20: What was Alice Dewhurst like?

 Her granddaughter Ellen Ewing described her:

• "Alice was highly strung"

• "Those who knew, said that, as a young woman, she was not particularly handsome … her eyes must have always been beautiful, large and deep set as they were and expressive to a remarkable degree"

There are hints of her lack of physical stamina – don't "exhaust what little strength you have," her sister Jane wrote in 1848.

In character, we know she was like her father – and in 1848 she described herself teasingly to her fiancé

I have a bad temper, a talkative tongue, a badly furnished mind and what furniture there is thrust in without arrangement, and furthermore, I know very little of housekeeping. 

 

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

19: Alice Dewhurst goes to school in Halifax, 1836

In 1836 at the age of 12, Alice Dewhurst was sent to boarding school in Halifax, where she spent 3 years.  Only a couple of years earlier, John Hopkinson had been sent to school near Halifax and had run away – Alice's experience was far better.

Halifax, 1847

Her school was run by the Misses Chippendale and it was on Temple Street, a cul de sac off New Road, Halifax.  Across New Road, there were open fields, and at the other end of Temple Street lay the grounds of Summerville House.  This large villa, built in about 1800, can be seen in the centre of the picture on the right.  I think Temple Street is one of the roads on the left.

Meanwhile, a couple of miles away and outside town, was Miss Elizabeth Patchett's Law Hill School in Southowram – and while Alice was at the Misses Chippendales', Emily Brontë was at the Miss Patchett's, trying through gritted teeth to be a schoolteacher.  Her sister Charlotte wrote of Emily's duties in October 1838

Hard labour from 6 in the morning until near 11 at night, with only one half-hour of exercise in between – this is slavery. I fear she will never stand it

Emily lasted about 6 months and then left a life totally unsuited to her physically and mentally.  We can only hope that at the Misses Chippendales' the staff had an easier time.

And then, as Alice was leaving school, Branwell Brontë came to work as clerk in charge at the new railway station at  Luddenden Foot, about 4 miles on the other side of Halifax from the Misses Chippendales' school – a good position in the booming new industry.  But while he went out drinking, the man he left in charge was embezzling the money and Branwell's failure of duty led to his dismissal after about 18 months.  After that, he hung around Halifax, spending a great deal of time, and money he didn't have, at the Old Cock Inn, not 2 minutes' walk from Alice's old school.

Mary, 15 year old
servant girl, 1836
by Mary Ellen Best

Alice's school was kept by the Misses Margaret, Agnes, Ann and Elizabeth Chippendale – they were between 41 and 33 years old when Alice went to the school 

• their sister Mrs Mary Hall sometimes visited the school and on one of her visits was particularly kind to Alice, looking after her at night when she was very ill with something like "brain fever"

• the 1841 Census (taken after Alice left) shows that the live-in staff consisted of the 4 Misses Chippendale, plus a French or German governess (her name is illegible), and 3 women servants 

• there were 17 pupils – most of them were aged 15 – but there was also a girl of 9

• the Misses Chippendale will have taken day pupils too

In the same census, Law Hill School at Southowram had 3 staff (Miss Patchett and 2 teachers), with 3 women servants and a male servant in his 50s, and 20 teenage boarders

• we know that Miss Patchett had a school of 40 pupils, so it seems reasonable to suppose that the Misses Chippendales' school was the same size

Alice's parents will have known all about the Misses Chippendale, because they came from Skipton.  They were the daughters of the banker Mr Robinson Chippendale, and their sister Mary's husband was the Skipton lawyer Stephen Bailey Hall – he ran the Skipton Savings Bank alongside his legal practice

• Mr Bailey Hall was well known in the town as a poet – in 1839 he had a volume of didactic poems published called The Test of Faith, Israel a Warning to Britain, and other Poems (it can be read for free on Google Books) 

• the serious, high-toned nature of the school can be guessed from Mr Bailey Hall's poems and the fact that Robinson Chippendale was not only a banker but also a churchwarden – in fact, he sided with the vicar and his curate in the unseemly dispute over the appointment of the Revd Withnell as master of the Grammar School

• but, while the Misses Chippendale were Anglicans, they were Evangelicals and this will have appealed to Alice's Nonconformist parents – besides, two of the Misses Chippendale were "truly devout" and had a great influence on some of the girls

It was during this time that Alice's brother James, her merry and mischievous childhood playmate and the closest in age to her of all her siblings, died aged 15 of tuberculosis – his death certificate gives the cause of death starkly as "Decline".  He was buried at the Zion Chapel burial ground on 4 May 1838.  

The 1830s brought a great deal of grief and trouble to the family – the fire at the mill was only the beginning

• John Dewhurst's sister Eleanor was widowed in 1837, and left with 4 boys under the age of 7 and an ironmongery business to run

• Alice's grandmother Ellen Dewhurst died in 1839, aged 82

• for Alice's mother, it was a particularly bad time – not only did she lose her son, but her sister Betty was widowed in 1830, her mother died in 1831, her brother George was found dead in a ditch in 1834, and her brothers Richard and Robert hit financial disaster in 1838

So it is perhaps not coincidental that it was at this time, during the three years that Alice spent in the devotional atmosphere of the Misses Chippendales' school, that she decided to apply to the Zion Chapel in Skipton for membership

• her new conviction brought her very close to her eldest sister Jane – their shared spiritual experience bridged the gap of 8 years between them

As well as being "carefully taught both from the Bible and Prayer Book" (in Mary Hopkinson's words), the girls were taught the usual range of subjects of the time, including music and drawing.  Mary Hopkinson found an exercise book of her mother's dated May 1839, which contained notes written in a "clear hand" and "well executed sketches" copied from prints, which she thought were drawn by Alice herself. 

Ellen Ewing gives the text of a letter from Miss Margaret Chippendale, dated 19 December.  No year is given, but it's clear that Alice had been in the "first class".  Readers of Jane Eyre may remember that it was "the tall girls of the first class" who whisper their disgust at the burnt porridge.  So – as Mary Hopkinson said Alice spent 3 years at boarding school from 1836 – this would be Alice's final report, written in 1839.

