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

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?