th chapter of Matthew and reading the 7th he saith "ask and it shall be given you, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you for every one that asketh receiveth."    

This was a comfortable passage to me as I was brought so low, so that I thought that if the Lord would spare me to recover that I would never sin again            

But I had no sooner recovered than I fell away again as bad as ever and it is a mercy that I was ever called again          

But the Lord opened my eyes again to see that I could do nothing of myself so that I may say that it is grace alone that made me seek so for God and not of myself so that I have ever enabled to rest my salvation in the merits of Christ and no further trust in any works of my own and it has been my supreme wish for to become a member of your church and to be united with the people of God I have ventured to ask admission.

Sarah Buchannan

So we can see that, if Alice wished to become a member, she would not need to be precise about her sins in her public letter, but we can assume that she would have told her whole story to her pastor.  

Next:  8: John Hopkinson goes to school: 1829-1840

6: James Griffin on the working classes & the poor

James Griffin writes with great sympathy of the Christian poor

• they were "unconstrained by conventional forms and feelings" and, with "few things of an outward kind" except daily works, wants and domestic cares to distract them, the spiritually minded were deeply engaged in their religious concerns.  They joined together at chapel, at prayer meetings, church meetings, Sunday school, "and each one's home seems to belong to them all"

• they sat together by their firesides and walked together, and talked together of their personal experiences with a frequency and freedom not much to be found in other classes.  "Many of them are well acquainted with the Scriptures, and have very just and enlightened views of Christian truth"

• the Taylors, three sisters and a brother, were particular favourites of his

• they were "all of them very rough and uncouth in appearance and manners, but honest, upright, hard-working persons, and some of them in no common degree of shrewd and vigorous minds"

• the brother could only work at "easy jobbing things" because of his epilepsy and was at one point thought an idiot, but James Griffin gives an account of finding him by his fireside encouraging the master chimney-sweep William Davies.  Davies felt that "I am so bad, it seems as if it was hard to believe that such a sinner as I am can be saved" to which Taylor replied, "We are pardoned, justified, and saved, only through faith, without our own merits or good works, but that it is all by God's free grace, and that therefore all are invited to come, just as they are, without trying to make themselves better."

• the poor, James Griffin wrote, were often valuable fellow-helpers with their pastors "and a great comfort to them, for among no other class do they find more loving and faithful friends."

• he found on his arrival that there was no afternoon service at Rusholme Road and he thought he might get a few domestic servants to come to a Bible Class

• he asked some of his friends to mention it to their servants and on the first day 50 or 60 people turned up.  The next Sunday there were 100 to 120

• so he set up a regular service for the working people of the district and he asked the usual worshippers not to come because it was to have a special simplicity and freedom of manner

• it lasted an hour and, except for prayers, he sat in an armchair.  A Sunday School teacher came up to lead the singing.  The address was in a free and colloquial style

• after seven years, with his health failing under three services on Sunday and two in the week, lay helpers took it on until it was finally discontinued.  But by then the chapel's galleries were filled from end to end at morning and evening services with a large proportion of the working class

• and they knew that Mr Griffin was on their side – this became clear in times of industrial unrest, when it was plain that Manchester working men trusted Mr Griffin and other Nonconformist ministers, while the employers looked at them askance.

He also praised the rich of his congregation for their generosity to the chapel, their contributions never failing even when business was bad, and the donations they gave, sometimes anonymously, to be distributed to the poor.  He gives a couple of examples of sensitive assistance by the well-to-do:

• one of his poor, the widow Mrs Turner, had come to chapel without any breakfast because there was no food in the house – she depended on mangling and there had been no work that week – but she didn't like to trouble anyone with this.  She said later that she "committed my case to my Heavenly Father".  She was feeling faint and ill but it wasn't so bad, she said, as she became absorbed in the service.  Then, at the end, a man who had always sat in the next pew but had never spoken to her and whose face she had never seen, put something into her hand and left at once.  It was half-a-sovereign. The deacons made sure she was never in want of breakfast again

