John William Ernest Pearce

1901 Census:

Merton Court, Foots Cray, Bromley, Kent (Parish of St John's) [Sidcup, Kent] [Piece RG13/694 folio 35, page 62 & folio 36, page 63]

John W E Pearce Head Mar 46 Schoolmaster Emplr Born Gloucestershire, Bristol
Irene Kate Pearce Wife Mar 38 Born London, Paddington
Effie I Pearce Dau 1 Born London, Hampstead
Edward H Pearce Son 1 mth Born Kent, Sidcup
George O C Ramsay Boarder Unm 17 Schoolmaster Asst Born Devon, Barnstaple
Cuthbert H Peach Boarder 13 Born Middlesex, Tottenham
John H Mabey Boarder 12 Born Kent, Bexley
Cyril D Mabey Boarder 10 Born Kent, Bexley
Margaret Bond Servant Mar 62 Monthly ? nurse Born Gloucestershire, Cheltenham
Nora M Leahy Servant Unm 16? Nurse housemaid Born England
Henry R Peach Head Mar 49 Schoolmaster Worker Born Ireland
Mary Peach Wife Mar 40 Born Cornwall? St Feock
Gertrude Peach Dau 16 Born Middlesex, Tottenham
Cedric Ernest Ringwood do Son 11 Born Middlesex, Tottenham
Eric N do Son 9 Born Middlesex, Tottenham
Alice G Sanswin Sis in lawUnm 35 School governess Worker BornCornwall? St Feock
Eric Y W Brown Visitor 1 Born Kent, Tunbridge Wells
Cedric Peach Son 11 Born Middlesex, Tottenham


From autobiographical notes by Edward Holroyd Pearce (Lord Pearce) 1989:

"My father was born in 1868 [1864 according to his birth certificate! ARJ] and was educated at Manchester Grammar School. From there he won a Scholarship to Merton College Oxford.
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. Thereafter he really passes from this story His financial affairs collapsed. My father while at Oxford had rashly signed (at his heedless optimistic request) some bills of exchange, so that my father was personally liable for them without receiving any benefits. He told the creditors that they would have to make him bankrupt if they wished, but if they waited, he would (when he went down from Oxford) work for them and pay them - a hard ordeal for a not very mature youth. He was under 21 when he incurred the liabilities, and therefore had a complete defence in law, but it would never have occurred to him either then or at any time in his life, to use this fact either as a ground for escaping his liabilities, or as a bargaining counter for lessening them For several years after leaving Oxford he was scraping to save every penny out of his meagre earnings as a schoolmaster until at last the creditors were paid in full.

Grandfather Pearce, undismayed by his own ill-success, was persuaded that Canada opened a wider field for his talents. He took his younger children there [in 1890 according to E I P's scrapbook] 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. My father for the greater part of his own life regularly sent an appreciable part of his earnings to Canada.

At Oxford he became a brilliant classic. Merton was ill suited for a retiring diffident scholar. My father did not find his tutors congenial and he had very little to do with them, but he got the best classical honours degree of his year in Moderations. When he turned to reading Greats he lost interest. He was not by nature a philosopher, nor at that stage of life was he interested in a close study of ancient history. I used a few of his books when I read Greats and found that his confession of idleness was no pretence. The first one or two pages were annotated in his neat scholarly hand; but the rest of the book was virgin and uncut. But since he was so powerful a classical scholar he glided effortlessly into a good second.

Thereafter he taught the classical sixth forms at Eastbourne College, Dover College and finally University College School. He taught himself German in order to read Lessing's Laocoon, and on his holidays he loved to go for long solitary cycle tours in Germany living on next to nothing. He once found a travelling companion through a newspaper advertisement but it was not a success. The travellers parted a few hours after arriving in Germany and my usually mild father threatened to shoot his companion if ever he saw him again. I do not know what provoked this out-burst but there may well have been faults on both sides My father was a terribly austere man to travel with, and his company on a tour of Italy knocked a stone off my weight when I was nineteen. His idea of a cycling tour when he was a young man was to make it a point of pride not to fall short of 100 miles a day or 50 miles if he was on a walking tour. The sustenance that he considered necessary for this was one roll of bread with coffee in the morning, two rolls with a bar of chocolate for lunch; no tea; and an omelette for dinner. Personally I always found that hard going: but he seemed to thrive on it.

