The meaning of the word “ERIMUS” on the Pearson memorial in Crambe:
The single -word “ERIMUS” (“We shall be”) on the Pearson memorial is tantalisingly enigmatic. It may relate to the momento mori warning “We shall soon die all”; but there was no sundial nearby which would give life to this double entendre and pun.
An alternative interpretation is more local, as “Erimus” is Middlesbrough’s Latin motto, It dates back to Joseph Pease (1799-1872), founder of the Stockton to Darlington railway, who famously proclaimed that “Yarm was, Stockton is, Middlesbrough will be”, thus triumphalising Middlesbrough’s mid-century rise to importance. Pease was a great Quaker and indeed the first Quaker MP. This might have motivated the Pearsons to want the association with him. The Middlesbrough/Pease resonance of “Erimus” also rings true in space as well as time: Pease was still a local and national hero up inot the 1880s, and Middlesbrough is relatively near (some 50 miles from Crambe, but just 20 miles from the other Pearson homestead at Danby).
KP used the word “Erimus” twice in his early work on Fronica (1887:52,60). However, this is probably coincidental. Both uses were in the context of Psalm 79 v.4 (“Deus converte nos et ostende faciem tuam et salvi erimus” – “Convert us O Lord and show us thy face, and we shall be saved”) – a verse for which Shanzer (2009) provides a peculiarly lavatorial interpretation, dating back to a usage on which St Augustine was privy.
However, it is unlikely that KP had anything to do with the choice of the word “Erimus” for the Pearson memorial. Indeed, he may have had nothing to do with the memorial at all, for it was probably erected either soon after the deaths in 1859 which are recorded there – when KP was yet a toddler – or some 23 years later after his grandmother died in 1882. Cursory inspection suggests that the grave-surroundings are older than the monument itself. Thus while the grave may go back to 1859, possibly the monument was erected around 1882. By that time William Pearson would have been well into his career, and sufficiently affluent to subsidise such a grand erection. His brothers too would have been established locally as lawyers by then –they would almost certainly have been involved in executing their mother’s will, and arranging her funeral. (Examination of WP’s account books at UCL may support or refute these theories.)
Who chose this motto for the gravestone remains unknown.
==== The xxx dated yyy reported under the heading “Memorial to Scientist at Crambe” that “The Chancellor of the York Diocese has granted a faculty to Mr. (sic!) E. S. Pearson to remove a family memorial tablet in Crambe church .. and to replace it by a tablet in Hoptonwood Stone …”. (In the same column it was announced as a smaller item that “President Roosevelt will nominate Mr. Joseph Patrick Kennedy (Jack Kennedy’s father) as the United States Ambassador to Britain this week.”
Hoptonwood Stone was a stone much-used by Eric |Gill and other scu derives from a small spinney at 800 feet above sea-level called Hopton Wood. It is south-west of Matlock, and on the heights above Wirksworth, an ancient market town, once an important centre for lead mining. (Lamb 1933).
H. A. J. LAMB, A.R.I.B.A. (1933) THE QUARRYING OF HOPTON-WOOD STONE. Stone Trades Journal.
Crambe’s parish records reveal that WP (KP’s father) was one of eleven children – as indeed was KP’s mother Fanny (see Section YYYY below). WP was the second child, the eldest son, and the only child who lived beyond eighty. Their birth-dates span 21 years; at least two died in infancy (including Elizabeth perhaps, whose deathdate is unknown); two others died aged 20 and 24:
Ann(e) 1820-1890 age 69 b. or bapt. Crambe
William 1822-1907 age 84 Crambe
Thomas 1825-1825 age 3 months Crambe
Thomas 1826-1902 age 75 Crambe
Robert 1828-1891 age 63 Crambe
Elizabeth 1830- Crambe
Alfred 1832 -1839 age 6 Newton-upon-Derwent
Sarah 1834-1859 age 24 Wapplington/Allerthorpe
Mary 1836-1914 age 77 b. Dunnington bapt. Crambe
Richard 1838-1859 age 20 b. Norton bapt. Allerthorpe (“Abode: Wapplington”)
Eleanor/Elenor 1841-1916 age 74 b.Norton
This mortality pattern was no doubt typical for those born in the pre-Victorian Yorkshire countryside. But what else was happening in Crambe during William’s childhood?
