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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manchester Courier, 7 October 1843

York Place, Oxford Road

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benjamin Disraeli as a young man

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

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

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

(Loud and long continued cheering)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John defended the pillars in his reply

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

William Fairbairn
in 1877

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plaque to Little Ireland: by Nick Harrison

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

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

23. John Hopkinson looks to his future: 1846

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

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

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

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

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

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

John decided to write to Mr Wren 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She tells another, undated, story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• the long struggle to reform conditions in mines and factories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quarry Bank Mill by David Dixon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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