Miles Pearson II (1811-1900)
(awaiting better image)

Mary Pearson ('Blind Mary') (1823-1909)
(awaiting better image)

Chapter 9: The later years of Miles and Mary Pearson

When Miles Pearson II, with his wife and four remaining children, left Borrowby in 1860 he moved to a property named "Black Dykes" at Brompton, about two miles north-east of Northallerton. At the time of the move Mary Pearson was expecting her eleventh child, and a further son, Robert Alfred, was born at "Black Dykes" in November 1860. However, the family stayed at that address for less than a year, because the 1861 census return shows them as living at Nag's Head Farm. This was a small farm of about 35 acres at Lovesome Hill, on the west side of the main road from Northallerton to Darlington a few hundred yards north of Oaktree Hill, where a side road comes in from Brompton. In the past the Nag's Head had been one of several coaching inns on this section of the main road to the North, and the front rooms and widows of the farmhouse still recall those of a country public house: but it had ceased to function as an inn well before Miles Pearson's time.

The family remained at Lovesome Hill until about 1866, and it was there that my grandmother Elizabeth Ann Pearson was born. I had considerable difficulty in tracing the records of her birth and baptism, due mainly to the fact that in her later years she had consistently understated her age. My mother, my uncles and I had always believed that she was 18 when she married in 1887 and 84 when she died in 1952. (In fact, 84 is the age on her gravestone.) This indicated a date of birth during 1868 or 1869: but when I obtained a copy of her marriage certificate I was puzzled to find that it stated her age as 23. Eventually I discovered her birth registered as that of an "unnamed female child" in July 1862 with a birth date of 23 June - which I knew to be correct. Her baptism was then traced in the registers of the Wesleyan Methodist chapel at Northallerton; it took place on 4 August 1862. My grandmother was therefore not 18 years of age when she married but nearly 25, and she was well into her 90th year when she died. Whether this understatement originated in a genuine mistake on her part, or an unwillingness to admit that she was nearly eighteen months older than my grandfather, I cannot now say. But it came as a surprise to both of my uncles and certainly did not assist my own enquiries!

The youngest of Miles and Mary Pearson's many children, Mary, was born at Lovesome Hill in 1865. In the following year Miles moved once again, this time to 17 Norton Road, Stockton-on-Tees (later known as 11 Crosby Terrace, Norton Road). The 1871 census return shows them living there with six of their seven children, as Miles III had in the meantime returned to Borrowby. In Norton Road Miles kept a grocer's and corn chandler's shop at the end of Crosby Terrace: the premises are still there although they are now used by the local Communist party as their offices. Although my grandmother was only three when the family moved to Stockton and could remember nothing about the farm at Lovesome Hill, she had clear memories of the corner shop in Norton Road with large cornbins in the shop itself and a high brick wall surrounding a small yard at the back. One thing in particular that she recalled was a serious fire which broke out in the shop when she was about eight years old. She herself, with her brothers and sisters, was rescued from an upstairs window by the local fire brigade. But the family's St Bernard dog threatened to attack the firemen and my grandmother believed they deliberately locked it in one of the back rooms, where it was burnt to death.

Miles and Mary Pearson stayed at the shop in Norton Road until shortly after 1880, when Miles, then 70 years of age - retired from active business and turned the shop over to his son Robert Alfred. His next move was to Ivy Cottage in Sycamore Road, Linthorpe, in those days a semi-rural area near Middlesbrough which was only sparsely populated. Ivy Cottage still stands as one of two similar detached houses (the other being Olive Cottage) on the left hand side of the road as one proceeds from The Avenue. But it is no longer known by that name and Sycamore Road itself has been developed very considerably with the spread of the ever-growing lower Teesside conurbation. As Martha, William and Sarah had already married and left home while the family were at the Norton Road shop, only my grandmother and her younger sister Mary accompanied their parents to Linthorpe. Although it was from Ivy Cottage that Elizabeth Ann was married in 1887, her recollections of the family home there were not altogether happy ones. The strain of earlier years had caused her mother to suffer a nervous breakdown which left her with an increasingly violent temper: in addition, her mother's sight was gradually failing. The house, moreover, was in an isolated position having as its near neighbours only Olive Cottage and the rather gloomy buildings of St Mary’s Roman Catholic College in its tree-lined grounds. My grandmother was working as a governess prior to her marriage and, being of a rather nervous disposition, was often scared to make her way home in the darkness of winter evenings. Frequently the only living persons she saw for nearly a mile were young priests walking in the College grounds. These strains and stresses affected her health and for some time she suffered from fairly frequent fainting fits.