On 9th June, the local Herald had joyfully announced “The Reform Bill
As Marc Girouard (1978) notes, country houses are best seen as ‘power houses’ – symbols and instruments of social power, especially from the tenancies that land-ownership brings: “A land-owner could call on his tenants to fight for him, in the early days of a country house, and to vote for him – or his candidate – in its later ones” (ibid.:2).
Local events during William Pearson’s childhood:
William’s childhood may have been impacted more by local events than by national happenings: 1816 had been “a year of severe agricultural distress” around York (Bell 1972:13), but the 1820s saw a public building boom in the old city. This included the Yorkshire Museum, the Festival Concert Rooms, and the York Subscription Library (Sheila Wright 1995:12). These were the years of the “Grand Musical Festival” in the Minster, but York was morphing from an “industrial backwater”, full of medieval restrictive practices and far from coal, into a national hub, located by the end of the 1830s on the new iron-road industrial superhighway (Armstrong 1974:20-46).
However during William’s formative years York Minster burned in 1829, the global cholera pandemic reached York and Malton three years later (Durey 1974; Barnet 1972:28), and the years 1828-1831 were exceptionally wet, producing problems for local farmers (Armstrong ibid.: 34; Cayley 1834:292).
Regarding the cholera; Mr Joseph Rowntree had assured York’s Board of Health that no city in the North of England was as clean, and that York had already done all it could to get rid of nuisances (ibid Barnet p. 32). One of the first victims was a young woman from near Malton. Her parents came to York for the funeral, taking her clothes back to Malton, and along with it the cholera (Barnet p.30). They must have travelled along the highway (today’s A64) which just bypasses Crambe. On 9th June, the local Herald had joyfully announced “Reform Bill Passed!!!”, but the Gazette sourly remarked that this was no time for celebratory dinners: the money should be given to the cholera hospital, so it did not become a burden on the rates (Barnet ibid.).
Some years later, Chartism held sway in Malton, Scarborough and York (Hastings 2004: 4, 16, 25-30), places with histories written in spades. However small villages like Crambe are often too small or unimportant to be recorded, and we have little further evidence of what occurred there during William Pearson’s childhood.
(Edward Cayley the local MP in Parlaiment, 1834feb21 Friday; pp.291-293 in “The Mirror of Parliament”
There were harvest failures and bank failures. Something around these times disrupted the Pearson household and may have led to the departure of the young William from Crambe.
By 1875, Sir George Cholmley was the East Riding’s third largest land-owner, after Lord Londesborough and Sir Tatton Sykes. The Cholmley 20,503 acres produced a rental of UKP 26,365 (Ward, EAST YORKSHIRE LANDED ESTATES IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY :p72).
. This is the seat of the Cholmeleys of Howsham Hall, and also the birthplace of George Hudson (1800-1871) “The Railway King”, who in his corrupt way changed the face of York, Yorkshire and the nation by developing a thousand miles of railway in the 1830s and 1840s.
===Porter: “His father had grown up among Quaker relatives in York, but his ambitions had driven him to Edinburgh, where he took an LL.D. degree, and then to London …. Karl never met his paternal grandmother, although he was twenty-five when she died.
Rural historiography, Sydney Smith, and brotherly nicknames
Chartism held some sway in Malton, Scarborough and York (Hastings 2004: 4, 16, 25-30), places with many written histories. However small villages like Crambe tend to be too small or unimportant to be recorded. . Historians urban and urbane tend to write of urban things.
