Wicklow shop survived 183 years by diversifying

Charles Stewart Parnell shopped there for animal feed, now people can buy beads, sequins and stationery at John P Hopkins's shop in Wicklow town, writes ROSE DOYLE

THERE ARE family businesses which more than integrate with their communities. They change and diversify and keep pace until, in time and by general consensus, they’re a core part of the lives around them.

John P Hopkins Sons in Wicklow town, aka Hopkins Toymaster, is one such, the place where generations of the town’s young have enjoyed rite-of-passage summer jobs and where six generations of the same family have served the town’s shopping needs.

The uncrowned king himself, Charles Stewart Parnell, shopped there for animal feed and sand for 11 acres. Capt Charles Robert Halpin, who laid the transatlantic cable, shopped there too. And, proving that looking to the customer’s need is all, today’s Wicklow citizens share the joys of shopping for art supplies with customers who travel from as far away as Dublin and Wexford.

That the Hopkins story, in all the glorious detail of its times and places, religions, names, travels and business dealings, is known so well is down to Jacqueline Devereux and her study of the family genealogy.

Jacqueline and her sister, Jean Hodgins, sixth generation descendants of one Nicholas Hopkins, run John P Hopkins Sons on Wicklow’s Main Street, one of two businesses which owe their existence to the industry of said Nicholas.

The other is Hopkins Home Value on South Quay, both of them diversifications from Nicholas’s original ironmongers, the whole still going strong because Nicholas handed on not only his work ethic but, very obviously, his love of place.

Nicholas Hopkins was born in 1797, the third son of a Methodist farming family in Clonegal, then as now a small, pretty village on the Wicklow/Wexford/Carlow border. As a young man he left Clonegal for Wicklow town to work for one John Perrin, who owned an ironmonger’s shop. A brother, Henry Martin Hopkins, was already a victualler in the town.

Nicholas worked and learned well and in 1827 set up his own Ironmongers and General Merchants in the town’s Abbey Street. He was married by then, too, to Grace Anne Fleming.

The first of their four children, John Perrin Hopkins, was born in 1831 and would in time take over the business. One of their other offspring married someone called Haskins, another emigrated to Australia. The youngest, William, became a farmer.

In 1868, when John Perrin Hopkins was 37, he moved the business to today’s building on Main Street. There, with living quarters above a larger retail space, he had room to accommodate the growing business and family.

He had earlier taken himself to Dublin to learn his trade working as a cashier with Arnotts and, by the time his father Nicholas succumbed to the draw of the land and went back to farming and Clonegal (probably living with his son William and dying there in 1856), John Perrin was running the business single-handedly. Jean’s research reveals him as an “authoritarian figure” who died, in 1914, aged 83.

John Perrin married his first cousin Sarah (his brother William’s daughter) and they had a son, George Frederick, whom they sent to school in England. George Frederick, when he married, settled in Milverton, Somerset, England, where his father bought him a drapers’ shop.

Clearly a hands-on father and not about to take his eye off the business, John Perrin travelled between Wicklow and Milverton and, when George Frederick’s children were old enough (he had 10) brought most of them back to Wicklow to help run the shop there.

The Milverton business was sold when George Frederick died but the Wicklow business always, through thick and thin and by dint of hard work and tenacious hanging on, remained core to the family.

Cedric Arnold Hopkins was George Frederick’s seventh child. He was also the grandfather of sisters Jean and Jacqueline, remembered well by Jacqueline as “a lovely, easygoing man”. He ran the shop with his brothers Garnet Buchanon and Harold Brassey; this was a family with names of consequence.

Cedric fought in the first World War but got home safely and, by 1921, when his father George Frederick died, his English mother and three sisters were living and helping out on Main Street, a crowded existence which included live-in staff.

Not everyone joined the business, however. One of Cedric’s sisters became a nurse, a brother became a doctor.

A pre-second World War falling out between Garnet and Harold led to Garnet taking himself off to England and, in the 1940s, on to Argentina. Harold and Cedric ran the shop during the 1940s until, in time, Harold’s family set up the second part of the business.Cedric’s son, John Hopkins, took over the running of the Main Street shop.

Which brings us, almost, to today. John Hopkins, son to Cedric and born in 1932, married Audrey Williamson and they became parents to four daughters: Jacqueline, Lesley, Jean and Kim.

When two of the “maiden aunts” still living over the shop moved to Dublin in the 1950s, John Hopkins found himself with space to expand. He set up one of the first supermarkets while Audrey, whose father had been a commercial traveller and whose heart was in the business from the beginning, started a small toy shop on the first floor. The year was 1958.

By then the Hardware Seed Merchants section of the business, run by Harold Hopkins and his sons, was thriving on South Quay. Today, thriving still as Hopkins Home Value, it sells mostly electrical goods and home necessities.

Business on Main Street grew and grew. Throughout the 1960s Hopkins’s was the main grocery supermarket in the locality, with the toy section going from strength to strength until it became a Toymaster member.

Cedric Hopkins died in 1969. He had taken a back seat by then, happy to let his forward-looking son John have his head. “Cedric was a lovely man,” Jean says, “he was easygoing, liked fishing and always had time to talk to us grandchildren.

“My father was a very quiet man, very well known in the town and progressive in business.”

The Hopkins girls grew up with a strong work ethic. “The shop hours were 9am to 6pm, no half-day even though the town closed for a half-day during the week,” Jean remembers.

“One of my jobs was washing the lino on the floor.” She did a secretarial course after leaving school but, jobs being scarce, “ended up working in the shop and never left. Jean came into the shop right after school”.

Their sister, Lesley, is a lab technician and Kim, after a stint in the shop, travelled for a while and then married.

Jean Hodgins and Jacqueline Devereux have diversified the business because “you have to, to survive”. The Toymaster Shop is now an important and ever-growing part of things while most of the ground floor has been turned into an immensely popular art and stationery supply emporium.

“We like to specialise in what we do,” Jean explains, “and a building as old as this wasn’t built to compete with supermarket chains.

“We’ve done what earlier generations did and diversified by adding the stationery and arts and crafts. It’s become a serious part of the business in the last few years; we carry pastels, finger paints, wobbly eyes, 50 different kinds of glue, Montessori needs, beads, sequins, everything.

“Customers come from Dublin and Wexford to get what they want – and that’s the key to survival, taking on board what customers want and giving it to them.People appreciate individual, special service.”

They are keenly aware of the uniqueness of the business they’ve inherited, aware of the value of tradition, service and value to the community they serve.

“Our father brought us up to be compatible, even-handed and fair,” Jean says. “He was very careful never to favour one of his children over the other.”

They get on well: Jean is outgoing and fiery, Jacqueline quieter and shy.

“She puts up with me,” Jean laughs and says of a relationship which is as compatible as anything their father John (“more or less retired but who comes in sometimes”) could have wished for.

Both are married with, between them, eight offspring. Enough to secure the Hopkins dynasty for another generation, or two, at least.