Frederick John H. Hopkins



S. of Frederick Hans Hopkins & Charlotte Hopkins

Frederick John H. Hopkins
Born c 1866 at Crundale, Kent, England
Occ. Navvy
Marr. Kathleen Taylor in 1892 at Bridge, Kent


Children

Bessie Kathleen H.
Gladys Harriet
Thomas William S.
George Ernest F.


NOTE

Kathleen was born c 1866 at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.

Strangely, I can't find Frederick at all in the 1881 or 1891 census'. He & his family are however living at 5 Primcott Road (?), Dover, Kent in 1901. All four children were born at different places.

"The term 'navvy' originated with the 'inland navigators' who constructed Britain's canals. It's now used for the men – a quarter of a million them – who are needed to build the thousands of miles of railway track that are set to span Britain: digging the cuttings, laying the lines and packing the ballast. The job might particularly suit Irish immigrants escaping the horrors of the potato famine. You will have the muscles of Hercules after pushing 200 wheelbarrow loads of soil up unbelievably steep-sided banks every day or shovelling 20 tonnes of stone scalpings. When the artist Ford Madox Brown includes a navvy in his painting Work (1859-63), he writes: 'Here is presented the young navvy in the pride of manly health and beauty; the strong fully developed navvy who does his work and loves his beer ...' No accommodation is offered with the position, however. You will probably live in a squalid communal dwelling with all the other workers, their families and, of course, their cholera, dysentery and typhus."

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