Miss Chippendale informs John Dewhurst in this stately letter that, during all her time at the school and particularly over the last half year, Alice has been

exceedingly diligent in all those pursuits to which she directed her attention and has invariably pleased us by general good conduct and ready and cheerful compliance with all our wishes.  In the musical department she has more than exceeded our expectations.

Perhaps Alice came home a little aggrieved about not winning first prize in her class.  Miss Chippendale explains that Alice was a candidate for the first prize in the half-yearly exam, together with "three other young ladies in the first class" – but unfortunately they all deserved the prize and so it was decided by lot and Alice didn't win.  However,

the honour of ranking one of the first in our establishment will, I have no doubt, compensate her for any little disappointment she may feel in not obtaining the book

(We don't know how stiff the competition was for this desirable – and surely very edifying – prize)

Miss Agnes Chippendale died in 1844, Miss Margaret married a Halifax clergyman in 1845 – they were both in their fifties and lived into their eighties – and the Misses Ann and Elizabeth retired to live on the income from their Railway Shares. (We don't know if they were lucky in their investments – the Brontë sisters lost the money they invested)

Two particular friends from Alice's schooldays are recorded by her daughter Mary

• Sarah Jackson was "an extremely musical girl" from Kirkby Stephen in Westmorland – her father Henry Jackson was a solicitor  

• Mary Harrison was born in Penrith in Cumberland in 1823, her mother's 9th & youngest child

Mary's father was Anthony Harrison, a Penrith solicitor, who died aged 54 when Mary was 4 

• Mary was then adopted by her father's childless sister Ann, who was married to Captain William Buchanan RN – they lived in the Friarage in Friargate 

• Alice and Mary had "a very warm friendship".  Mary had a "particularly sensitive and refined nature" which "made her a truly kindred spirit" and they exchanged "long interesting letters"

The letters that are quoted by Ellen Ewing date from 1840 and 1843, after the girls had left school, but they give an idea of their friendship they made at Halifax.  None of Alice's replies survive.  It isn't possible to tell from the brief sentences quoted by Ellen Ewing where the balance in the friendship lay, but she describes Mary's

innocent gaieties and harmless pleasure in music and beautiful scenery and society and friendship, her guileless interest in the other sex, her efforts at self-improvement and the acquisition of knowledge, her religious doubts and hesitations, which she seems to have faced with courage and common sense

and she comments that Mary was often "afflicted with introspection of a depressing character" which was perhaps made worse by "her unusual interest in death beds, of which she seems to have been often a witness"  (Mary described the deathbed of her old schoolmistress Miss Agnes Chippendale in 1844 as "delightful")

Giulia Grisi (1811-69)
operatic soprano

It's impossible to say whether this was a sort of competitive gloom picked up at their very earnest school, nor who was the leader between the two girls.  But perhaps we can guess from Mary writing this, on 2 October 1843, that she could be very light-hearted

Will you be sadly shocked if I tell you I have been down to Carlisle lately, to hear Grisi.  And really, Alice dear, I did not feel I had done anything wrong.  I hope it is not a proof of a hardened conscience.

They wrote to each other about literature – we know that Alice was always a great reader – and that at one point Alice "recognized too strong an inclination for novels" and so she gave them up for "something more worth while".  (Not much like the Brontë sisters of nearby Haworth?  Alice was a near contemporary of theirs, four years younger than Anne Brontë)

Perhaps we see a bit of Alice's seriousness here, when Mary writes on 3 October 1840 

Recommend to me, if you can, some poetry to commit to memory which will have the effect of raising the mind … For my mind is one of those which requires solid nourishment.  The work of digestion never ceases.  Therefore, if substantial food is not administered it will feed on light, unwholesome things which, though palatable to the taste, do not strengthen the soul …

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1795

and, very interestingly, Mary continued

… Mama does not think she has a single autograph of S. T. Coleridge … My Father was very intimate with him.  As I think I told you, his powers of conversation were amazing and fascinating.  Aunt Buchanan tells me she once heard him talk for hours on end on the character of King David – a voluminous subject truly …

because it turns out that Mary's father was the Anthony Harrison mentioned by Dorothy Wordsworth in her journal on 28 August 1800:

I was rouzed by a shout that Anthony Harrison was come.  We sate in the orchard till tea time, drank tea early & rowed down the lake which was stirred by Breezes

William Wordsworth 1798

Anthony Harrison was at Hawkshead Grammar School with Wordsworth, one of Alice Dewhurst's favourite poets.  The friendship was renewed when Wordsworth returned to live in the Lakes, and Anthony Harrison became – for a while – part of the Lake Poets' circle.  He had Samuel Taylor Coleridge to stay with him in 1809, and helped him to proof-read his journal The Friend.  

"There was unpleasant gossip about his habits at Penrith, where he stayed with one Anthony Harrison, an attorney" wrote E K Chambers tersely in his 1938 biography of Coleridge.  

Luckily Mary never knew what the Lake Poets were writing about her father to each other. 

Anthony Harrison seems to have been filled with the longing to be a Lake Poet too, and in 1806 he published his own verse.  Poetical Recreations came out in 2 volumes when he was 33, the year before his marriage to Mary's mother (you can actually still buy it as a reprint).  

Robert Southey 1805

On 2 September 1805 Robert Southey wrote to a friend 

We have also had two evening parties – one for the Calverts & a poor fellow who having been a good Lawyer is gone crazy & turnd bad poet; – of course he brought me two vols his poems – two great books full!

Unfortunately Anthony had parodied Wordsworth's 'Hart-leap Well' in his 'The Barkhouse-Beck Leap'.  Wordsworth did not take this well.  The critics panned Anthony's verse.  

In 1840 Alice's schooldays were over and she was back at home with her family in the High Street at Skipton.  She would be 16 that November – her eldest sister Jane would be 24 that year and Tom, the youngest of them, would be 11 in December.  There was, of course, the dreadful gap where James should have been.

