Everything about Sir Arthur Pearson 1st Baronet totally explained
Sir Cyril Arthur Pearson, 1st Baronet, GBE (
24 February 1866 –
9 December 1921) was a
British newspaper
magnate and
publisher, most noted for founding the
Daily Express.
Early life
Pearson was born in the village of
Wookey,
Somerset to Arthur Cyril and Phillippa Massingberd Maxwell (Lyte) Pearson and educated at the prestigious
Winchester College in
Hampshire. His father was Rector of Drayton Parslow in Buckinghamshire, England per the District 16, Drayton Parslow, Buckinghamshire, England 1881 Census. His first job was as a
journalist working for the London-based publisher
George Newnes. Within his first year he'd impressed Newnes enough for him to make him his principal assistant.
Career
In
1890, after six years of working for Newnes, Pearson left to form his own publishing business and within three weeks had created the
periodical journal
Pearson's Weekly, the first issue of which sold a quarter of a million copies.
A
philanthropist, in
1892 he established the charitable
Fresh Air Fund, still in operation and now known as
Pearson's Holiday Fund, to enable disadvantaged children to partake in outdoor activities.
In 1897, Pearson married, as his second wife,
Ethel Fraser, daughter of William John Fraser. (His first wife was the daughter of Rev John Bennet.)
In
1898, he purchased the
Morning Herald, and in
1900 merged it into his new creation, the
halfpenny Daily Express. The
Express was a departure from the papers of its time and created an immediate impact by carrying news instead of only
advertisements on its front page. He was also successful in establishing papers in provincial locations such as the
Birmingham Daily Gazette. He came into direct competition with the
Daily Mail and in the resulting commercial fight almost took control of
The Times, being nominated as its manager, but the deal fell through.
In
1900 Pearson despatched the explorer Hesketh Prichard to
Patagonia to investigate dramatic reports of a giant hairy mammal inhabiting the forests, and conjectured to be a
giant ground sloth, long since extinct. Prichard's reports from 5,000 miles away gripped readers of
The Express, despite him finding no trace of the creature.
During this same period, Pearson was also active as a writer, and wrote a number of tourist guides to locations in Britain and Europe. Under the
pseudonym of "Professor P R S Foli", he wrote
Handwriting as an Index to Character in
1902, as well as works on
fortune-telling and
dream interpretation.
Pearson was a strong supporter of
Joseph Chamberlain's tariff-reform movement, and organised the
Tariff Reform League in
1903, becoming its first chairman.
In
1904 he purchased the struggling
The Standard and its sister paper the
Evening Standard for
£700,000 from the Johnstone family. He merged the
Evening Standard with his
St James Gazette and changed the
Conservative stance of both papers into a pro-
Liberal one, but was unsuccessful in arresting the slide in sales and in
1910 sold them to the
MP Sir
Davison Dalziel and Sir Alexander Henderson.
Loss of eyesight and later life
Beginning to lose his sight due to
glaucoma despite a
1908 operation, Pearson was progressively forced from
1910 onwards to relinquish his newspaper interests; the
Daily Express eventually passed, in November 1916, under the control of the Canadian–British tycoon Sir Max Aitken, later
Lord Beaverbrook.
Later completely
blind, Pearson was made president of the
National Institution for the Blind in
1913, raising its income from £8,000 to £360,000 in only eight years. In
1915, he founded
St Dunstan's Home for soldiers blinded by
gas attack or trauma during the
First World War. Its goal, radical for the times, was to provide vocational training rather than charity for invalided servicemen, and thus to enable them to carry out independent and productive lives.
Pearson was a close friend of the pioneer of the
Scouting movement
Baden-Powell, and supportive of his efforts in setting up the movement and publishing its magazine
The Scout. When Pearson's scheme for publishing in
Braille was faltering due to lack of funds, on
2 May 1914 Baden-Powell publicly requested that "all Scouts perform a 'good turn' for
The Scout magazine publisher Mr C Arthur Pearson, in order to raise money for his scheme of publishing literature in Braille for the blind."
In
1919, Pearson wrote the book
Victory over blindness: how it was won by the men of St. Dunstan's.
He founded the
Greater London Fund for the Blind in 1921.
Death
Pearson died in
1921 resulting from a fall in his bath. In 1922 his biography,
The Life of Sir Arthur Pearson, was written by
Sidney Dark.
Further Information
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