• one day he called at the cottage of a poor widowed old man and his daughter.  The old man told him that during the previous week they had both been so poorly that they couldn't work.  Nothing was coming in to the house and at the end of the week they had only three half-pence left.  They were sitting on the Saturday evening with the door open – it was a fine evening – when something was thrown in and fell under his chair.  He thought it was a stone thrown by the boys who were playing in the street but, when he looked under the chair, he found it was something wrapped up in paper.  He opened it and there was half-a-crown.  He went out to see if there was anyone in the street, but there were only the boys.  Mr Griffin told him it was undoubtedly some kind friend wanting to supply his wants without his knowing from whom it came

"The pious poor," he comments, "generally, so far from desiring to be pensioners on the Church, or on public or private charity in any form, are very reluctant to let their wants be known."

He tells a couple of stories of the active ministry of his congregation:

• two of the young men were going into the rough and impoverished area called Little Ireland – in 1845 Engels described it as "the most horrible spot" of the whole area –  later the population was scattered when a railway terminus was built over the slum

• then the young men went into Charter Street, which was known as the centre of a wretched neighbourhood inhabited by "the very scum of gaol deliveries".  They went among the people, found a cellar where they could hold a Sunday evening service, wrote out hymns on slips of paper for the people who could read, and carried on services in a dismal cellar by the light of a candle or two.  It was soon full to overflowing

• the minister and church tried to help the young men unobtrusively and without interference

• on the next New Year's Day, at the usual Chapel prayer-meeting at 7am, one of the young men appeared with seven men, well-dressed, "really very respectable and looking exceedingly happy".  They had come nearly two miles to be there from Charter Street.  They had been accounted some of the worst men of their neighbourhood and were now total abstainers, earning an honest living

• James Griffin notes that the two young men achieved this in the simplest and quietest manner possible, with no adverts, no processions, no music, just the Bible and tracts and kind words

• soon after he had come to Manchester, he had been invited to lead the Whitsuntide service at the Mosley Street Chapel and, just as he was about to begin, he saw three women standing hesitating on the threshold

• he stretched out his hand and beckoned to them, saying "Come in, my friends, come in; no doubt we can find room for you: come in".  They had been uncertain because they had just come from "the dram-shop" where they would go to buy "a little comfort" in the form of alcohol and the youngest of them had been leading "a vicious life" and was not long out of prison

• a few weeks later, she was brought by a woman member of the Rusholme Road Chapel to Mr Griffin.  She was quite broken and now "longing for Divine mercy".  He and some of the women spent a good deal of time with her and after some months she was proposed, at her own request, for membership.  Her health was failing and she died before it could happen, but she and her aunt – who came to chapel until her own death – and the third of the women, who returned to her Methodist upbringing, spoke until the end of their lives of the day when James Griffin had beckoned them in

Next: 7: Becoming a member of the Rusholme Road Chapel

5: The Rusholme Road Chapel & the Rev James Griffin

James Griffin, 1847

Rusholme Road has now disappeared; it connected Oxford Road and Ardwick Green, and lay just south of Grosvenor Street.  Moving there was to prove a major turning point for Alice Hopkinson and her children – it brought them to the Rusholme Road Congregational Chapel, which was to have an enormous influence on their lives.  

The chapel had only recently been built.  It stood on the corner of Rusholme Road and Upper Brook Street and had opened for worship in 1825 with an overspill congregation from two of the older Independent chapels.  

It was a plain, respectable, spacious building, not at all ornate, with a row of Ionic pillars behind the pulpit and no organ.  The Sunday School was held in a low cellar room underneath the building.  When it opened, there were nearly 80 children attending, 39 boys and 38 girls.

The Rev James Griffin may already have been minister at the Rusholme Road Chapel when Alice and the children moved into their new home.  He was to be an important family friend and advisor and he became, in Mary Hopkinson's words, "like a father to John".  So I think I should give a fairly full account here of James Griffin and the faith in which the Hopkinson children were raised and which was to have such an impact on their lives.