At the age of thirty five he was teaching the sixth form at University College School under the inspiring leadership of Paton. In school hours he was vigorous, vital and brilliant. In social life he was diffident, and retiring. It was then that he had the great good fortune to meet my mother."

"When I was ten I went to Germany with my father for a fortnight's walking tour, he with a rucksack, I with a tiny luggage receptacle on my back. We went up the Rhine on a steamer and I kept a careful diary of uninteresting events and took rather dim photographs of the enchanting castles with a five shilling Brownie Box Camera. At Heidelberg we started to walk in earnest. The novelty end excitement of walking through forests and following routes shown by marks of various colours on the trees buoyed me up so much that we accomplished 25 miles the first day. But the walk ended sadly because we were set on by a storm of horse flies that followed us for miles and settled on us, until walking became insupportable, and I was sobbing with anger and aversion. So we stopped at a rough little Inn, where the landlord pooh poohed the flies and said that they were not nearly so unpleasant as the big white flies that came in winter and made it cold. The next morning my shoulders were bruised by the shoulder straps of my paraphernalia, and my father worried about whether he was over-walking me. So we only walked 15 miles that day."

"My father's teaching ran like a flame through the school. Whether he was teaching clever boys or dunces in high forms or low forms he generated such a heat of inspiration that he could warm the dullest. When four o'clock came he was nervy, white faced and worn, and his family left him alone until he had drunk one or two cups of strong tea. At the end of term he would read detective stories and the like for hours and hours on end, as a reaction from the strain."

"Professor Beadle, the Zoologist, said of my father in an address at University:- "To stimulate the interest of a child who was neither very quick in the uptake nor very diligent, nor in fact at all cut out for classical studies, was proof enough of his genius as a teacher.' "

"Two or three times in every year I would go with my father for a fortnight's tour abroad, living on coffee and rolls drifting round the cities of France or Belgium in search of cathedrals, museums and the like, or staying in little towns in the Auvergne and walking over Caesar's battlefields. 'That hill' my father would say, 'must be the Collie Nudatus where Caesar brought up his seventh legion. Yes' I would say, I expect so'. I never really knew much about it; but my father, with the optimism of all great schoolmasters, never realised how small was my grip of the subject, and how great was my ignorance. He was content if he had my interest which he certainly did."

"Immediately war was declared [in 1914] my sister and I rushed up to London to stay with our grandmother. We watched the marching soldiers and listened to the bands with tears in our eyes and thrills running down our spines. We hardly pretended that life had not become wonderfully glamorous and exciting. To our parents it was just blank misery. And to them as the war years went by it was a heart-breaking procession of attractive old boys whom they loved, coming down to show off their grand new officers uniforms and then going off to the front, from which they never returned. Many of the best were killed. My father hated to go out in the town for fear of meeting some parent; when he did he dreaded to ask after the son. In those days parents had not even the tonic of personal danger to relieve the bitter fear that darkened every hour for them. It was a relief when the Zeppelin raids brought a small measure of danger for those who stayed at home dreading the telegraph boy."

