Introducing John Hopkinson & Alice Dewhurst

Last year I began a new blog called 'The Engineering Hopkinsons'.  

Alice Dewhurst of Skipton was the daughter of John Dewhurst of the Bellevue Mill.  (Readers may remember buying the familiar Dewhurst sewing thread)  

In 1848 she married John Hopkinson, millwright and engineer of Manchester, and they had a large family.  Three of their four sons were engineers:

John Hopkinson FRS was a noted physicist, electrical engineer and professor who died untimely with three of his children in a climbing accident in the Alps.

Edward Hopkinson, engineer and MP, designed the first City & South London Railway's electric locomotives

Charles Hopkinson was a consulting engineer.  With his nephew Bertram Hopkinson and Ernest Talbot, they worked on the electrification of the Newcastle upon Tyne and Leeds tramway systems

Sir Alfred Hopkinson, John and Alice's second son, was the only one to follow the arts rather than the sciences.  He was a lawyer, academic and MP

Albert Hopkinson, the youngest son, was a general practitioner and influential teacher of anatomy.

This is the first article on 'The Engineering Hopkinsons' to give readers an idea of the story that follows:

Introduction

On Monday 7 February 1848, four days before his 24th birthday, a young engineer called John Hopkinson wrote his first and only letter of proposal of marriage

My dear Miss Dewhirst,

I wish to ask you one question, one which I have never proposed to any other, soliciting for it a patient consideration, because your answer may possibly affect your own happiness, and is to me an object of deepest concern.  Most respectfully yet most anxiously I ask, Will you be mine?

He had come to know Alice Dewhurst – in his anxiety, he misspells her surname in his carefully written letter – when she came to Manchester on visits to her married sister Ellen.  From the start he had been attracted by her "intelligence, unaffected piety, and genuine worth."  Admiration and esteem had become love, "deep and fervent."  He had never spoken to her about it because, as an apprentice and then an employee of Messrs Wren & Bennett, Millwrights & Engineers, he wasn't in a position to look after a wife.  Now he was a partner in the firm.  Casting aside formality, he wrote

I do love you.  I am yours devotedly.  Dearest let me call you my Alice and the future shall bear witness to the fervency of my gratitude.  

His proposal wasn't made lightly – deep feelings, long thought and prayer lay behind it.  His closing words were 

In tendering to you my warmest affections and in soliciting a return I have taken council of my own heart, but not less have I sought direction from God.  To His guidance I commend you, confident that in His hands the result will be right even though it should blast my most fondly cherished hopes – for He is wiser than men. 

Ever am I 

Yours very sincerely

John Hopkinson

That Friday, on his birthday, he visited her at her parents' home in Skipton and they were engaged.  They were married seven months later in the Zion Chapel in Skipton.  They remained a devoted, loving couple until John's death in 1902.

Their story has always had a fascination for their many descendants but it has a wider interest too.  It touches on so many topics:  the textile industries of the North; cotton mills and the Industrial Revolution; the prodigious growth of Manchester; science and engineering; seaside resorts and Blackpool; mountaineering and Alpinism; public service and voluntary charity; Nonconformity; the rôle of women.

John and Alice's lives – conscientious, hard-working, disciplined, austere, but lit by a passionate love of poetry and nature – were infused with their faith.  They were Nonconformists – Independents, they would say – members of a Congregationalist church, committed to the Puritan faith inherited from the 17th century and the time of Oliver Cromwell.  John's mentor and father figure, the Rev James Griffin, wrote that his aim in preaching was to 

awaken in his hearers a conviction of sin and spiritual danger.  They needed to have a consciousness of sinfulness, a knowledge of their own helplessness, and a desire to cast themselves on Christ as their hope and salvation.

John and Alice's belief in Providence had a down side as far as their grandchildren were concerned.  The Revd Arthur Hopkinson wrote that he was "sorely puzzled" as a boy by 

the assumption that God will bless His own with worldly success, and that failure to achieve it is a sign of divine disapproval

while their granddaughter Katharine Chorley (in her memoir Manchester Made Them) felt that

the high-spirited sons at any rate must surely sometimes have felt that their parents' constant preoccupation with the progress of their souls and expressed belief that every happening which touched them was specifically designed by Providence as a discipline or a gift for the family made them like plants in a religious forcing-house

And the austerity was hard on the daughters-in-law, checking carefully before a visit to Alice that there were no frills or fancy trimmings on their little girls' dresses – and on Alice herself and her daughters.  Two of the girls, according to family legend, died of Spring Cleaning.

We can't help but look on Alice's life with some horror.  

From the end of 1848 until February 1868 she was pregnant thirteen times – and pregnancy wasn't kind to her.  She didn't enjoy it and it made her ill.  Back pain and weariness were bad enough but, always sensitive and rather anxious, pregnancy made her depressed and fearful.  This fear was very natural at a time when mothers and babies died (one of Alice's sisters, two of her own babies) but it seems that when she was pregnant she felt even more heavily the burden of responsibility for the little souls entrusted to their care and this seems to have weighed on her.  She felt a real spiritual distress.  She was often unwell after the birth and it took her a long time to recover.  

The perfectionist, conscientious side of her nature was a source of worry to her husband and children.  Far too much of her time was spent in spring cleaning and household chores in an endless and rather obsessive round of self-imposed duty.  She knew – they all knew – that it made her ill and irritable, but she couldn't help herself.  Perhaps it was a reaction to the many bereavements that surrounded her, and the social isolation caused by the increasing deafness which began when she was in her mid-forties.