Her brother Bonny, now 20, had started work in the business and was already travelling on behalf of the firm.  Within a few years he would see a good deal of England, Scotland and Ireland.  He wrote long descriptive letters to the family back at home.  In one letter of 1840 he reported on his coach journey to Durham, describing Thirsk and Northallerton as "very dull and uninteresting places with no sort of manufacturers in the neighbourhood" but he approved of the railway:

… the great North of England Railway was in a very forward state.  It runs from York to Darlington and will be opened, it is supposed, in the month of November.  It crosses the Tees, about three miles from Darlington, by a very fine skew bridge

So now Alice would spend her time romping with the younger children, teaching Sunday School and staying with friends and family.  We know she visited Sarah Jackson in Kirkby Stephen, Mary Harrison in Penrith, John & Alice Bonny in Blackpool – and that, after her sister Ellen married in 1843, Alice stayed with her in Manchester.  There must have been many other visits in the years after school ended.

Miss Ellen Milne, Miss Mary Watson, Miss Watson, Miss Agnes Milne and Sarah Wilson
by Hill & Adamson
National Galleries of Scotland

Alice and her friends must have looked rather like these young ladies, photographed by Hill & Adamson in Edinburgh in the mid-1840s.  

The fashions were subdued, romantic, sentimental – the outline created was one of sloping shoulders, a low, pointed waist and bell-shaped skirts that skimmed the floor.  To get this look, a girl would have to wear a long, inflexible bodice and a couple of petticoats for standard day wear – and at least one of the petticoats would have to be made from horsehair crinoline to be stiff enough to hold up the skirt.  By the end of the decade, a woman might need to wear as many as 6 or 7 petticoats.  

But perhaps that was for the very fashionable, and I don't think Alice's religious principles would have permitted that sort of thing.

Next:  20: What was Alice Dewhurst like?

18: Alice Dewhurst's childhood

Skipton in 1830

The structure on the right of the High Street matches the description of the old market cross in Dawson's History of Skipton – it had a square awning supported by four piers, with tiers of steps around it and a small belfrey on top.  It was removed in the 1840s

Where was Alice born?

• Alice's daughter Mary Hopkinson thought that her mother was born at Swadford House, a place she knew well herself from visits to her grandparents

• but this was the house of John Dewhurst's prosperity, and they moved there in the 1840s when Alice was in her late teens

• until then they lived in the High Street, and the 1841 Census shows that they were living on the west side of the High Street near the Black Horse Hotel and not far from the parish church of Holy Trinity

So Alice spent her childhood in the bustle and excitement of the High Street, which was sometimes known as the Market Place, because that was where the frequent markets were held:

Skipton market, late C19

An excellent weekly market is held here on Saturday; and a good fair for fat cattle and sheep every alternate Monday; the annual fairs are March 25th, Saturdays before Palm and Easter Sundays, the first and third Tuesdays after Easter, Whitsun-eve, August 5th and November 5th, chiefly for sheep, horned cattle, horses, pedlary &c.

Pigot's Directory 1828-9

As the road wasn't then paved with setts, and especially as the Black Horse Hotel must have been popular with the farmers and merchants coming into town, it must have been a lively, noisy, dirty, exciting place for children.

(To try to give a flavour of the times, I'm adding here pictures by the young artist Mary Ellen Best of Clifton, just outside York.  For more, see the excellent book, The World of Mary Ellen Best by Caroline Davidson)

Alice's brothers and sisters were described by their niece Mary Hopkinson 

• Jane, the beloved eldest sister and family counsellor, was born in 1816

• her judgment was "wonderfully mature" from her early days and her brothers and sisters looked up to her with "reverent affection"

• John Bonny was born on the day of the Peterloo Massacre in 1819

• he was a studious, thoughtful boy – he went to Skipton Grammar School

• Ellen, born in 1821, was "a very bright, energetic and sociable girl"

• James, born on Christmas Eve 1822, was a merry, generous, loveable boy, "quite a wit and brimming over with fun and mischief"

• he was Alice's playmate and often led her into scrapes – she remembered how he once cut her hair "in Vandykes, much to the chagrin of her parents" (ringlets of some sort?)

Clifton Feast, May Day 1833 by Mary Ellen Best

Alice came next, born in 1824, and then there was a gap of 4 years before her younger sister & brother were born:

• Elizabeth Ann – Lizzie – was born in 1828 with a club foot, which was a cause of much suffering to her in her youth 

• eventually she was able to be treated and Alice went with Lizzie to London where she had "very skilful surgical treatment in London by Dr Taplin".  In those days this was without anaesthetic so her fortitude and endurance can only be imagined, but the operation was successful – a "complete cure".  The only surgeon I can find in any medical list is a Thomas Taplin of the Indian Army, whose listing shows he retired in 1849.  Perhaps he practised in London when he was on leave, or after retiring from the Madras Presidency 

• Thomas Henry ("Tom") was born in 1829 – he went to Skipton Grammar School and then (his father being now much more prosperous) was sent south to be a boarder at Mill Hill – founded in 1807 by Nonconformist merchants and ministers, who chose a site far enough out of London to keep the boys out of the "dangers both physical and moral" of the city streets

By about the age of 4, Alice could already read fairly well and she was learning to sew.  She was very like her father, in his quick-tempered, impulsive and outspoken nature, and in his looks – the family called her "little Papa" and Mary Hopkinson said that, when you looked at the portrait of John Dewhurst that used to hang on the wall in his son Bonny's house, you could see why.