Young Mr James Griffin, aged nearly 23 and in training as a Nonconformist minister at Highbury College, visited Manchester for the first time in July 1828 as a supply preacher

• he had been told that he wasn't to be considered as a candidate for the pulpit – which had yet to be filled on a permanent basis – because he was still in training.  But he made such an impression that the post was offered to him and he was ordained minister on 16 September 1829

• the chapel was packed for his ordination.  The service lasted nearly five hours, and it was said that nobody left before the end.  That wasn't the end of the day – there was a second service in the evening

• John Hopkinson was then 5½ years old and the ordination was one of his earliest memories.  It must have been a long day for a child of that age.

Writing Memories of the Past: Records of Ministerial Life in 1883, James Griffin remembered finding in Manchester a "remarkable degree of really intellectual and practical energy stirring":

To live in Manchester was to live in almost constant excitement in connection with public affairs.  I should have said it was a glorious city to live in but for the smoke, and damp, and dirt of the place.  But smoke, and damp, and dirt, notwithstanding, it is now a noble city indeed

He was born in Portsea (Portsmouth) in 1806, one of seven children

• his father John was a highly esteemed Congregational minister at the King Street Chapel, a splendid new building which held 3,000 people when crowded

• his mother Hannah had died when James was nine.  The last words she was heard to say, he remembered nearly 60 years later, were "Underneath are the everlasting arms"

• James' eldest brother John had only just been appointed minister of the Congregational Chapel at Exeter when he fell ill, dying in early 1822 at the family home.  In his last days, he loved to hear his brothers sing to him the Isaac Watts' hymn

Not all the blood of beasts 

On Jewish altars slain 

 

Another brother, Samuel, became a bookseller in Portsmouth

Major influences on James Griffin as he grew up:

• his father the Rev John Griffin, who wrote missionary and devotional hymns, played an active part in encouraging vaccination against smallpox and, wrote James,

felt strongly united [to the poor] by birth, education, and conscientious principle.  He took every suitable opportunity to remind us of this fact, and to counsel us by every sacred motive to steadily and prudently 'consider the poor'

So from childhood James Griffin too felt a particular sympathy for the poor.  His tender regard for their troubles, their dignity and their wellbeing fill his memoirs

• a well-known book by the Anglican clergyman Legh Richmond called The Annals of the Poor.  The story called The Dairyman's Daughter was particularly popular and was published as a tract.  It tells the story of Elizabeth Wallbridge.  The dairyman explains to the narrator that his daughter 

was all for the world, and pleasure, and dress, and company.  Indeed, we were all very ignorant, and thought if we took care for this life, and wronged nobody, we should be sure to go to heaven at last.  My daughters were both wilful, and, like ourselves, strangers to the ways of God and the Word of his grace 

But her life was transformed by a sermon and she began to talk only 

of the goodness and love of God, and all his gracious dealings.  What a comfortable reflection, to think of spending a whole eternity in that delightful employment 

• Village Dialogues written by Rowland Hill, who had been ordained in the Church of England but left to found an independent chapel.  Hill was a friend of James' father for 40 years.  

One interesting theme deals with the adulterous Mrs Chipman, who has left her husband and child for an evil rake and comes to realise the full extent of her sin when she hears the Rev Lovegood preach on Hebrews 13:4 (Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge).  Overcome by learning of her husband's death and now fully convinced of her sin, she is so full of self-blame and self-loathing that she becomes perfectly deranged for six weeks. 

 

Mr Lovegood and Mr Worthy work steadily to bring her to believe that, whatever her sins, she can be saved by Christ.  She overcomes her feelings of worthlessness and the dread of facing people, and goes back to run her dead husband's business and raise her child.  Later writers would, one feels, sooner have brought Mrs Chipman to a penitent deathbed herself than have her re-integrate into society 

 

James Griffin explains in his memoirs that he was trained as a preacher to "aim at the conscience".  The preacher's task was of the utmost seriousness – it was to awaken in his hearers a conviction of sin and spiritual danger.  They needed to have a consciousness of sinfulness, a knowledge of their own helplessness, and a desire to cast themselves on Christ as their hope and salvation.