"In the summer holidays of 1916 my father took me to France. Since the war began he had been pining for a trip to the continent. In the holidays he hated hearing the sound of the guns when the wind was in the South East. He moped at the inaction to which his age compelled him apart from Sundays when he used to work with other volunteers at Vickers Arms factory carting heavy steel baseplates for mines. At the suggestion of a friend he wrote to a farmer in the Beauce, not very far from Blois, offering our free services for the harvest. This was accepted by a letter of overwhelming gratitude, since the farmer himself was at the front, and the farm was being run under difficulties by his wife and their small children. Armed with the letter my father went to the French Embassy. There several people kissed him on both cheeks and he was given a permit. It was a thrill to travel again across the Channel, free at the moment from submarines, and to be once more in the heart of the French people. As we passed through Paris they were not friendly. They thought that England was making sacrifices too small in comparison with their own. But when we got to Pontlevoy, they were full of friendship and treated us with honour. We stayed at the village inn. At 6.30 every morning we set off jauntily on the long white dusty road that led to the farm. At 7 o'clock in the evening we trudged back to the Inn. We hoed vines, we hoed beetroots, we carted wheat and stacked it, and in due course we put it through the thresher and stacked the straw. When the thresher came, we had a gang of rough German prisoners to help us with the heavy work. The farmer's wife helped us part of the time and the fiffeen year old farmer's son worked with us. On every side the great flat fields stretched out to a limitless horizon, with never a hedge to vary the expanse. A huge canopy of unbroken blue was always above us.
Hoeing the vines, 'piocher les vines,' was tolerable. Hot and back breaking the work was as one went on and on down the long lines; but the leaves were pretty and gracious and the little clusters of grapes looked merry and succulent, though duty made them untouchable. But hoeing the beetroots was intolerable. They were shiny and vulgar and it took forty five minutes to reach from one end of a row to the other. My father considered that the honour of England was at stake. The farmer's boy might (and did) straighten his back and look around and pause. But we might not. Sometimes as we worked, bent double, side by side, I would say to him,
'I think my back is going to burst into flames. Don't you think it would be a good idea to straighten ourselves up for a moment'
My father would say tolerantly,
'Do by all means, my dear boy, if you feel you really must. I think I'I1 just get to the end of the row first'
So of course I couldn't.
Dejuner in the hot farm kitchen was a trial. There were flies everywhere. The queerest things appeared to have got into the stew and my father never failed to put on his spectacles for the meal. He picked about unhappily and started slightly but noticeably whenever the farmer's wife spat shrilly and lustily on to the brick floor.

Most evenings we talked French with the gaunt stubbed bearded village schoolmaster for a while. And sometimes I read the Comte de Monte Christo or some other Jules Verne (with which my father always provided me lavishly on our holidays abroad, in order to improve my French). The schoolmaster told me a thing which enormously helped my French accent. In learning to speak English (which he did well) he had got the accent by constantly imitating an Englishman's mispronunciation of French. Maybe it was a commonplace but I had never heard or used it before

We left with real warmth and blessings (and two kilos of lovely farm butter) from the farmer's wife. When we reached Paris we were told by Cook's that four submarines had got loose in the Channel and no boats were being allowed to cross. When we asked how long it would be before we could go, shoulders were shrugged. My father was desperately worried about his school which was due to open in a few days. I viewed with equanimity the prospect of returning late to Charterhouse as a sort of war casualty. But it was dismal tramping about Paris with his nerves on edge just trying to kill time. My father's old favourites Notre Dame, the Louvre and the Invalides had lost their charm. As a minor irritation the butter started to get rancid and we could not decide whether to throw it away, or carry it back for cooking as a disintegrating trophy of our prowess.
After two or three days we went to Le Havre so as to be ready to snatch the first opportunity of crossing. We travelled by night in a carriage full of French soldiers returning from the front. The battle of the Somme had done its work and we were welcomed with enthusiasm and embraced for the sake of our 'braves compatriots'. I was given various mementoes, a bullet, a piece of an exploded bomb, a pocket mirror taken from a German soldier. We exchanged addresses and promised to write. The youngest was drunk and kept tweaking the feather in the hat of an austere lady in the adjoining compartment, repeating again and again in a love-lorn falsetto:
'Ah, Mademoiselle, ton chapeau'
He left his croix de guerre on the floor when he got out; so I implemented my promise to write by sending it back to him.
The next night at Havre we saw a captured submarine brought in. Another had been sunk, the two remaining were considered a reasonable risk. So we set off in a ship overcrowded by torpedoed crews and zig-zagged home to Southampton. My father's worries departed - we got home just in time for school. I set off at once for Charterhouse where I expect I did full justice to our odyssey."