Miss Mary Kirby of
the Castle Howard Inn
1832
by Mary Ellen Best

Alice was now sent to Miss Louisa Wimberley's school – a Ladies' Boarding and Day School in Newmarket Street

• the 1822 Directory shows their seminary was kept by the Misses L and C Wimberley, but Charlotte married that year and Louisa carried on the school on her own

• by the time Alice became a pupil, Louisa was about 33 years old and was working under her maiden name – in 1825 she had married Robert Hume Mossman, who kept a Commercial and Mathematical School in Newmarket Street

• the Mossmans had a chequered life – they left Skipton soon after their marriage and came back again a year or two later, I suspect because Robert's attempt at a school in Wetherby failed.  He was gaoled twice for debt in London in the 1840s

• Alice remembered Miss Wimberley for rapping her on the head with her thimble when Alice wasn't paying attention to her hemming in a sewing class – this reprimand was known as "thimble pie"

When the Mossmans left Skipton again, Alice was sent to Miss Mary Ann Dilkes' boarding & day school in Market Place

• Miss Dilkes appears as Miss Delk in the 1834 Directory – I can't find anything about her under either surname  

• Alice was nearly 8 years old now and she felt that her "mental training" under Miss Dilkes was "exceptionally valuable", according to Mary Hopkinson

Alice was an intelligent little girl, keen and eager to learn and always, her daughter said, aware whether she had grasped a subject or not.  She had a "remarkable faculty" for figures but she was always a great reader and her tastes were literary.

Next:  19: Alice Dewhurst goes to school in Halifax, 1836

17: John Dewhurst's Belle Vue Mill and the break with his brother Isaac

In 1823, John moved the family back from Embsay to Skipton, and it was in Skipton that his daughter Alice was born, on 1 November 1824.

Isaac was already living in Skipton.  Perhaps the brothers were confident their on-site managers could run the mills while they dealt with marketing and management.  Or perhaps they were already planning a new venture – or at least John was planning it. 

In May 1828, they bought a site in Skipton between the Leeds & Liverpool Canal and the main road into Lancashire.  John's plan was to build a cotton spinning mill with power looms for weaving, and the power was to come from steam.  

Power loom weaving in 1835

But even as the new mill – it would be called Belle Vue Mill – was going up, all was not well in the business.  

K C Jackson (in The Dewhursts of Skipton: a dynasty of cotton masters, 1789 to 1897, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 75, (2003), pp.  181-205) has various suggestions for the difficulties.  Perhaps 

• there were problems coordinating the business across the various mills

• the brothers had different ideas of the business's future

• Isaac felt he was the junior partner because John had more capital – and so more clout – than he did.  John had inherited from an uncle, and he'd also inherited the farm at Pickhill (I think probably as his father's heir at law).  Alice had inherited money from her father – he left his daughters £800 apiece – and would share with her siblings in the residue of their father's personal estate (goods & chattels, monies & securities) after their mother died, which happened in 1831.  John might even have had capital from his first marriage

• Isaac was perhaps nervous about the new change of direction for the business 

We might think – given Mary Hopkinson's description of her grandfather as "quick tempered, impulsive and outspoken" – that without James being there as a buffer and emollient, John & Isaac couldn't get on.

On 17 February 1829, the Belle Vue Mill was opened and immediately afterwards refinanced with a mortgage from a farmer & grazier at Long Preston.  Two months later, on 21 April 1829, the partnership between the brothers was formally ended.

• John – whose project it seems to have been – took the Belle Vue mill and the mill at Airton – he also had a warehouse he had bought a few years earlier on Newmarket Street 

• Isaac took the mills at Embsay and Scalegill – it seems from the 1834 Directory that he also had the Manchester warehouse 

John began by producing cloth on his new power looms, but after a while most of the production was in spinning, turning out worsted yarns and cotton twist.  This shows he was aiming at the Bradford worsted trade, which made fabrics with a cotton warp yarn and a wool worsted weft

• worsted is a high-quality type of wool yarn that comes from long-staple pasture wool  

• at that time they used cotton warps in worsted fabrics because they hadn't yet developed worsted yarns that were strong enough to be used in power-looms 

• and the use of cotton warps saved money, which was useful because of the American tariffs

Belle Vue Mill: O.S town plan c1850
National Library of Scotland

This wasn't the first cotton mill in Skipton – there was Mr Sidgwick's High Mill at the entrance of Skipton Woods, built in 1785 and with a steam-powered extension added in 1825.  With two steam-powered mills in town, there were more mill-hands needed.  Between 1821 and 1831, Skipton's population went up from 3,411 to 4,842.

I hope the split didn't mean the families fell out.  There seem to have been plenty of little cousins in Skipton by then, all living not far from each other.  And by 1835 the town was full of them:

• John & Alice had 7 children 

• Isaac & Sarah had 9 children

• Nancy Dewhurst and Storey Watkinson had 9 children – Storey, who was mostly a farmer and grazier, was by 1837 keeping the Devonshire Arms in Caroline Square (which was not the same place as the upmarket Devonshire Hotel in Newmarket Street)

• Eleanor Dewhurst had married Henry Wilson, who was an ironmonger in town, in 1829 – they had 3 sons, and Eleanor would soon have her fourth 

Fire!

A horse-drawn fire engine from the 1840s

On the morning of Sunday 2 January 1831, two years after production began at the Belle Vue Mill, it was discovered that the buildings were on fire.  Crowds rushed to the scene to try to put out the flames.   

 

If only, lamented the Leeds Intelligencer, there had been even one fire engine in the town, "any very extensive injury might certainly have been prevented; but there were none!" 

Messengers were sent at once to Keighley, 10 miles away, and Leeds, 25 miles away.  The two Keighley engines galloped to the scene as soon as they got the message and were on the spot in 44 minutes.  But it was too late.  Nearly all the valuable machinery and stock was gone and the fine new building, except for the part where the engine stood, was left, the Intelligencer reported, "a mass of blackened ruin".  

It must have been an appalling moment for John and Alice.  The scale of the Belle Vue operation can be seen – if the report is accurate – in the amount of damage done.  It was estimated at £14,000 or £15,000, and the insurance with the Manchester, Alliance and Atlas offices would only cover about £8,000 worth.  The Mill formed the bulk of John's business – he'd bet everything on this.  And it was a bad blow for the town – somewhere between 300 and 400 people had been thrown out of work. 