This makes him sound a stern and uncongenial man.  But his memoirs – which were available free online, but now seem to be available only as a reprint – reveal a delightful character, modest, with an intense interest in people, an acute social conscience and a lively desire to help.

Next:  6: James Griffin on the working classes & the poor

4: Death of John Lomax: 1827

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

John Lomax had various business ventures:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• the nephews and the trustees obviously knew all about Alice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Lomax left legacies to his family

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Alice was also to have the sum of £500

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

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

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

Ainsworth Unitarian Chapel by Alexander P Kapp

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

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

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

A tribute of respect

from his affectionate Nephews

to JOHN LOMAX Esq

of Manchester

youngest son of Richard & Ellen

Lomax of Harwood,

who departed this life on the

fifth of June 1827

 aged 63 years

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

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

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

     Alice Hopkinson    –    John Lomax

                                                 1787-1852                 c1764-1827

                                                                     |

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

                           Ellen               Elizabeth              Mary                 John               Alice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alice went out to work as a servant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peterloo, 16 August 1819

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

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

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

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

• Alice's address is given as Richmond Street

On 11 February 1824, John was born

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next:  4: Death of John Lomax: 1827

2: John Lomax of Manchester (1763/4-1827): the father of John Hopkinson

 John Lomax was the father that John Hopkinson never knew – he died before John's third birthday.  

John Lomax was born some 10 miles north-west of Manchester in the township of Harwood, which was one of the 17 townships that made up the parish of Bolton-le-Moors.  

(The following information is taken from the invaluable booklet Harwood: The Early Years by J Frederick Horridge.  I have included from the booklet a part of the projected map of Harwood c1600 and a picture of Lomax Fold.  I do recommend buying the booklet, which can be bought from Amazon – see the list of publications on the Turton Local History Society website.  And I'm very grateful for the headstart given to me by Tonge's Old Lancashire Wills)

In 1600 – about the time of the first written record of a Lomax at Lomax Fold – some 250 people lived in the township of Harwood.  

• there wasn't a village – just 16 or so farms and folds and a water cornmill.  (A fold is a farmstead surrounded by a cluster of cottages)

• about a quarter of the township was common land – cart tracks and bridle ways led between the mill, the common land and the farms

• the people had always spun yarn and woven cloth for their own use and by 1600 it was an additional source of income for many.  Chapmen acted as agents, supplying the yarn to the farms and cottages and selling the cloth 

• the farmers were all tenants to absentee landlords.  Their houses were built of dry stone with timber-framed internal walls, roofed with thatch or split-stone slate.  

In 1610, John Lomax of Owd Jacks Farm married a girl from the neighbouring township of Breightmet – his marriage brought him a farm called Old Nans

• not long afterwards, when the farmers of Harwood were able to buy their farms, he bought the freehold to the 18 Cheshire Acres (nearer 40 Statute Acres) of his farmstead.  It cost him about £66.  This was to be known for more than 200 years as Lomax Fold.

• Lomax Fold lay in the south-eastern corner of Harwood township, bordered by the Blackshaw Brook, Nab Moor, and Breightmet

Part of 'Projected map of Harwood c1600'
from Harwood: The Early Years by J Frederick Horridge

• the Harwood farmers now built themselves better houses.  The outer walls were of random or coursed stonework, and the walls inside were timber-framed with a wattle & daub infill – some had internal walls of riven oak planks.  