"My father once said to me reflectively 'lf your mother and I had gone into business instead of school-mastering, I should have made a big success.' To my look of surprise at this rather odd pronouncement,'I,' he said, 'would have opened the business every morning and locked up at night.' For a short time after his marriage my father had a house at University College School.
As it was really a day school this held little future at that time and only produced £185 a year. So they decided to adventure in a preparatory school Alter careful consideration they decided that the expanding suburb of Sidcup in Kent was a good place for the attempt. My grandfather produced a loan of money, and they built Merton Court Preparatory School on four acres of land. While it was being built the adventure started as a day school in a rented house. Most of the parental promises failed to materialise and the first term opened with three pupils. A fourth pupil wanted to come, but his parents could not afford to pay any fees. My father with his usual approach to such matters agreed to take the boy for nothing, and justified his decision by telling my mother that it would at least enable the boys to play football two a side. On arrival, however, the fourth pupil turned out to be ruptured and was therefore unable to play football.............................

Just before the war ended my father had offered to sell his school. He had been ageing greatly under the strain of the war, with its added work and worry, and the nervous misery from so many of his loved old boys being killed at the front. My mother felt that when I went out to France he would break up completely; so she had persuaded him to agree to give up the school. When the Armistice came, the real reasons for selling had gone and the school at once became worth far more than he had been asking. But though he had not bound himself legally to the purchaser, but had merely given a vague and friendly option, he declined to withdraw the offer, and agreed to hand over at Christmas. Paton who was then headmaster at Manchester Grammar School, implored him to come and inspire the sixth form. My father was so thrilled by this eager insistence, and by a sentimental affection for Manchester, that his Southern family could not grumble at trekking to the North

Soon after Christmas he and I set off as the advance guard to move in the furniture while the rest stayed with my grandmother. We arrived to a huge dark impressive house (at a cheap rent) that had once belonged to some merchant prince. The gigantic bath had at least half-a-dozen taps, each of which sprayed or shot out rusty water in a different way and in a different direction. One of them, if turned on suddenly, tried to lift one up in the air like a ping-pong ball on a jet of water at a fair. Our furniture looked pitifully inadequate. We camped for a few days trying to make it habitable for my mother. As soon as the rest of the family arrived I set off for Charterhouse. By comparison it seemed a very cheerful place."

JAC Pearce said: that his father had to walk four miles through the snow to get to Manchester Grammar School.

From 'The Times' for Tuesday 30 January 1951:

Mr. J.W.E. Pearce, who died on January 25, was educated at Manchester Grammar School and Merton College. On retiring in 1919, from classical teaching he turned to the study of Roman numismatics. In the early twenties he assisted in the identification of the masses of coins from the excavations of the Roman fort at Richborough. Then began his special study of the coinage of the late fourth century A.D., a subject which he soon made his own. He studied almost all the major and minor collections at home and abroad, and was one of the last foreign scholars to be given access to the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad. The results of this research were published in 1933 as 'The Roman Coinage, A.D. 364-423', the standard work of reference for this period.

For many years he gave assistance in the Department of Coins at the British Museum and there, as in the Viennese Coin Cabinet, the arrangement of the coinage of this special period is a testimony to his wide knowledge and careful research. The importance of his many contributions to the 'Numismatic Chronicle' and to American numismatic periodicals on the coinage of his chosen period was recognised by the award in 1939 of the medal of the Royal Numismatic Society, and in 1949 of the Huntingdon medal of the American Numismatic Society. His last years were devoted to the production of a detailed and definitive work on the coinage of the late fourth century, and his book, now in the press, will be a monument to the international reputation of an outstanding scholar and numismatist.