A subscription was raised at once to support the workers, and the clergy, gentry and other inhabitants of Skipton were "cheerfully and liberally" contributing by the time the Intelligencer came to press on the 8th.  Two county magistrates began at once to investigate the cause of the fire.  Was it arson?  There were desperate and destitute former handloom weavers in the manufacturing districts and arson was always suspected.  But the magistrates couldn't establish a cause and the Intelligencer reported that John Dewhurst himself thought it was accidental.  On the very day of this dreadful crisis in his business career, he put a notice in the papers:

Fire at Skipton – Mr John Dewhurst feels himself particularly called upon the return his most sincere thanks to his friends, and the people at large, for their kindness and unremitting exertions which he this day witnessed through the dreadful proceedings of the calamitous Event.

Skipton, 2nd January, 1831

His daughter Alice was 6 years old at the time and it made a deep impression on her.  She loved to tell the story of how incendiaries had burned down her father's mill just before the insurance on it was completed (clearly the family thought it was arson) – and how his friends insisted he should build again – how they were ready to lend him money without security – and how the Bank Managers were keen to help in any way.  Customers relied on John's love of supplying only the best – they were happy to have him pass the goods they were buying, instead of examining the textiles themselves. 

John began rebuilding and re-equipping his mill and it opened as a cotton-spinning mill that very autumn.  He had already mortgaged the mill once, and now he topped it up with a second loan, this time from the Craven Bank, putting up as security the newly rebuilt mill and the warehouse that he owned in Newmarket Street.  

His wife Alice, who must have been glad of the support of her sensible daughter Jane, now 15, had a 1 year old and a 3 year old to cope with – and her mother Jennet died in Blackpool during the rebuilding of the mill.  The fact that the money which would now come to Alice under her father's Will was so welcome, given the family finances, must have added complicated feelings to her loss.

Perhaps John's status in the community is revealed by the fact that in 1832 he rode, his daughter Alice vividly remembered, at the head of the procession to welcome Lord Morpeth and Sir George Strickland into Skipton.  They had just been returned as Whig MPs for the West Riding in the newly reformed Parliament.  John's granddaughter Mary Hopkinson thought it was probably the last time he rode before the rheumatism obliged him to give it up.

Next:  18: Alice Dewhurst's childhood

16: The move to Embsay & the death of John Dewhurst's brother James: 1816-20

Embsay in 1907:  National Library of Scotland

By the time Alice Bonny married John Dewhurst, he and his brothers had been taken into partnership by their father and the business had become Thomas Dewhurst & Sons

• they had expanded the business, taking the leases of two water-powered cotton mills in the village of Embsay, a mile or two to the north-east of Skipton – its population was 861 in 1822

• the mills had been purpose-built only 20 years earlier and lay side by side at Sandbank and Mill Holme

• we can get an idea of the size of the mills and the water wheels of this time in the advertisement in 1823 for the mill George Balme was using to spin worsted – it was modern-built, 3 stories high and with 2 water wheels of 23 feet and 15 feet in diameter, using "a good and constant Supply of Water ... Hands are very plentiful, at moderate Wages"

Scalegill Mill today
(a holiday rental property)

John & Alice moved to Embsay in 1816 to live at Mill Holme and run the business.  John's younger brother James moved to Embsay too, and soon afterwards he married Elizabeth Shiers of Threapland farm at Rylstone near Cracoe.  Before long, there were four little cousins in Embsay – John & Alice's Jane and Bonny and James & Elizabeth's Benjamin and Eleanor.

And in the same year of 1816, Thomas Dewhurst retired to Skipton and left the business to his sons – it was now John Dewhurst & Bros.  

In 1819 the three brothers bought the lease of a cotton mill at Scalegill on the River Aire north of Kirkby Malham, ten miles to the north-west of Skipton.  Scalegill mill had been converted from a corn mill in 1792 but rebuilt in 1795 – the Dewhurst brothers refitted it and their cousin Isaac managed it for them until his death in 1823.

So prospects were looking good for the Dewhurst family as 1819 came to an end. 

And then, in March 1820, Thomas died, aged 71.  But much worse followed.  On 5 July 1820, James died after a short illness.  He was 25 years old.  He left his widow Elizabeth with two very small children and in the early months of pregnancy.  Their son James was born the next year.  I think little James died – I can find no trace of him.  

For a short while, Elizabeth took James's place in the partnership, but at the end of 1821 she left and the business became John & Isaac Dewhurst.   A few years later, she remarried in Bolton le Moors – she didn't return to Skipton.

In spite of losing James's capital and expertise, John and Isaac continued to expand the business.  

In 1822, they bought the lease of a water-powered cotton mill at Airton, about 1½ miles south of Kirkby Malham.  In 1818, when the lease had last come up for sale, it was described as "a substantial stone built cotton mill", 72ft 3ins long and 31ft wide, with a water wheel 12ft in diameter and 3ft broad.  There was another water wheel 16ft in diameter and 6ft broad, and among the rest of the equipment, there were 17 spinning frames containing 1,632 spindles and 3 warping mills.  The fall had been only about 8ft previously, but it had been increased to 16ft by a weir upstream.  A selling point was that it was within 3 miles of the Leeds & Liverpool Canal and 7 miles from Skipton.

Airton Mill 
right: the original cotton mill
centre: the steam-powered mill built by John Dewhurst in 1836

By this point, in order to match the demand for yarn with locations where they could get the necessary labour and water power, John and Isaac were operating 4 spinning mills on 3 separate sites – the mills at Scalegill and Airton and two mills at Embsay.   They employed handloom weavers and they had offices and warehouses in Skipton and Manchester.   Manchester was their principal market, and they had there the use of a warehouse at 14 High Street.

John later blamed the rheumatism that stopped him riding – his favourite pastime – on the 40-odd mile ride he made each week to Manchester in all weathers for so many years.

Next:  17: John Dewhurst's Belle Vue Mill and the break with his brother Isaac

15: Alice Bonny & John Dewhurst start their married life in Skipton

Perhaps Alice Bonny already knew Skipton – perhaps she knew some of John's friends and family – so perhaps starting her married life would not be too daunting.  She might even have known the family of John's first wife Ann.  That would have been helpful in what might have been an awkward situation.  Fortunately, Alice wasn't a girl but a calm young woman of 27.