Lomax Fold must have looked something like Leegate Farm, Bradshaw, which remains an unspoiled example of 17th century South Lancashire rural architecture: 

Lee Gate Farm, by Plucas58 CC BY-SA 3.0 

On 31 December 1751, Richard Lomax of Lomax Fold married Ellen Knowles in the old church of St Peter's, Bolton

Old Bolton Parish Church

• Ellen was the daughter of Robert & Jane Knowles and came from Eagley Bank, a couple of miles north of Bolton

• the Knowles family had mining interests going back to Elizabethan times and Ellen's father had started pits in Eagley Bank.  Her brother Andrew and his descendants continued the business – by the end of the 19th century it dominated the mining industry in the Manchester area

• Richard developed Lomax Fold into a grand Georgian residence for his new bride.  A datestone on his extension reads 'L-RE-1757' (Lomax – Richard & Ellen – 1757).  

Some time between June 1763 and June 1764, Ellen gave birth to John 

Lomax Fold, 1806

• so John was the same age as Joséphine de Beauharnais, who married Napoleon Bonaparte, and Fletcher Christian, who led the mutiny on HMS Bounty

• he was one of the younger children of a large family – he was only five when his eldest sister Hannah married 

• he grew up in a family which belonged to a deeply-rooted network of rural kinship groups – these were people who, like their neighbours in the villages and towns around Manchester, had been diversifying into cotton and fustian manufacture for a long while

• during his childhood, the inventions of the Industrial Revolution – for example, the Spinning Jenny (1764), Arkwright's water-powered water frame (1769) and Crompton's Mule (1770s),  – revolutionised cotton production

• when John was 15 or 16, his father Richard Lomax died.  He was buried at St Peter's, Bolton-le-Moors, on 15 May 1779

• his surviving children were Hannah, Robert, Richard, Ellen, John, Jane and Betty.  Betty and Ellen were aged 6 and 11; Jane was probably in her late teens

• Richard evidently found he was land-rich and cash-poor when he made his Will.  He instructed his executors to put a value on his estate, including Lomax Fold and Old Nans, and offer it to his son Robert at that price.  If Robert refused the offer, the executors were to sell the estate.  They were to provide for Ellen out of the proceeds of sale, giving her an income for her life and the means to raise the young children.  After her death, the estate was to be divided between the children with Robert taking a double share, and Hannah taking £50 less than the others because she had already received that amount on her marriage

• Robert was still very young – probably just 21 years old – when his father Richard died.  He must have raised the money, perhaps with family help, because he took over the farms

This was the Manchester that John Lomax knew in 1800:

• the town had grown rapidly in his lifetime.  In 1784, when John was 20, a Monsieur de Givry (a Frenchman engaged in industrial espionage) had described it as a "large and superb town ... which has been built almost entirely in the past 20 to 25 years"

• in 1800 – when Napoleon had taken power in France and the war against the French had already

  

  Napoleon crossing the Alps
  by J-L David

  been going on for 8 years – Manchester's population had increased from over 40,000 to over 70,000.  People had come in from the surrounding countryside, from Scotland and from Ireland, and the town now had a high birth rate

• the canal system brought in the food for the ever increasing population.  Imports included apples from the cider districts – an important part of the diet even of the poor, valued for pies and puddings – salt butter from Ireland; and fish from the Yorkshire and Lancashire coasts (the River Irwell had no fish, being poisoned by liquor from the dye-houses)

• but the Lancashire roads were still notoriously bad, except for the famous paved causeways of stones raised above field level, just wide enough for horses but too narrow for wheeled traffic

• foreign merchants were coming to live in the town, which was becoming more and more like one of the commercial capitals of Europe

• there were many schools.  The College of Arts and Sciences was founded in 1783

• the town had a theatre, and there were the Assembly Rooms in Mosley Street, with a ballroom with glittering chandeliers and mirrors, an elegant tea-room, a billiard room and a card room

• there were Public Baths supplied by a local spring and, for half a guinea a year, subscribers could enjoy the Cold Bath, Hot or Vapour Bath or the 'Matlock or Buxton' Bath

• there was a long-established hospital (it was doctors at the Manchester Infirmary in the early 1770s who pioneered cod-liver oil treatment for rickets, a disease which had been well-known in many parts of England in the C17)