The history of small villages is not merely a ‘foreign country’, but they live on a complete different planet from most historians – their emptinesses have either never been known or they have been expunged from the collective memory An exception may be that most urbane of urbane historians – Sydney, the “Smith of Smiths” as Macaulay called him (Bell 1972:4). From 1806 to 1829 he was vicar of Foston, just 3 miles from Crambe. Thus he possibly knew the Pearsons, and would certainly have known James Jarvis Cleaver (later Peach), who was vicar of Crambe when William was christened in 1822
Being famously “twelve miles from a lemon”, Smith’s purpose-built rectory at Foston was nevertheless “most pleasantly situated” even if the church was “a miserable little hovel with a wooden belfry” (Macaulay to his father, 26 July 1826, cited by Trevelyan (1881:142-3) and Bell (ibid.).) Smith was later a “big lemon” on the London scene, especially that revolving around Holland House. William Pearson would certainly have known of him (so too would KP, albeit later). Could there be any connection between the fact that KP called his elder brother “Balbus”, while Sydney Smith’s elder brother was nicknamed “Bobus”?
Crambe’s location, and nearby country houses:
Crambe is a small hamlet some xxx miles north-east of York and xxx miles south-west of Malton and Norton. The River Derwent lies some xxx metres to Crambe’s south; Crambe is in the North Riding while Howsham, on the opposite bank of the river, is in the East Riding. Crambe lies on a bend in the river, and hence its name ( = xxxxx – just like Buttercrambe a few miles south).
The 1841 census for Crambe showed a total of 29 inhabited houses and 191 inhabitants. However, no Pearsons are evident there, for by then the family had left.
The York-Scarborough Turnpike just north of Crambe predated WP’s birth by some seventy years (it obtained Royal Assent in 1752: MacMahon 1964:28) – and then as now Crambe lay almost midway between two fine country houses: Castle Howard (built c.1710), has just seen its first century and was some xxx miles to the north, while Howsham Hall (built c. 1610) was two centuries old and yyy miles south of Crambe. As local people would have known intimately, such country houses were not just or mainly for living in – they were “power houses” (Girouard 1978:2) and centres of political influence. War-lordism had ended, but lordism remained. The landlords then were George and George William Frederick Howard, 6th and 7th Earls of Carlisle (1773-1848 and 1802-1864 respectively) at Castle Howard, and George Strickland-Cholmeley (1782-1874) at Howsham. Even today such landowners have power beyond their numbers, and they must surely have been extremely powerful when William Pearson was young. The Howards were more important on a national scale, but the Cholmeleys were nearer and were Lords of the Manor at Crambe. They also had a particular influence on the Pearson family. (The Cholmley/Cholmeley family were originally from Whitby where their money came from harbour dues (Binns 1994) – even the two main pedigrees disagree on how to spell the name (“Cholmeley of West Newton”, “Cholmley Pedigree”).
This excerpt is fairly reliable in sentiment and substance. But factually it has several errors and important omissions:
There is no evidence that KP’s father had Quaker relatives in York, let alone that he grew up among them
William Pearson was driven to Edinburgh – but maybe not by ambition. Correspondence with the Vicar of Crambe suggests that a dispute involving William Wildon <1758>-1836), the Cholmleys’ steward , may well have been the cause.
William Pearson moved to Edinburgh around 1840 (he appears on the 1841 census as “Writer”), and started a law course in 1843. He did well and gained prizes, but he left Edinburgh suddenly in January 1848 before completing the course. Thus despite the LL.D. (Edin.) claimed by his son and grandson on the Crambe tablet and elsewhere, William probably never gained a degree. He is not listed on the standard graduate lists (University of Edinburgh 1858, 1889), nor is any degree mentioned in “Men-at-the-Bar” (Foster 1885), although this does record his 1843 matriculation. (In any case, Edinburgh LL.D.s at that time were only honorary.)
Little is known about WP’s schooling, although Who’s Who? (1900:791) reports:
“Educ. : private schools; Edinburgh University. Prizeman in Roman Civil Law, 1845 ; in Scots Law, 1847; Gold Medallist, Edinburgh University, 1847. Inner Temple, 1850 ; Barr.”
See also (Walkowitz 1992, Bland 1995, etc., etc.).