To picture Alice's new life as a married woman, I'm drawing here on the life of Mrs Mary Stubbs and her family in Boroughbridge, another West Riding market town, a few decades later but still attached to traditional ways 

• Alice's first social engagements will have been going out to dine and meet the neighbours – people were asked to dine "to meet the bride" 

• frequent sociable gatherings among family, friends and neighbours – invitations to tea and supper, followed perhaps by cards, games, dancing, singing

• visits and visitors – female friends and relations often stayed for long periods

• offering hospitality to people calling in, or coming to see John on business, or coming to town for the markets and fairs – Skipton being a great mart for cattle, sheep and corn

• traditional ways and customs – even in the 1850s, in Boroughbridge weddings were marked by races – the women were busy, active housekeepers and countrywomen, keeping a cow for the house, and a good larder, ready to offer food and drink to young relations who might call in – like the men, the women were good walkers, and walking was a companionable, social activity as well as a means of getting from place to place

• the men's lives outside work were filled with the traditional activities of the countryside – going out with a gun, getting up parties for rook shooting and, in John Dewhurst's case, going hunting 

Almack's Assembly Rooms by George Cruikshank

The digitised Leeds newspapers for 1816 to 1819 mention local events in Skipton – nowhere near as smart as the High Society gathering in Almack's Assembly Rooms in London, but there were plenty of gentry in the Skipton neighbourhood and the town was growing, its population in 1821 reaching 3,411 – for example:

• on 20 January 1816, the Leeds Mercury reported that the Skipton Dancing and Card Assemblies would be held monthly in January, February and March in turn at the Devonshire Hotel and Black Horse Hotel – "Residents of Skipton or not, admitted as Non-Subscribers"

• at the beginning of December 1817, the Leeds Intelligencer carried an announcement by the young organist at the parish church, Mr Charles Morine, who

Respectfully informs the Public, that he intends having a Miscellaneous Concert

at the Devonshire Hotel, Skipton, on Tuesday Evening, December 23d, 1817

with vocalists, including one from York, and a Mr Bradbury "from the King's Concerts", while Mr Morine himself led a Band of violins, viola, cella, flutes, bassoon, horns and double bass – and there was a Ball after the concert

• perhaps some of the Dewhurst family even went to Marton to watch a Mr Kendrick and his colleague Monsieur Evonthomasi exhibiting "Feats of Necromancy, Tight-rope Dancing, Deceptions of various sorts, Thaumaturgic Horologium Exhibitions, &c." – this attracted the notice of the press because the two men were later sent to the Wakefield House of Correction for 3 months, though this was more about staging their exhibition on a gentleman's land without his permission than the Necromancy and Deceptions.

Sunday would be taken up with attending church, and in the first years of their marriage this was at Holy Trinity, Skipton, where their first child was baptised.  

Alice and John Dewhurst had seven children

• Jane, born 25 September 1816 

• John Bonny, born 16 August 1819 – the family always called him "Bonny"

• Ellen, born 17 March 1821

• James, born 24 December 1822

• Alice, born 1 November 1824 – she would go on to marry John Hopkinson

• Elizabeth Ann, born 17 April 1828 – she was called "Lizzie"

• Thomas Henry ("Tom"), born 14 December 1829

Zion Chapel

Within the first three years of their marriage, two big changes had happened in their lives

• by the time Jane was born in 1816, John had moved the family from Skipton to nearby Embsay because of the business

• and by the time John Bonny was born, John had transferred their allegiance from the Church of England to the Congregationalists, and they were attending the Zion Chapel in Newmarket Street, where the younger children were baptised

• John's cousin Hannah and her husband Robert Johnston had already become members, and perhaps others in their circle of family and friends – I don't know how much difference being members would have made to their social lives, and whether cards and dancing might have been off the menu in future …

The move to the Zion Chapel, according to his granddaughter Mary Hopkinson, was because of "the degenerate lives of some of the clergy with whom he was brought in contact."  It might really have been on more theological grounds – she wrote that John read "with great interest the Puritan divines".  As for the clergy:

• the vicar of Skipton, the Revd John Pering, was a bachelor who lived with his sister in his other parish, Kildwick.  There doesn't seem to have been anything said against him, though he did enrage his parishioners over the tithes, with some of them threatening to emigrate to America and others threatening to raise a Meeting House and become dissenters

• John can't have been angered by the Revd Robert Thomlinson, the curate of Skipton who baptised Jane, because he sent Bonny to Skipton Grammar School when Thomlinson was master there

• it might have been because of the long dispute over who should be appointed master at the Grammar School.  Because while Georgian Skipton was a lively place among the lower orders

Tyne Mercury, 5 March 1816

On Wednesday, some persons threw Mr Joshua Metcalf, inspector of licences in Skipton, over one of the bridges in that town, into the water

the times were just as lively among the educated classes – 

Old Grammar School & Chapel, Skipton by Stephen Craven

The dispute began with the death of the old schoolmaster in 1792 (when John was five) when the vicar, then the Revd Thomas Marsden, wanted to appoint his curate the Revd Richard Withnell

• 5 members of the Parish Vestry objected to Mr Withnell as master and when Mr Withnell couldn't get into the School, he had the door "violently" broken open 

• so there were 4 years while there was no schoolmaster and no school, because the clergymen Fellows of Lincoln College, Oxford claimed the right to nominate and they chose a Revd Thomas Gartham of Queen's College – but the Bishop wouldn't give him a licence to teach and meanwhile Mr Withnell had taken his case to the law courts 

• Gartham finally took the post in 1796 – the town thought he had bought off Withnell 

• in 1800 Gartham got his unfortunate maid Mary Slater pregnant and failed to support her – she had to go to the magistrate, there was a Bastardy case, and Gartham was ordered to pay her £5 per week for the first month, and afterwards 7 shillings per week.  I doubt Thomas and Ellen Dewhurst sent their son John to the Grammar School after that