• there were three weekly newspapers and the town had its own Penny Post

• the town had an intellectual life – the Manchester Literary & Philosophical Society had been founded in 1781 

Men, however great their learning often become indolent and unambitious to improve in knowledge for want of associating with others of similar talents and improvements. But science, like fire, is put in motion by collision. Where a number of such men have frequent opportunities of meeting and conversing together, thought begets thought, and every hint is turned to advantage. A spirit of enquiry glows in every breast   [Manchester Lit & Phil, 1785]

• in the early 1790s, when the French Revolution had sharply divided public opinion in the town over political reform, a breakaway group from the Lit & Phil formed the Manchester Reading Society or "Jacobin Library" as it was known (one of the founders was Thomas Cooper, a Radical who later became a prosperous lawyer and slave-owner in the USA)

• but the town's local government had barely started and it was still governed like a village.  The fire service and police force were both inadequate 

• the rapid change and newness of the town could appal outsiders – one visitor from Rotherham wrote in 1808 "the town is abominably filthy, the Steam Engine is pestiferous, the Dyehouses noisome and offensive, and the water of the river as black as ink or the Stygian lake" 

• it was not a clean or safe town!  A description of the town in 1799:

during many wet and dark winter months, the streets have remained uncleansed and without lights; for some time no watchmen or patrols were appointed ... and none could pass through the streets in safety.  Escaping personal violence, they were still in imminent personal danger, from the numerous unguarded cellars, pits and various obstructions that every where interrupted their passage ... the streets are still crowded with annoyances ... not a street has been widened or laid open

By 1800, John was 27 years old and was a cotton manufacturer in Manchester

Cooper Street and Kennedy Street near Manchester Town Hall
cc-by-sa/2.0 © Andrew Hill geograph.org.uk/p/3803930

• the Manchester & Salford Directory 1800 shows that he was living at 9 Cooper Street, a part of Manchester favoured by the prosperous.  His office was not far away at 15 Brown Street

• cotton manufacture at this time still involved putting out work to handloom weavers – the manufacturers finished and sold the woven cloth

• soon the economic recession would enable manufacturers to offer handloom weavers only breadline wages.  By 1812, with increasing numbers of power looms in operation, the Luddites were active, breaking the machines that put them out of work.  Manchester was growing rapidly and these were restless and difficult times, with a growing gulf between the rich and the poor.  There's a good account of the industrial unrest and the increasing desperation of the weavers on the Heywood History website

John Lomax's brother Robert now lived at Lomax Fold – he was a farmer and manufacturer

• he is listed in the 1800 Directory as a dimity manufacturer (dimity was a stout cotton fabric, with a raised pattern on one side) with a Manchester place of business at 11 Crow Alley.  Harwood: The Early Years records that he became a successful velveteen manufacturer

• Robert married Mary Kay of the parish of Middleton in 1782

John Lomax's sisters married yeomen and manufacturers:

• Hannah married John Hampson, yeoman, in 1769 at St Peter's, Bolton-le-Moors; their son Richard became one of John Lomax's partners

• Jane married Richard Orrell in 1784 at Bolton-le-Moors.  He is described in the register as a weaver.  They lived at Orrell Fold in the moorland township of Turton, north of Bolton, where his family had lived since the 15th century.  

• Ellen (known as Nelly) married John Bentley, a Stockport muslin manufacturer in 1794 at Bolton-le-Moors; they were both 26 years old.  Their home was at Birch House in the township of Farnworth, near Bolton, which he bought from the previous owner at about this time.  Bentley died aged 29, only three years after the marriage, leaving Nelly with one son, John.  This engraving shows the mansion house in 1835.  (The house was sold by John Bentley junior, who moved to London)

  

  Birch House, 1835

• Betty married George Stopford, a muslin manufacturer of Stockport, in 1797 in the Manchester parish church (now the cathedral).  Muslin must have been in great demand because of the fashions of the time; by 1808 Stopford had moved to Manchester and was described as a cotton manufacturer 

