Pearce
John William
Ernest Pearce (1864-1951), my mother Effie's father, is shown here with her. He did well, in
1898, to marry my grandmother Irene Kate Chaplin, for he was a born
academic, whereas she had social skills in abundance. After a spell of teaching classics at
Eastbourne College, Dover College, and University College School London, where he was Housemaster at
Yarth House, he built and ran, with her, his own boys Prep School, at Merton Court, Sidcup, Kent, to
the south of London, but sadly many of his boys died in France in the 1914-18 war. There were
a few girls in the school as well, including Effie, who became a bit of a tomboy. In 1922 the family
moved to Lewes Crescent in Brighton, but in 1926 they moved again, to 10 Cromwell Place, South
Kensington, in London near the Natural History Museum, and he had a second career, as a world
authority on the Roman coinage of the 4th Century AD, working with Harold Mattingly of the British
Museum. On a numismatic website recently I came across an entry: "Pearce, J. W. E. Harold
Mattingly, C. H. V. Sutherland, and R. A. G. Carson Eds. The Roman Imperial Coinage v. I through X
London: Spink & Son Ltd., 1968".
My grandparents said they would leave London if and when the Natural History Museum was bombed. Not
soon afterwards, in 1941, bombed it was, and they moved to Tunbridge Wells in Kent - and finally,
after the war, back to London, to the Vale of Health in Hampstead. I lived with them for some
time in both places.
Their four children were, from left to right - the youngest, my uncle Jack - John
Allan Chaplin Pearce - a solicitor, born in 1912 and going strong at 90; the oldest, my mother Effie
Irene Pearce (1899-1996); my uncle Edward Holroyd Pearce
(1901-1990), who was later a Law Lord, Chairman of the Press Council for five years from 1969 and
author of the Pearce Report on Rhodesia in 1972; and, on the right looking worried - as she often
did - my aunt Phyllis Pearce (1910-1973). All four married and had children: My mother married Raymond Ray-Jones, an artist; Edward's wife was Erica, daughter of Bertram
Priestman, a well known landscape artist; John Allan
Chaplin Pearce married Raffaella Elisabetta Maria Baione (Lella), whom he met in Italy when
serving in the army; and Phyllis Pearce married Edward Eade (1911-1984), an artist whose work has
recently been brought to the attention of the public through exhibitions and a website, by his son Oliver and his grandson
Jeremy.
J W E Pearce's father, Henry Edward Pearce, from
Bristol, emigrated to Canada in about 1882, with the whole of his family except J W E P, who was
already at Oxford University. Of his grandfather, Edward Pearce wrote:
"It was typical of Grandfather Pearce that on my father going to Oxford at the age of 17 he
gave him no advice and no money, but he did give him a tasteful tea set of Minton china (a few
pieces of which even survived the Blitz), three tolerable water colours, and a dozen bottles of very
fine Claret..... Grandfather Pearce, undismayed by his own ill-success [in the UK], was persuaded
that Canada opened a wider field for his talents. He took his younger children there, and lived to a
very ripe old age, full of culture, keen on freemasonry, spoilt by his sweet and loving wife,
comforted and helped by kindly sons and daughters who went with him. I never heard that he earned
any money, but he bred affection and nice children."
Unfortunately I have no information about the life of Henry and his wife in Toronto, but my
mother and I have kept in touch with the descendants of two of their children, Mabel and Elsie. I
have a little information on William (Billy) Pearce but the trail has gone cold. I think that Cecil
died in Toronto in 1909 and I have no information on the others - Henry Edmund, Leonard, Swinton,
Lionel, Lincoln and Tom. For Edward's wife Harriet and the parents of both of them, click here.