• there was the problem of Gartham's debts – he had to make an arrangement with his creditors in 1802 and it was said that he only dared leave his house on Sundays for fear of bailiffs

• there were attempts to get rid of Gartham – at one point, he was accused of defrauding the charitable foundation of money and trying to misappropriate future rents – to which Gartham responded with a notice put in the Leeds Intelligencer under an eye-catching headline "Diabolical Conspiracy": 

Whereas, serious hints are just come into Circulation, of a Deep-laid diabolical conspiracy against the life and civil safety of the Rev Thomas Gartham …

• the problem was only solved in 1824 when Gartham died 

John regularly attended and generously supported the Zion Chapel for the rest of his days.  Oddly, Ellen, James and Alice – but not Bonny – all underwent a second baptism in the parish church on 3 March 1825.  Perhaps it was an impulsive action by John.  The younger two children were only baptised at the Zion Chapel.

Next:  16: The move to Embsay & the death of John Dewhurst's brother James: 1816-20

14: The Bonnys of Blackpool after 1815

When Alice left Blackpool, the little seaside place was just as Richard Ayton had described it a couple of years earlier.  It changed only very slowly in the early years of her marriage.  In 1821 a church – which was seen by everyone as absolutely vital for a resort – was built.  Fifty years later (shortly before it was demolished and rebuilt on a grander scale) it was described as "a plain brick edifice, with a low embattled tower, and destitute of any architectural beauty."  As Blackpool grew, it was enlarged – in 1832, in 1847 and in 1851. 

In August 1816, a few months after she had left Blackpool, her grandfather William Bonny of The Hill died at the age of 91 – "universally respected" according to the Revd Thornber.  

Three years later there would be more bad news from Blackpool – in March 1819, when Alice was in the early months of pregnancy with her second child, her father John Bonny died aged 58.  

By 1824, the number of people living in Blackpool all year round had increased to 750.  Handsome houses facing the sea were beginning to be built on the flat sandy land called the Hawes, where the race meetings used to be held.  By the middle of the century the houses reached nearly as far as the south end of Blackpool itself, and the area had been given the name South Shore – described as "the pretty village of Southshore" in the 1855 Directory – and it had its own church, built there in 1836.

By the time her mother Jenny died on 26 May 1831 aged 72, Alice's sisters Nancy (1787-1868) and Betty were both widows 

• Betty's husband Robert Fairclough left her with two little boys under the age of 3.  In 1851 she was living in Liverpool with the elder, who was a printer compositor

• Nancy's husband Edward Gaskell, who kept the Hotel in Blackpool, died 5 years after their marriage leaving her with two little girls under the age of 4

• she set up as a lodging house keeper in Victoria Street – a little street running down to the spot where the Blackpool Tower would be built in the early 1890s

• when Nancy died in 1868 aged 81 her surviving daughter Nancy took over the lodging house – Nancy the younger's illegitimate son Richard Gaskell was a fisherman, to be found living at 58 Bonny Street in 1891

• the money that Nancy and Betty inherited from their father must have made a substantial difference to their lives

The year 1834 brought shocking news.  Alice's brother George (1798-1834) had been an ironmonger in Friargate in Preston, but had moved back to Blackpool.  Then, only a fortnight after his baby daughter's baptism at Bispham church, George was found dead in a ditch:

Preston Chronicle, 15 February 1834

Lamentable Occurrence – On Tuesday evening last, Mr George Bonny, formerly of the firm of Bonny and Granger, of Friargate (in this town), after having attended a meeting of rate-payers at Bispham, proceeded towards home at about half-past nine at night, and was not afterwards seen alive.  

On the following morning he was found quite dead, lying on his back, in a ditch at Bispham, not far from his own house.  There was no water near him, nor were his clothes soiled, and it was supposed he had missed his footing and fallen in, that he had been unable to extricate himself, and had afterwards fallen asleep and perished from the cold.  

A Coroner's inquest was held on the body, before R Palmer, Esq., and in the absence of all further evidence, the jury returned a verdict of "found dead."

George was only 35.  I think the drink must have been flowing and the ratepayers' meetings in Bispham must have been very convivial affairs.

Perhaps it was their mother's death and a release of more funds from their father's Will that encouraged Alice's brothers to speculate.  Robert, Richard and (probably) James weren't successful.

Robert (1792-1875) married Sarah Gardner in 1836, a few years after his mother's death.  Sarah's father was the miller at the Hoo Hill windmill – it can be seen on the map of 1830.

Blackpool in 1830

• Robert bought the Hoo Hill House tavern, for which he had ambitious plans.  It was – as the auction notice for its sale in 1838 explained – in an excellent situation for "a considerable Business", almost midway between Poulton-in-the-Fylde and Blackpool, and at the junction of the three roads which led north east to Poulton, west to Blackpool, and north to Fleetwood

• the hamlet of Fleetwood was being developed by the landowner and MP Peter Hesketh into a seaport, a resort for the rather cheaper end of the market and a railway spur – he saw it, when there was no London-Scotland rail link, as the point where travellers would take the steamer to Scotland.  He hit financial difficulties at the same time as Robert Bonny

• Robert enlarged Hoo Hill House, built a bowling green and laid out gardens – but he went bankrupt in 1838, two years after his marriage.  So he found himself spending a short while in the Debtors' Prison at Lancaster Castle. 

• he was able to set himself up a few years later as a boarding house keeper in Fleetwood – it declined as a resort as Blackpool grew, but the port grew and by the end of the century it was one of the three major fishing ports of England

• Robert died in 1875 – in later years, his son Robert William kept a Temperance Hotel in Fleetwood

Richard (1804-66) hit financial problems at the same time as Robert, and had to make an arrangement with his creditors – perhaps he was involved in his elder brother's enterprise.  His wife was Esther Ward, from an old Fylde family

• Richard later ran a lodging house in South Beach, Blackpool

• his son George ran a joinery business – he was on the first Town Council after Blackpool was incorporated, established an Orange Order Lodge in the town, was a Freemason and an Oddfellow.  His brother Richard Ward Bonny was a joiner too – both of them built housing in Blackpool.  Another son was a chemist and druggist in Leicestershire

James – I think, but the identification isn't certain – was a mercer & draper in Castle Street, Liverpool who went bankrupt in 1842. 