Until 1807, when George Stopford retired from the firm, John Lomax was in business in Stockport & Manchester with George Stopford, John Mather and Samuel Mather

• they traded as George Stopford & Company

• I think this was almost certainly his brother-in-law George Stopford, but the name of the company suggests it was founded by Stopford's father

• John Lomax was also in a separate partnership with the two Mathers in the firm Samuel Mather & Company.  Newspaper reports from 1802 and 1804 show that the firm dealt in malt and in coffee from the slave plantations of the West Indies.  

It was when John Lomax was in business in Stockport that he was presented with a silver medal as a trustee of the Sunday School built in Stockport in 1805

• this medal is referred to by Mary Hopkinson in her memoir of her parents – in fact, all she knew for certain of her grandfather was his name and that he was given the medal

• in 1805, £6,000 had been raised for a new building on London Square for the Stockport Sunday School

• it was large enough to hold 5,000 scholars – and it was needed to provide the only education available to the children who worked 14 hour shifts in the mills from Monday to Saturday

• it was to be inter-denominational but the local Anglican clergy, who felt threatened by Methodism and Calvinism, withdrew their support 

  

  Stockport Sunday School in 1855

• it seems John Lomax was a Nonconformist, like so many in his close family – they came from an area with a long history of Nonconformity.  It had been a Puritan stronghold in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms of the 1640s

Chester Chronicle, 19 July 1805

On Sunday the 16th ult. 3000 children, educated at the Sunday Schools in Stockport, in this county, were conducted by their teachers to a spot of ground in an eligible and airy situation, purchased for erecting a building by voluntary contributions, and capable of holding upwards of 4000 scholars, where they were formed into a semi-circle, with the band of the Stockport Volunteers placed in the centre; in the front a platform was raised for the Committee, and an immense multitude surrounded the whole.  The first stone of the building having been laid the preceding night, one of the Committee stepped forward, and, in an audible voice, gave out the following hymn, in which thousands of voices joined:

These walls we to thine honour raise,

Long may they echo to thy praise.

After which another of the Committee read the following inscription, upon a brass plate, to be placed upon the foundation stone, engraved and presented by one of the scholars:- "This foundation stone of the Stockport Sunday Schools, for the education and religious instruction of the children of the labouring poor, was laid June 15, 1805"; and in an animated address, declared, that the building was intended to concentrate the piety and benevolence of all parties in favour of the poor untutored youth, and to be under the exclusive influence and direction of no party; that it was devoted to the rising generation of Stockport, and was to be denominated The Stockport Sunday School. - An appropriate hymn, with prayer, closed this interesting scene.

In late June 1807, George Stopford retired and the remaining partners formed a new firm called Mathers, Lomax & Company, cotton merchants in Manchester

• Cotton merchants took regular consignments of cotton from the Mediterranean, from the slave plantations of the West Indies (the anti-slavery campaign in Britain in that year achieved the abolition of the trade in slaves, but not slavery itself), and the plantations of the slave states of the USA
• it seems that, generally, cotton dealers dealt in a smaller way, probably buying enough at the quayside for their customers for a fortnight or so  

• a newspaper report shows that in 1820 Mathers, Lomax & Co was awaiting 45 bales of cotton which had come into Liverpool onboard the Savannah from the USA 

• some cotton merchants owned plantations, but John Lomax did not, as nothing of the sort is mentioned in his Will  

• directories show that in the years 1816-20 the warehouse & premises of Mathers, Lomax & Co were at 5 Cromford Court, Manchester. 

