Free Kate by Claudia Joseph

1887, Anne in 1888 and Lionel in 1892 – but Harriet’s immune system was low after giving birth to her fifth child and she caught influenza. She died at home at Rockland on 9 January 1892, leaving her distraught husband, paralysed with grief, having to care for five children under the age of ten. Two months later to the day, Francis’s mother Fanny died of diabetes and exhaustion. Francis had lost his wife and both his parents in the space of eight years and the joy went out of his life.
    ‘The birth of the youngest boy took place when a severe epidemic of influenza was at its worst,’ his nephew Charles Athelstane Lupton, known to the family as ‘Athel’, wrote later in a family history, The Lupton Family in Leeds .
The confinement was normal but Harriet was attacked by the infection and died a fortnight later. Frank never really recovered from the blow. He kept his grief entirely to himself. For many years he never talked about her to the children. He rarely took holidays. It was some 30 years before he would go abroad again. And we remember what a joy such holidays were to him in his young days. He devoted himself to the business and to civic work.
    Devastated by his wife’s death, Francis threw himself into work and local politics. As well as running the family firm with his brother Arthur, he became a prominent figure in Leeds public life. Beginning as a Liberal Unionist, opposing Home Rule for Ireland, by 1895 he had gained a seat as a Conservative alderman, or councillor, a post he held for the next 21 years. It was during that time that he found his calling. As the first chairman of the Leeds Unhealthy Areas Committee, he cleared inner-city slums and replaced them with affordable homes.
    He is also remembered as one of the ‘Big Five’ council members who negotiated with the workers during the 1913 strike by council labourers over wages. Athel Lupton recorded:
The attitude of the five great men was moderate and patient but they remained completely firm, and in two or three weeks the strike collapsed. There was no serious violence. Electricity and water were maintained throughout and there was always some gas available. Other large towns watched with keen interest the course of the strike in Leeds and the attitude of the Big Five. They showed their admiration and gratitude to Frank by the presentation of a vast silver tray and a ‘huge and abnormally ugly china flower pot on a china leg’.
    Not content to limit himself to his council work, Francis was also a magistrate on the West Riding Bench, was involved with Cookridge Hospital and regularly attended Mill Hill Chapel, despite his deceased wife’s Anglican sympathies.
    Yet despite being the eldest son, incredibly successful and philanthropic, Francis remained humble and unsure of himself, possibly as a result of his wife Harriet’s death. He remained close to his younger brothers – Arthur, with whom he ran the family business, Charles, who was head of the legal firm Dibb Lupton, and Hugh, who was chairman of Hathorn Davey & Co., a hydraulic engineering company – and would consult them regularly. Together, the tentacles of their influence reached across the city.
    Arthur, who was pro-vice-chancellor of Leeds University, must particularly have been able to empathise with Francis’s loss, having himself been widowed four years earlier. His wife Harriot, who was a cousin of Beatrix Potter’s mother Helen, had died in childbirth in 1888, before her famous cousin published her first children’s book The Tale of Peter Rabbit . Charles, a renowned art collector, was treasurer and chairman of the General Infirmary and later, in 1915, became Lord Mayor. He left his extensive art collection to the city. Hugh was chairman of the Board of Guardians, an organisation that aimed to protect the poor and needy, served as a councillor for many years and became Mayor himself in 1926. ‘“I must consult my brothers” was his reaction to doubt,’ recalled Athel of