What is the connection between Gerald Manley Hopkins and Hampstead Parochial School?

15/6/2021

It may not be generally known that Manley Hopkins, father of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, was a member of our parish, a churchwarden sometime between 1877 and 1886, and a Manager of the Hampstead Parochial Sunday Schools, later to become our own Hampstead Parochial School.   When he left in 1886 the school presented him with this handwritten and illustrated address:

“Hampstead Parochial Sunday Schools

June mdccclxxxvi

To Manley Hopkins Esquire

We the undersigned teachers and scholars of the Hampstead Parish Church Sunday Schools, having heard that your connection with this neighbourhood is about to be severed, desire to make this the occasion of expressing our deep sense of the loss to be sustained by all the agencies of the Parish – and especially by the Sunday Schools – through the departure of yourself and your family, whose interest and efforts for the welfare of the Schools have for so many years been continually exerted

We would further record out high appreciation of the many services which you and they have rendered to these Schools by personal intercourse, teaching and superintendence, involving considerable sacrifice of time and convenience: and we desire to testy how much these services have been valued and how much we all have benefitted thereby.

During the many years that you have been going in and out among us many classes of scholars have grown up and passed away beyond the confines of the Sunday School room but believing, as we do, that the good that each man does lives after him, we are persuaded that your efforts to impart religious life and knowledge as well by precept as by example, still bear fruit among them, and that your influence will be felt long after you have left Hampstead

Such lasting good as is seen in elevated thought and bettered life is the best memorial a man can leave behind him, and is the memorial of your long sojourn in Hampstead, which you and your family, we feel, the most desire.”

Signatures follow – not all of them legible

• Arthur Wellesley Chapman
• ……………Superind.  Boys School
• Mr W Buckler 1^st Class
• Edw G Saunders 3^rd Class
• Mary G Currie
• Silvia Field 4^th Class
• C O Bartrum 4^th class
• Edward Vandermere Fleming 5^th class
• Alfred Taylor 5^th class
• Lilian Craigie 6^th class
• E Carlisle 6^th class
• James Henry Thiethener (?) 7^th class
• Bruce E Wakley (?) 2^nd class
• Amelia Langmead Superint. Girls’ School
• Jessica B Champneys
• Annie J Nash 1^st class
• Florence Essex 2^nd class
• Mary S Nevinson
• E Maude Roberts 3^rd class
• Violet E Wrightson 4^th class
• Caroline D Saunders 4^th class
• Sarah A Bürch 5^th class
• Eunice (?) Emerson 6^th class
• K Satchell 7^th class
• Florie E Gay 8^th class
• Florence Husband Infants Class
• Anne M Howard Infants Class
• Edith H Nash Infants Class

Manwell G Tracy (this name is separate so perhaps is the Head of the School)