Philip Ray-Jones says:

Dardan was a teacher at Eastbourne College, then University College School in Frognal (he was a housemaster in Fitzjohn's Avenue when M was born) then Manchester Grammar and finally his own school, Merton Court. Boys there included Rex Whistler, (Dr) Charles Harris and Norman Dawbarn.

He said that he would not leave London (10 Cromwell Place, South Kensington) until a bomb dropped on the Natural History Museum - and it did, so he and Dan moved to Vale Lodge in Tunbridge Wells. Tiny Mate, the matron from Merton Court, lived on the top floor of 10 Cromwell Place and when they moved she went to Rottingdean. She was Grace Wiltshire's sister.

Alan Ray-Jones writes:

One of my earliest memories is of the splendour - probably at Christmas time - of the Drawing Room on the first floor of 10 Cromwell Place with its tall windows and shutters. I also remember the Dining Room on the ground floor, smaller and now an architects office, with a large and beautifully polished extendable table which later found its way to Vale Lodge and to Dan and Dardan's last house, South Villa in the Vale of Health, Hamstead, London. I remember being chastised for running round the table, and generally making too much commotion! We came to London (from St Ives in Cornwall) very rarely in the thirties - perhaps once a year - so it was a very important event in our lives.

From a website listing books about Roman coins: http://myron.sjsu.edu/romeweb/BOOKLIST/coinbook.htm - College of Edn, San Jose Univ:

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.
Keywords: Roman Coins History Roman Emperors Roman Women Numismatics

The Roman Imperial Coinage, known to collectors by its initials RIC, is the standard scholarly reference work on the coinage of the Roman Empire from Augustus until the fall of the West with the deposing of Romulus Augustus. Originally comprising nine large volumes, a tenth volume, RIC X has recently been published covering the coins of Arcadius and Honorius through A. D. 476. This work consists largely of data on coin reverse types and mints arranged in tables. Each volume is accompanied by several plates of illustrations either in the back of the book or in a separate bound volume having the same volume number (i.e. RIC IV a contains tabular data and RIC IVb contains the plates. A complete set of these reference works is quite expensive, costing over a thousand dollars if copies of each volume can even be found. The collector should beware of reprinted editions in which the quality of the photographs is poor. The original plates were of the highest quality.
Pearce, J. W. E. Harold mattingly, C. H. V. Sutherland, and R. A. G. Carson Eds. The Roman Imperial Coinage v. IX Valentinian I to Theodosius I London: Spink & Son Ltd., 1968.
Keywords: Roman Coins History Roman Emperors Roman Women Numismatics A scholarly Victorian figure, usually in his study. Numismatist. Died aged 87, had prostate cancer. 1911 Census: Annie Burrough, School Matron, 39, from Tisbury, Wilts, and Margaret Terry, Nurse, 25, from Snodland, Kent. Also, as a separate record:
John William Ernest Pearce, Preparatory Schoolmaster, 46, his wife Irene Kate, 37, daughter Effie Irene, 11, son Edward Holroyd, 10, daughter Phyllis Margaret, 1, and 13 boys boarding ages 8-14, also two schoolmasters, ages 19 and 29. Rachel Kneale, archivist at Manchester Grammar School, by email 20 Jan 2011: "John William Ernest Pearce attended the Manchester Grammar School from 1876 – 1881. He is listed as Captain of School for 1881 in one of our admissions registers – which is the MGS equivalent of Head Boy. His home address is listed as 25 Darncombe Street, Moss Lane East. This is in the Moss Side area of Manchester.
He was clearly a very able student. We have form lists for pupils, listing their position in form and any prizes they received. He won the Langworthy Scholarship for Classics, which was worth £20 in 1880 and 1881. He also won the Lawson Gold Medal which was awarded for academic achievement. He was placed 2nd in his form for 1880 and top in 1881, in his final year. He also won the Brackenby Classical Scholarship, worth £45, for any Oxford College, and then an Open Classical Scholarship to Merton College, Oxford. He received a first class result in Moderations in his first year at Oxford."

My grandfather remembered walking four miles through the snow to get to Manchester Grammar School.