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.

Bishop William Stubbs (1825-1901): a devout Yorkshireman

This is something I meant to write before, but it got lost in other work.  I'm afraid the alignment of text in this is a little haphazard - Google Blogger was not co-operating!  

William Stubbs by Hubert von Herkomer

William Stubbs, scholar, clergyman, Regius Professor of History at Oxford and finally Bishop of Oxford, was much loved.   A contributor to the Bucks Herald on 18 January 1802 in a column looking back over the year in the diocese of Oxford wrote 

The one death which marks and makes a loss to diocese, Church, country, and literature is that of good Bishop Stubbs, kind Bishop Stubbs, grand Bishop Stubbs, of the winning face, fatherly heart, humorous fancy, fine nature, wide and magnanimous tolerance, keen sympathies.  

William Stubbs was born in Knaresborough in 1825 and his roots in Yorkshire were of importance to him to the end of his days.  "So long as I last, I continue a devout Yorkshireman," he wrote not long before his death.

He grew up in a place rich in historical associations with important national events.  All around him were places where his forebears had lived for generations – in the written records the Stubbs family can be found, farmers and yeomen, in the Forest of Knaresborough from the mid 14th century.  In Bishop William Stubbs & Knaresborough, an article by Robert M Koch in the Yorkshire Archaeological Journal (Vol 82, 2010), you can find an evocative account of how the layers of history with which he was surrounded laid the foundation for William's career as a pioneering mediaeval historian.

He was drawn to the study of history very early on in his life and he recommended local and personal history to others as a way of connecting with the social and political history of the country.

His biographer W H Hutton (the biography can be read here) wrote that in 1886 William gave a talk in Crewe in which he took himself as an example.  Hutton doesn't give his source for his quotation and there are errors which William would not have made – perhaps it was an early draft or a newspaper report.

I wonder if the talk was at the Crewe Mechanics' Institute.  He presented prizes there on at least one occasion when he was Bishop of Chester and you will see that at the end of this quotation he encourages them with his own example of success, saying "please to remember that I am just as much a working man as any of you":

You do not mind my taking myself for an illustration.  

Where was I born? Under the shadow of the great castle where the murderers of Thomas Becket took refuge in 1170, and where Richard II was imprisoned in 1399.  My grandfather's house stood on the site where Earl Thomas of Lancaster was taken prisoner in 1322.  My first visits were paid as a child to the scene where Stephen defeated the Scots and where Cromwell defeated Prince Rupert; my great-grandfather had a farm in the township where King Harold of England defeated Harald Hardrada;  and one of my remoter forefathers had a gift of land from John of Gaunt in the very same neighbourhood where I was born.   

As you can see, William is referring to some famous battles fought in the North and West Ridings.  His forefather John Stubbs had a grant of newly cleared land at Birstwith in the Forest of Knaresborough from the prince and soldier John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, on 27 February 1387.  I think it wasn't his great-grandfather who farmed at Stamford Bridge, but his 3xgreat-grandfather, John Wright.  Further on, it was his great-grandfather who was out in the Gordon riots.

Now he turns – he was a precociously clever little boy – to events that happened when he was four and five: the arson at York Minster in 1829; the death of the King on 26 June 1830; the July Revolution  of 1830 in France when Louis Philippe, Duc d'Orléans, overthrew Charles X; and the election of the statesman Henry Brougham in 1830.  Brougham was a major force in the passing of the 1832 Reform Act and the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act.  

What do I remember first?  Well, perhaps the first thing I do remember was the burning of York Minster – then the death of George IV, then the second French Revolution, then the election of Lord Brougham for Yorkshire, then the Reform Bill and the Emancipation of the West India Slaves. What sort of connection had I with soldiers and churchwardens, and such like?  Oh, my grandfather was out in Lord George Gordon's Riots; and all of my ancestors, so far as I can trace, served the office of churchwarden in their time.    

You may smile at this – perhaps I was lucky in the circumstances of birth and associations – but mind you, on every one of the points that I have mentioned hangs a lot of history to which my mind was drawn by the circumstances that I have jotted down, and from which the studies began which, not to speak of smaller successes, have landed me in the dignified position to-night of having to advocate the study of history before an audience of the most intelligent people in England!  

You like, I dare say, to be told so.  As I am flattering myself as you see, I may give you a little of the overflow of my self-complacency; and please to remember that I am just as much a working man as any of you, every step of the life which is now drawing to an end having had, under God's blessing, to be worked out by my own exertions, so that to some extent I may put myself forward as a precedent for you.

He had indeed worked his way through life by his own exertions.

William King Weatherill of Guisborough: a sad story

Far off in Sydney, Australia, Richard Ord Todd and his aunt Isabella had photographs of her nephew William King Weatherill of Guisborough and his children.

(William was the brother of Annie Weatherill, whose diary I posted on 1 December 2012.)

William King Weatherill was born on 22 November 1844. These photos, taken in Harrogate, show him apparently in the prime of life and with everything before him.

William King Weatherill (1844-77)

He was married to Hannah Maria Pickersgill and they had two children.

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Here is his son Thomas, and below, his daughter Mary. 

But William had known a good deal of sadness.

A large family in 19th century Harrogate

I like this story of Jane Stubbs' family because it's a reminder – at a time when everything to do with bringing up children seems so particularly fraught with anxiety – that the idea we make for ourselves of childcare of the past may not be quite accurate … …

Jane Stubbs was born at the Bridge Foot at seven o'clock on the morning of 5 July 1826, and was twelve years older than John.  She makes only rare appearances in his early diaries – a teenage boy would hardly notice the activities of a sister who was a young unmarried woman of twenty-seven.