Alice's brother William (1791-1841) was the eldest son

• he was a farmer, he ran a bathhouse on the seafront, and – if he was the William Bonny who is listed among the innkeepers in the 1824 and 1834 Directories – he ran an inn called the Letters, which might or might not have been the old Bonny's Hotel

• he never married and he must have been comfortably off because he retired in 1839

• in 1839 he advertised that his "large and commodious Dwelling-house" with its 27 acres of "excellent Arable, Meadow, and Pasture Land" was up for let

• he died "very suddenly" aged 51, according to the newspaper notice of his death, in 1841

• he was living with his married brother Edward when he died

Her brother Edward (1799-1876) had left Blackpool by 1839

• he was farming at Warton, a village about 8 miles south-west of Blackpool on the banks of the River Ribble, not far from Lytham, when he married Anne Salthouse of Bispham, the schoolmaster's daughter, in 1839

• he was interested in agricultural improvements and active in the Lytham Agricultural Society 

• the 1861 Census finds him further east, at Cuerden Gates Farm on the edge of Cuerden Hall Park; in 1871, a widower, he lived north of Preston in Victoria Street, Fulwood

• there was certainly money in his family – his son John was able to retire and live off income from property before he was 40

Her brother John (1796-1871) married Ann Dewhurst, John Dewhurst's cousin, in Skipton in 1826

• he was a coal merchant with a coal-weighing machine on the shore where the coal barges from Wigan were beached and offloaded

• he was a property developer and it seems that he's mostly remembered nowadays – and not kindly – for the working-class housing that he built.  Blackpool's Seaside Heritage by Allan Brodie and Matthew Whitfield describes the small houses in narrow streets and alleys on Bonny's estate – it became an "infamous slum", which some called the "Whitechapel of Blackpool".  It was cleared at the beginning of the 1960s

• he was an active investor in the booming Blackpool holiday market.  If he didn't build the Victoria Hotel on South Beach, he rebuilt it – in 1845, the Fleetwood Chronicle carried a report that 

Large additions and alterations have also been completed at the Victoria Hotel, by Mr John Bonny, the respected owner, viz:- a commodious dining room, two elegant sitting rooms, and six spacious bedrooms having been added to this building.  On the plot of land adjoining several modern residences are nearly finished, and we believe the whole plot, forming the Victoria Terrace will shortly be built upon

In the 1840s John built a double-fronted house for himself and Ann on the newly-developing stretch called South Beach (now the Golden Mile).  'Rocklands', Number 8 South Beach faced the sea and I think it had a long front garden.  It had 2 reception rooms and 4 bedrooms with dressing rooms and all conveniences, including a WC, a wash house and cellar.

In April 1846 an imposing railway station was opened, bringing a branch of the Wyre and Preston Railway to Blackpool and more growth to the town

• by 1855 the resident population had reached 2,000, with 5,000 visitors arriving in the summer 

• Slater's Directory 1855 commented, "The months of September and October are considered the genteel season"

• better administration was needed – and John Bonny was one of the first members elected to the Blackpool Local Board of Health in December 1851 and was chairman until 1856

By the 1860s Blackpool had become a small town and its population had doubled to almost 4,000

• there were gasworks, more churches and chapels, a lifeboat station, and water was pumped to two-thirds of the houses

• in 1863 a second railway station was opened and the North Pier was built (an uncluttered promenade pier, like the one still to be seen today at Saltburn-by-the-Sea)

• it was so very successful that the South Pier was built in 1868.  This was aimed at the popular market, and was the "People's Pier", with open-air dancing to a German band

The opening of Blackpool's North Pier, 1863

Blackpool always attracted working-class visitors, but it was still aimed at the genteel middle class market, with an assembly room, baths, circulating libraries, fancy goods shops, bazaars, booksellers.  Visitors liked to go for walks in the countryside and trips by sea and coach to the Lakes.

John Bonny died on 4 February 1871.  Like his brothers William and Richard, and all their forefathers, his Probate describes him as a Yeoman – this clearly meant a great deal to them.

In the years after John's death, while Ann lived on at Number 8 South Beach, more attractions were opened.  Blackpool had always drawn a small-scale genteel clientèle – in the 1870s it began to target at a mass but respectable audience, with large, popular and reasonably affordable entertainments  

• the Raikes Hall Gardens, with walks, gardens, statuary, a conservatory, a dancing platform for 4,000 people, fireworks, circus acts 

• an aquarium and menagerie

• the Winter Gardens, a grand entertainment complex 

• by 1879 nearly 1 million people arrived each year by train 

• as the years went by, the middle classes became only a small part of the visitors

When Ann died in 1881, the population had reached 14,000 (by the beginning of the 20th century it had passed 50,000).  She died on 4 July 1881 at the age of 89 and the notice of the goods to be auctioned after her death gives a glimpse of an old lady's comfortable life:

excellent Household Furniture, Pier and Toilet Glasses, Mantel and other Clocks, Ornaments, Antique China, Cut-glass, about 50 ounces of Silverplate, Gold Watch and Gold Guard, Silver Watch, Feather Beds, Carpets, Linen, Mahogany Secretaries, superior Mahogany Wardrobe, Capital Bath Chair, &c

Mary Hopkinson and Ellen Ewing made no mention of Blackpool in John & Alice Hopkinson – not even that Alice Bonny came from there – but we can see that there was continuing contact between Skipton and Blackpool in the fact that John Bonny and Ann Dewhurst met and married – and we can actually catch Alice's daughters Jane and Alice Dewhurst staying with their uncle John and aunt Ann on the night of the census, on Sunday 6 June 1841.

Blackpool, 1840

Next:  15: Alice Bonny & John Dewhurst start their married life in Skipton