I can't help but compare her life with another from my family – the much jollier, though rather chaotic, life of the more robust Mrs Jane Capes in Harrogate where we get the distinct impression that Jane's mother Mrs Mary Stubbs of Boroughbridge thought that having such a large family wasn't really necessary.  (Possibly Mary herself had relied on long breastfeeding and husbandly "consideration".)  Perhaps the size of Alice and John Hopkinson's family reveals not only their mutual love and passion but also Alice's strong sense that this was her path and calling in life.  In 1864 she wrote to John from her mother's sickbed 

God has given us a great work to do in entrusting so many precious souls to our care

It's a relief to find glimpses of lightness and fun in her letters – when, after a son's wedding, she says she felt like "a yesterday's opened bottle of champagne" or when she reports on her household and comments that "the pigeons are laying eggs and the cockroaches are decreasing."

Alice Hopkinson née Dewhurst (1824-1910)

John was clearly a man of great energy and ability.  His widowed daughter-in-law described him as "a man of such warmth of heart, such tender sympathy."  He was a devoted father, faithful public servant (Alderman and Mayor of Manchester), indefatigable at work and in the chapel.  He endured bereavements and business failures and he drove himself hard – no wonder his health broke down at one point. 

He and Alice watched over their children's development with close and anxious care.  They encouraged their boys in an active, outdoor life 

I think it strengthens their mind, develops their energies, awakens their powers of observation

John wrote in 1863,

I quite agree in wishing to trust them a good deal – we want to teach them to go alone – to think and act for themselves – in subordination to the wishes of their parents and to the will and law of their God … How thankful I am that they are blessed with a Mother so truly concerned for their spiritual welfare …

But it was the boys' love of the mountains that led to the last and most terrible tragedy of John and Alice's lives.  All five surviving Hopkinson sons – John, Alfred, Charles, Edward and Albert – were well-known mountaineers and members of the Alpine Club and it was in the Alps, on the Petite Dent de Veisivi that John and three of his children died in a climbing accident in 1898; the youngest was only just 18 years old.  

John and Alice Hopkinson had now known the deaths of six of their children and three of their grandchildren.  Four years later, John died at the age of 78 on 14 March 1902; Alice died on 24 September 1910.  They are buried in Manchester's Southern Cemetery.

John Hopkinson (1824-1902)

They left behind a large and increasing – and frequently distinguished – family.  But at the very beginning of the story there are two mysteries which have intrigued their descendants ever since:

• Why wasn't John's father married to his mother?  

• How did John's mother manage to bring up her five illegitimate children so successfully that her son became a junior partner in an engineering firm at the age of 24, and all five children were able to make such very respectable and excellent marriages?

The whole upright, earnest and successful Hopkinson dynasty was founded on – to use the expression of the times – bastardy.  

John's children – who lived in times when illegitimacy was taboo – knew only that their grandmother Alice was the daughter of a stone mason and that she had been a servant (housekeeper, they thought) to John Lomax.  They knew nothing of John Lomax except that he had been given a silver medal as trustee of Stockport Sunday School in 1805.  They thought perhaps he couldn't marry Alice because of his father's opposition.  John's grandchildren embroidered these stories – as you can see in Katharine Chorley's Manchester Made Them and in Crystal Clear: The Autobiographies of Sir Lawrence and Lady Bragg. 

The mysteries were compounded by the disappearance of letters.  

After the Second World War, John and Alice Hopkinson: 1824-1910 was printed privately for the family.  John and Alice's 89 year old daughter Miss Mary Hopkinson wrote the Foreword while their granddaughter Ellen, the widow of physicist and engineer Sir Alfred Ewing, drawing on the log-book kept by John and the many letters that he and Alice exchanged when they were separated, wrote a history of their lives.

Ellen Ewing carefully left readers to draw their own conclusions and she avoided making any comments that  "might offend the susceptibilities of the Living still closely connected with the Dead".  She thought that there would be ample scope in the future for a family historian to go to work.

But she and her aunt Mary Hopkinson burned letters and the knowledge of this tantalised the younger members of the family.  Had the key to the secret of John Lomax and Alice Hopkinson been deliberately destroyed?  Had there been a conspiracy to suppress the truth?

It seems not.  Ellen Ewing's nephew told his son that Mary Hopkinson and her niece Ellen burned the letters that they thought were damaging to people's reputations.  John and Alice had written to each other at length whenever they were separated and their letters will have taken the place of frank, late-night chats about their children and later their children's spouses.  Burning the letters would safeguard family harmony and future reputations.

But I don't know what happened to the letters that weren't burned.  Do they still exist somewhere among the Hopkinson descendants?  And where is the log book that John kept?  

(Perhaps someone will tell me …)

In the meantime, I have worked from John and Alice Hopkinson: 1824-1910, supplemented by my own research.  It's necessarily a very partial view of their lives, but that can't be helped.  And – as the history of science has become more popular, and stories about the Hopkinson brothers as engineers and mountaineers appear more and more on the internet – I hope it's a corrective to some of the mistakes that have crept in.  And I hope to make the somewhat alien and forbidding world of the Puritan Victorian middle class in Manchester rather more human and familiar.

I shall add to this blog as I go on with my researches.  Quite probably I'll go back and correct myself when I discover more information.  

In the meantime – spoiler alert – I can say that I do know who John Lomax was.  I don't know why he didn't marry Alice Hopkinson.  And I suspect that the explanation of the respectability that she achieved lay not only in the amount of money left to her and her children by John Lomax, but also in the Rusholme Road Chapel and the abiding belief of its minister, the Rev James Griffin, in repentance and redemption and a fresh start.