By early 1856, Jane is more frequently noticed in his diary entries and always in connection with a young solicitor in their uncle Hirst's office, Henry Hawkesley Capes.  He was a year younger than Jane, and came from Whitgift in Yorkshire, the son of solicitor Thomas Hawkesley Capes and his wife Ann.  He and Jane were now to be found walking together and playing chess.

At some point the marriage must have been announced, but John does not record it.  We might guess that Jane must have been making preparations for her wedding when she went to stay in York in May and came back with a black undress Coat for her younger brother.   With quantities of clothes and underwear to make or buy and the new home to get ready, it is not surprising to find her going to York again in early August, this time with her mother.

York was also the natural place to find a wedding present, and John entrusts this task to his eldest brother Joe who, with the help of his fiancée Sarah Sedgwick of York, buys something suitable:

 “gave Jane a butter dish and silver knife with pearl handle for a wedding present   it cost 11/6”. 

On Wednesday 10 September 1856 Jane and Capes were married.

A Boroughbridge Boyhood: Epilogue

What happened to John's family in later years?

Aunt Ann Pick died in 1860 at the age of fifty and her husband William in 1872.  Aunt Bell, the active spinster aunt, died in 1880 at the home of her niece Jane Capes.

Uncle William Henlock died in 1866.  In his Will he left the sum of £200, the interest of which was to

William Henlock of Great Ouseburn

be distributed to the poor of the parish by the Vicar and Churchwardens.  His wife Ellen died in 1885.  They are both commemorated in a memorial on the wall of the church of St Mary the Virgin at Great Ouseburn, where there is also a plaque recording Mr Henlock's legacy.

Uncle William Hirst died in 1879 at the age of eighty-one.

He had outlived his daughter Dorothy, who died the year before.  John recorded her funeral on 28 November 1878:   

went to poor Dora Hirst’s funeral at 3 o clock.  She was buried at BB Church.  Tremendous funeral.  All the Shops closed.  Grannie [his mother] and Alice went and so did all from Uncles except Uncle who is still very poorly.  It is indeed a sad day at BB. 

She was fifty-one years old and is commemorated by a stained glass window in the church to which she had been devoted through her life.  Her unmarried sister Mary Barker Hirst lived alone in Boroughbridge after the death of Dora and her father.

Their sister Sophy Hirst married William Thompson, a London auctioneer with family in Bridlington.  They lived in Russell Square in some style – they were holidaying in Nice in 1880.  After Sophy's death in 1900 and William's retirement, he and his unmarried daughter Edith Wharton Thompson moved north to Harrogate.

John's cousin Mary Redmayne, wife of his friend James Sedgwick, the Boroughbridge doctor, was a  sociable, kind and active neighbour often mentioned in letters by John's mother.  She died “of apoplexy” on the night of Whit Sunday 1892 “very suddenly at Victoria Station London”.  She was fifty years old.  James and his unmarried son and daughter left Ladywell House and the practice to Dr Daggett and moved to Wimbledon, perhaps to be near his son Hubert Redmayne Sedgwick and his family; Hubert was a surgeon at St Thomas's.

Grove House, Harrogate: 1912

Grove House, Harrogate 1912

Following my last blogpost, here is a second Yorkshire property from the Knight, Frank & Rutley brochure of 1912.

Grove House was the home of Samson Fox (1838-1903), engineer, industrialist and philanthropist. 

A remarkable man and a great benefactor of Harrogate, he was the ancestor of the celebrated Fox family acting dynasty – as you may know, if you saw the episode of Who Do You Think You Are? that featured Emilia Fox. 

There is a history of the house on wikipedia and jolly photos of Edward Fox unveiling a plaque at Grove House in May 2012 here.

YORKSHIRE

Ten minutes walk from Harrogate Station

A Valuable Residential Property
known as
GROVE HOUSE
Harrogate

Extending to 75 Acres

Or the House and nearly 15 Acres would be sold separately

The Handsome Stone-built Mansion stands 300 feet
above sea level, in well laid out Pleasure Grounds.  It
contains: –  Staircase Hall 33 ft. by 17 ft., Drawing
Room 30 ft. by 20 ft., Dining Room 26 ft. by 20 ft.,
Billiard Room 30 ft. by 20 ft., Library 26 ft. by 18 ft.,
Magnificent Ballroom or Picture Gallery 42 ft. by
30 ft., Study, Morning Room, Business Room, 26
Lofty Bed and Dressing Rooms (three of the Dressing
Rooms are fitted with Baths), Bathroom and the usual
Domestic Offices

Electric Light and Acetylene Gas installed
Modern Sanitation

Stabling for 17 Horses - Grooms’ Rooms
Motor-house with Pit, Two Cottages, Farmery

The Pleasure Grounds include Tennis and Croquet
Lawns, Flower Gardens, Small Lake, Museum and
Observatory with Telescope.

The 60 Acres of Meadowland
Which are ripe for development would not detract from
the privacy of the House and Grounds if built upon

Two Golf Links within two miles - Hunting with three Packs

Auctioneers & Land Agents Messrs. KNIGHT, FRANK & RUTLEY,
20, Hanover Square, London, W.

 

Grove House, Harrogate 1912