Phyllis Grosskurth (1980) Havelock Ellis: a biography
Pearson was a young man of immense, humourless, self-important rectitude. He loathed everything Hinton stood for and he was so enraged by Miss Haddon’s rash remarks that he set about unmasking Hinton for the charlatan he believed him to …
1852787678 Lovell, Terry, ed. (1995) Feminist Cultural Studies Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd
… Pearson was a young barrister beginning a career in mathematics at University College, London: a young man of ‘immense, humourless, and self-important rectitude’.6 A convinced Darwinist and socialist, his beliefs accorded with the …
“In March 1915, (Sam) Darling arrived in Kuala Lumpur with his team: Marshall Barber from the Phillipines, and Henry Hacker from the Malay States” (Farley 19xx:66)
Federated Malay States Malaria Bureau Reports.
HACKER, H. P.(1920)
Federated Malay States Malaria Bureau Reports. 1920, November Vol. 2 pp. 47 pp.
Methods for Expressing the Associations of Different Species Federated Malay States Malaria Bureau Reports by H. P. Hacker
Review by: Philip P. Calvert
Distribution of the Long-tailed Fi’tld Mouse, Apodemus sylvaticus, on South Haven Peninsula, Dorset, in 1937, with some observations on its wandering and homing powers. By H. P. HACKER^^^ H. S. PEARSON.
(With 5 sketch-maps and 4 tables.)
The growth, survival, wandering and variation of the long-tailed field mouje, Apodemus sylvaticua. III. Wandering power and
distribution By H. P. HACKER and H. S. PEARSON. With thirteen Chtrts and one Map . . . . . . . 389—413
THE GROWTH, SURVIVAL, WANDERING AND VARIATION OF THE LONG-TAILED FIELD MOUSE, APODEMUS SYLVATICUS
H. P. HACKER , H. S. PEARSON , and HELGA S. PEARSON Biometrika , Volume 33 ( 2 ): 136
XXXviii, ’27] ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS 19
…. These bees Professor Cockerell has placed in a new subgenus called Hackeriapis. He informs me that Mr. F. H. Timberlake has found M. schauinslandi Alfken, an Hawaiian species, a resin worker and sometimes using keyholes for sites.
Hacker found specimens of M. ustulata carrying masses of a resinous substance in their mandibles with which they line crannies and holes in timber. A resin cell was taken containing a half-grown larva of this species. M. inyslacca was found to use resin with which it lined the clay cells of the nest of a wasp, Sccliphron lactnin. The exit holes were sealed up with the same material. Hacker did not find M. rliodnra nesting. but he inferred that it used resin for the bees were observed visiting- a Eucalyptus tree, from which resin had oozed, and rasping the patch ot” resin with the mandibles. Both sexes were captured on these resin patches and he inferred that the males assist the fe
Who’s Who 1900 lists both KP and WP – but with errors in both; WP mentions Crambe and having an LL.D. Ii have not seen these printed elsewhere although several people do say he had an LL.D. (which may be false). It also has a false birthdate for KP. Interestingly, for KP it mentions mathematics, mechanics, philosophy, law, evolution, heredity and elasticity, but does not mention eugenics or statistics. (This may be fair for 1900 – I suspect KP wrote it himself – but seems surprising today.)
Edinburgh in the 1840s.
William Pearson was in Edinburgh for the first half of the “hungry forties” – the period when Hobsbawm’s “age of revolution” (1789-1848) morphed into the “age of capital” (1848-1875) (Hobsbawm 1962, 1975). This was “a time of economic depression and food shortage”, with regular typhoid and cholera outbreaks, aggravated by nutritional shortages, potato blight (from 1845), and offshoots of the contemporaneous Irish potato famines. The Church of Scotland’s Moderator interpreted some of this as “alarming indications of the divine displeasure”; March 1848 saw food riots in Edinburgh, while Bank Rate doubled from 3½ % to 8% between January and November in 1847 (MacGillivray 2003:70, 73 and passim).
Meanwhile, Edinburgh until 1846 was distinctively different from other comparable towns in its disregard for health-related statistics. Glasgow was far more forward-looking (ibid.: 116, 120, 129).
The railway link between Edinburgh and Berwick was completed in 1846