Anthony Hopkins Family History

Anthony has often spoken fondly of his Welsh upbringing and the natural beauty of Wales, crediting it for shaping much of his creativity and character.

His surname Hopkins is indeed a Welsh name.  It is a name mainly to be found in the low lying areas of Glamorgan in south Wales.  This lowland area had been predominantly agricultural, devoted to general branches of farming, cereal, grass for pasture, hay and stock raising.

That is where Anthony’s roots lie.  His first recorded ancestor was Jenkin Hopkin, born in 1710 in Glamorgan near Neath.  The Hopkin spelling here looked back to the Welsh ap Hopcyn of earlier centuries.  Anthony had some past relatives by the name of Hopkin Hopkin.  In his family tree the more modern Hopkins (i.e. son of Hopkin) did not really take hold until the early 1800’s.

Rural Glamorgan

There were five generations of Hopkins recorded in villages in rural Glamorgan, starting with Jenkin Hopkin:

• Jenkin Hopkin (1710-1759), married in Cilybebyll
• Jenkin Hopkin (1743-1817), from Kenfig
• Richard Hopkin (1767-1841),  from Michaelston Super Avon
• William Hopkin (1794-1873), from Margam
• Richard Hopkins ( 1820-1875), from Margam

Jenkin Hopkin had married in 1741 at Cilybebyll, a village five miles north of Neath.  He and his descendants can be found in the rural villages of the Vale of Glamorgan, mostly within the areas of Neath, present-day Port Talbot (southeast by seven miles from Neath), and extending further east to the Kenfig river:

• at Kenfig and Pyte (c. 1740 to 1760), seven miles east of Port Talbot
• at Margam (c. 1790 to 1840), now subsumed in Port Talbot and three miles from Kenfig
• and at Michaelston Super Avon (c. 1840 to 1870 and later), two miles north of Port Talbot

Many of these Hopkins had large families.  For instance William Hopkins, born in 1794 and someone who may have had more than one wife, had no fewer then fourteen children (although not all made it to adulthood).  William was by trade a forge rollerman in Margam.

His son Richard left Margam for the village of Michaelston Super Avon around the year 1840.  Michaelston, it was recorded then, had about 1,500 acres of cultivated land and 1,000 acres of mountain.  Richard, a licensed victualler, ran a pub (The Star Inn at Aberkenfig), which it seems his younger son Richard continued.

However, there was probably little to keep his other children around.  By the 1870’s they were moving away:

• the eldest Mary Ann and William married and left Wales altogether, emigrating to America – Mary Ann in 1871 to Colorado and William in 1879 to Pennsylvania
• Arthur left around 1870 for Neath five miles away
• while Owen departed later for Bridgend seven miles away.

It may have seemed clear by then that the agricultural areas in Glamorgan were in decline, as compared to the growth in towns and industrialization that was occurring.

And Later

There was no return to the Glamorgan countryside:

• Arthur Wellesley Hopkins (1854-1907) moved to Neath
• Richard Arthur Hopkins (1879-1958) moved to London
• and Richard Arthur Hopkins (1907-1981) moved back to Wales and to Margam which by then had become a suburb of industrial Port Talbot.

Arthur Hopkins had moved to Neath where he was recorded in the 1871 census as a lodger.  He found work as a clerk and then as an accountant.  He was still boarding in 1881.  But by this time he had lost his wife Miriam after two years of marriage and was a widower with a young son Richard.  Arthur did remarry in 1885.  He lived on in Neath and died in 1927 at the age of seventy-two.

The young Richard, finding little to keep him, moved to London.  He married in 1903 and settled in Bermondsey.  He was recorded there in the 1911 census as a confectioner (probably running a sweet shop).  However, Richard and his two children, Richard and Lorna, later returned to Wales.

Son Richard married his wife Muriel in Neath in 1936 and settled in Margam.  Anthony, their only son, was born a year later.  Margam was then a very different place than the collection of villages that his Hopkins forefathers had known 100-150 years before.  Margam had since been subsumed into the large industrial town of Port Talbot.  That town did not even exist prior to 1837.

Richard opened his bakery shop there.  Anthony has said that the working-class values that his father had shown always underscored his life.  “Whenever I get a feeling that I may be special or different, I think of my father and I remember his hands – his hardened, broken hands.”

One Jewish man from Port Talbot had the following recollection of Richard and his son Anthony:

“My grandparents were Orthodox Jews and as such were not able to light their fire on the Sabbath. They therefore had someone to come and light it for them.

The person who did this, along with his father Richard the local baker, was the young Anthony Hopkins.  Watching him do this on a weekly basis was my own father who was around the same age. This simple, helpful action formed a childhood friendship between the two of them.”