• by 1819 the partnership consisted of John Lomax, John Mather and Lomax's nephew Richard Hampson, who was only seven years his junior

John Lomax took his part in the public life of Manchester.  Newspaper reports show him 

• among the gentlemen inviting the officers of the First Regiment of Manchester Local Militia to a dinner in 1810

• on the committee formed to prepare a petition relating to the Corn Laws in 1814

• giving a 10 guinea Benefaction to the Manchester Infirmary and Dispensary in 1814

In 1814, his elder Robert died at the age of 56 and was buried at the Independent Chapel at Ainsworth, a mile west of Lomax Fold.  It was Presbyterian when founded in 1662 but the congregation moved – as did many in the North West – to Unitarianism, which was finally given toleration when the blasphemy laws were altered in 1813.  It was then that Joseph Bealey, the minister who had baptised Robert and Mary's six children, openly announced that he was a Unitarian.

• Robert's eldest daughter Ann had married John Kay in 1805, but her four younger sisters and her brother were still at home with their mother – they were aged between 12 and 29

• John Lomax was one of his brother's executors and it must have fallen especially on him and his nephew and fellow executor Richard Hampson to decide what to do about Robert's cotton manufacturing business.  Robert had said in his Will that they were to keep the business going for his young son Robert if they thought it advisable for the benefit of the estate.  Robert jnr was not quite 16 years old

• some 5 years later, Robert jnr inherited Lomax Fold and his father's other properties and went on to become a successful manufacturer himself – so it looks as though, during the 5 years of young Robert's minority, John Lomax was involved in running his late brother's business as well as his own

What was John Lomax like?  

• he was a man of great family feeling, close to his sisters and brother, nieces and nephews.  People felt he could be relied on – admittedly I've only seen his brother Robert's Will and a record of the contents of the Will of his uncle John Kinder, but both appointed him as executor  

• he was able and enterprising in business and made a good deal of money

• he was remembered with great affection and gratitude by the three nephews he helped in business  

• he must have been a man of very definite presence, confidence and personality to judge by the flair of his flamboyant signature.  Here it is, from the foot of one of the pages of his Will in 1827.  Even when acting as witness to a marriage, his signature looks just the same, comfortably at ease when everyone else is evidently struggling with the space allowed and a scratchy pen.   

Here's the signature from his brother Robert's Will, by way of comparison.  Much less stylish.  

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

1: 1824

 

George IV, 1821

In 1824, John Hopkinson was born in Manchester and Alice Dewhurst was born in Skipton.  It was the reign of George IV, now a vastly corpulent and heavily corseted 62 year old, in ailing health after his long years of high living.  

The years after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815 had brought recession, unemployment, growing radicalism and rapidly developing industrialisation.  

The Tory government was holding firm against demands for social and political reform.  

The Church of England's entrenched position of privilege was under pressure – the civil disabilities suffered by Catholics and Nonconformists were acutely felt, especially as their congregations had to fund their own churches and Sunday Schools as well as paying tithes to their parish's Anglican clergyman.  

Large steam-powered cotton mills had transformed the Lancashire textile industry and the landscape; villages had become industrial hamlets of terraced cottages and industrial towns had grown up along the valley bottoms.  In Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the Northumbrian George Stephenson and the Darlington Quaker Edward Pease were building steam locomotives to run between the collieries of Shildon and the port of Stockton-on-Tees.  

One of George Stephenson's locomotives for the Killingworth Colliery

The future Queen Victoria was five years old, seeing few people and playing with her dolls and her spaniel.  In London, Charles Dickens, a small and traumatised 12-year-old, was working ten hours a day, six days a week, in a blacking factory.  Thirty miles from Alice Dewhurst's home in Skipton, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, aged eight and six, and their two elder sisters were enduring life at the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge – this would be Charlotte's model for Lowood School in Jane Eyre.  Sir Edwin Landseer made his first of his many visits to the Scottish Highlands and John Constable's The Hay Wain was exhibited to great acclaim in Paris.

John Hopkinson was the fourth of five children, and the only boy.  Alice Dewhurst was the fifth of seven children – she had three sisters and three brothers.  

John was older than Alice by some nine months; I'll begin the story with him.

Next:  2: John Lomax of Manchester (1763/4-1827): the father of John Hopkinson