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Characters in Rutherford's life

Alice Hopkinson in the 1910s

Pictures:

  • Alice Hopkinson, wife Bragg, 1910s.

  • Olga Cunliffe-Owens with her daughter Alice

  • Albert Hopkinson, husband of Olga and father of Alice

Source: Crystal Clear: The Autobiographies of Sir Lawrence and Lady Bragg , AM Glazer & Patience Thomson

Alice Hopkinson     (1899-1989)

   When Ernest Rutherford made his debut in Manchester in 1907, Alice Hopkinson was eight years old. She was far too young to be a colleague or even a student of the new boss of the university's physics department. Her first encounter with the researcher, however, allowed the little girl to live a truly privileged experience.

Alice Hopkinson came from an important family in Manchester.

His grandfather had been mayor of the city, his uncle John, had followed in the footsteps of the great local scientists, John Dalton and James Joule had represented before him by inventing dynamos which perfected the models of Edison, then techniques for the electrification of urban lighting, deployed first in Manchester and then across the country. Unfortunately, the inventor had also left in the minds the painful memory of his precocious and tragic death: on August 27, 1898, the engineer and three of his six children, were killed during an excursion in the Alps. The father was forty-nine; children between seventeen and twenty-three. The oldest was named Alice.

Olga et Alice Hopkinson.jpg
Albert Hopkinson.jpg

The unfortunate John Hopkinson, who died in 1898, was the oldest of thirteen siblings which included two other engineers, a doctor and a lawyer.

Among these, it was above all the lawyer, Alfred, whom Ernest encountered the most: after having served in London and then briefly been a member of a constituency in Manchester, he held the post of vice-chancellor of the Victoria University when Rutherford took up his post there. He also frequently met one of the engineers of the Hopkinson family who, like him and Alfred, was a member of the Lit & Phil , a learned society in Mancun.

As for the doctor, Dr Albert Hopkinson, he had a doctor's office on the main street in Withington and a small house a few minutes walk away. As the Rutherfords settled in the same village, both families sent their children to the same local schools. And so Eileen Rutherford became friends with Alice, two years her senior, and with her younger sister Enid, born like her in 1901.

Images: Crossroads between Wilmslow road, Palatine Road and Parsonage Road in 1910 and 2019.

In the first image, the house of Albert and Olga Hopkinson is hidden by the trees on the left. Sources: Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives & Google Maps

Wilmslow and Palatine roads junction 191
Albert Hopkinson's house 2019.png
Wilmslow and Palatine roads junction 201

One of the consequences of this friendship between Ernest's only daughter and the Hopkinsons was that Alice, when she was not much more than ten years old, had the privilege of being in the lead with a great teacher. , known worldwide and Nobel Prize in chemistry. Which, for her, shouldn't mean much. Because the only characteristic Eileen's friends remembered about her father was his terrifying big voice ... even when he spoke kind words.

Alice heard it up close on a game afternoon in the Rutherford house.

This is how she recounted the scene many years later - of course she hadn't forgotten that she was disguised as a flower when she first met:

      Rutherford was a bit frightening, he had such a loud, gruff voice, and was so large. I remember going to a fancy dress party at his house in Withington. We were playing hide and seek, but told that there was one room into which we must not go.

        I suppose I forgot which it was, as I crept into an empty room and was just going behind a curtain, when Rutherford loomed up from his desk, and shouted :

        'Who are you?'

        'A violet,' I said, and added quickly, 'A modest violet.'

        'Ho! Ho! Ho!' he roared, 'you can hide here with me.'

       Alas! None of course dared look for me there, and I nearly missed tea.

Newnham College.jpg

   Alice Hopkinson studied History at Newnham College, Cambridge, from 1918 to 1921, when Eileen Rutherford was pursuing a course within the same college, but in the field of art.

   In 1919, Alice met a certain William Lawrence Bragg , newly released from his military obligations. This young man had been the best friend of his cousin, Cecil Hopkinson, who died in action in 1917.

   The two families had also been heavily affected by the conflict: Eric Hopkinson, Alice's full brother, then Robert Bragg, Lawrence's youngest, had been killed three months apart in 1915. The first had fallen in France while the second had been mown down by an explosion during the Battle of the Dardanelles (just like Harry Moseley , one of Ernest Rutherford's most promising researchers) .

Old Hall, Newnham College, Cambridge. Source : Wikipédia

    Lawrence Bragg had heard a lot about Alice through Cecil, but had never met her.

    They met at several tea dances, before the young man decided to ask Alice to marry him. It was May 1919 and she refused: she wanted to finish her studies first ... and make the most of the "parties", dances and excursions with friends that Cambridge offered her.

    She also saw with a critical eye the fact that the young physicist left Cambridge for Manchester: he had indeed just been appointed to replace Rutherford (who was at that time doing the opposite route). For Alice, who had lived all her childhood in this northern town that she did not appreciate, it was not very tempting to return there to follow a possible future husband.

    They married, however, in December 1921, two weeks after Eileen Rutherford, and in the same chapel in Cambridge. And she left this city which had pleased her so much during her student period. She left her parents there, moreover, since Dr Albert Hopkinson had taken a teaching post in Cambridge in 1919, exhausted by his work as a general practitioner in Manchester, where he had worked for many years for his patients (in often forgetting to charge those who could not afford).

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   Alice and Lawrence had four children: Stephen Lawrence (1923), David William (1926), Margaret Alice (1931), and Patience Mary, (1935)

 

    The youngest, Patience, would marry the grandson  of Rose and Joseph John Thomson, who mentored Rutherford when he started in Cambridge in 1895. Science is definitely a big family.

Alice Hopkinson Lawrence Bragg on their

Alice Hopkinson and Lawrence Bragg on their wedding day, December 21, 1921.

Source: Australian Physics, May-June 2012 , page 77

Stephen, Olga Hopkinson, David, Albert Hopkinson, Patience, Lawrence Bragg, Margaret.

Source : Light is a Messenger : the Life and Science of William Lawrence Bragg, Graeme Hunter, 2004, page 167

William Lawrence Bragg en 1937 avec ses

   In 1938, Alice returned to Cambridge: in fact, her husband, Lawrence Bragg had just taken the post of director of the Cavendish Laboratory, previously held by Rutherford (deceased the previous year).

   This was the second time that Lawrence succeeded Ernest, since he had also taken his place in Manchester in 1919.

  In 1941, upon the death of his father, William Henry Bragg, Lawrence Bragg inherited his title. Alice thus became Lady Bragg.

  In 1945 she was elected mayor of Cambridge, a position she held for two years.

We see her below giving a speech as mayor. She was the third woman to be Mayor of Cambridge, but she was the first person to be filmed in that role.

Alice Bragg was also:

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- teacher at the Withington Girls School, until 1937.

- from 1938, member of the Women Voluntary Service , founded the same year by Lady Reading

- from 1944 to 1953, city councilor of Cambridge, in which she participated in particular in the commission of motherhood and child welfare

- from 1951 to 1955, member of the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce of Great Britain.

- President of the National Marriage Guidance Council

- Involved in the organization and the reception of the participants in the conferences held within the Royal Institution, of which her husband was "superintendent" then director (only the name changed) from 1954 to 1966.

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Lady Bragg was elevated to Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1972 for her role in the National Marriage Guidance Council .

Commander of the Order of the British Em

Sources : 

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