After my grandmother married, Mary, her younger sister, remained with Miles and Mary Pearson until - some time in the 1890s - they moved once again. This move, the final one as it turned out, was to 2 Swinburne Road, Eaglescliffe, about four miles on the road south from Stockton-on-Tees to Yarm. In those days Swinburne Road formed part of a small group of houses near Eaglescliffe Junction railway station, and even in his old age Miles regularly took the train from there to Stockton, where he collected rents from properties he owned in the Tilery area and had his mid-day meal with Robert at the old shop before walking back to Stockton station for the return journey. It was on just such an occasion that he eventually died. On Christmas Eve 1900, in a bitterly cold winter, he had walked only a few hundred yards from the shop towards Stockton station when he collapsed in the street. He was taken into the snug of the Commercial Hotel, which still stands at the corner of what was then Railway Street, and died there without regaining consciousness. An inquest held on 26 December recorded that his death had been "accelerated by the severe cold" and his death certificate, which included the Coroner's finding, showed his age as "about 90". In fact, he had only just passed his 89th birthday. My grandparents were then living at Fairfield, near Stockton, and my mother recalled the news of Miles' sudden death being brought home by my grandfather at teatime on Christmas Eve. My grandmother, who was very fond of her father, was extremely distressed by the news - the more so, I gathered, because he had been unfortunate enough to die on licensed premises! My grandmother, recounting the circumstances of Miles' death, told me she well remembered a large rose bush in full flower in his front garden for several days over that Christmas weekend, despite the severe cold. And this was confirmed quite independently by my mother, who accompanied my grandfather and grandmother to Eaglescliffe immediately after Miles Pearson's death.

Old Mary Pearson survived her husband by more than eight years, but for the whole of that time she was totally blind and dependent on her youngest daughter who was still living at home. (I have always understood that my great-grandmother's blindness could have been avoided, or at least delayed considerably, if she had not sought treatment from a "quack" doctor of foreign extraction.) Her will, dated 17 July 1906, gives her address as 9 Gordon Terrace in Stockton-on-Tees, which may have been only a temporary move to be near my grandmother and her family because she had returned to Swinburne Road by the time of her death on 24 January 1909. She was then 85 years of age. My mother told me that when she was in her late teens she often visited Eaglescliffe to have tea with "Blind Mary" and that much of the fine needlework she did when young was completed in her grandmother's company at the Swinburne Road house. Both Miles and Mary Pearson were buried in the Durham Road cemetery at Stockton, where there is a gravestone to their memory and that of Robert Alfred Pearson and his family.

My grandmother described her father Miles II as of medium height, having a resolute countenance and a fine head of dark hair up to the day he died. A photograph I have, which was probably taken about 1880 when the family were still living in Norton Road, bears out this description in full. A photograph of Mary Pearson which is also in my possession shows her as rather a plump woman with pleasant features and appears to have been taken before she went blind. Life did indeed deal them many severe blows and in the later years of their lives the deaths of their daughter Martha and their son Miles III and most of his family were to be added to the losses they had suffered so many years before in Borrowby village. For the greater part of their long lives Miles and Mary Pearson were zealous Wesleyan Methodists, as were my grandmother and grandfather after them. And although the first of their many children - Mary Anne, who died in infancy - was baptised in Leake Church, all the others were baptised in the Wesleyan Methodist chapels in Thirsk and Northallerton .

Miles and Mary had seven children who survived to adulthood: four were born in Borrowby and three afterwards. The eldest of the seven was Martha, who was born at Borrowby in 1849. She married a fruit merchant named Richardson in Stockton, but had already died by 1896, when Miles Pearson referred to her as his "deceased daughter" in the will he made in that year.

Descendants of Martha later lived in Thornaby-on-Tees but I know nothing more about them. By 1896 the eldest surviving son, Miles III, had also died with his wife and two daughters in Borrowby: he, too, is referred to in Miles' will. The second son, William, was a joiner and cabinet maker and I was told by an uncle that he later lived at Sand Hutton (Sandhutton) near Thirsk. The second surviving daughter, Sarah Helen (or Sarah Ellen) married James Stephenson of Darlington, who was one of Miles Pearson's executors, and later lived at Uplands near Barnard Castle. She was still alive in January 1909, when she was named as the informant of Mary Pearson's death, but she died a few years afterwards after being accidentally struck on the head by a golf-ball on Barnard Castle golf course.

Robert Alfred, the first child to be born after the move from Borrowby, stayed in Stockton. After managing his father's grocery and corn chandlery in Norton Road he had a grocer's shop in Tilery Road, where his father had owned property. He and his family lived in a house named "Belmont" in Durham Road, and between them they remained in occupation for well over sixty years. Robert died in 1928; his wife Hannah died in 1947; and their children Minnie and Wilfred died at the same address in 1968 and 1976, respectively. One son, Harold, was killed in the First World War; and the youngest, Reginald, is still living in his 70s at Linthorpe. He and his son are the only members of Miles and Mary' s original family who still carry on the surname Pearson, as none of Robert's other children were married. In my early years I was taken by my mother to "Belmont" to visit my great uncle Robert and great aunt Hannah but I remember nothing about them. I did, however, visit the house two or three times on my own in Wilfred's last years, when he was living there after the death of his sister Minnie in 1968. I found it a museum piece in which nothing seemed to have changed in thirty or more years. Wilfred lived on his own in the kitchen and one small bedroom; the Venetian blinds in the drawing room had hardly ever been opened; and a woman's handbag and gloves still lay on an old fashioned chaise-longue alongside a piano with quaint winged legs. The house was sold after Wilfred died.

Miles and Mary Pearson's two youngest children were my grandmother Elizabeth Ann, who is the subject of the next chapter, and Mary ("Polly"). Mary was still living with her widowed mother until as late as July 1906, when "Blind Mary" made her will. Later she married Richard Hornsby who by an earlier deceased wife had a son Bertram, the British High Commissioner in Egypt shortly after the First World War. I never met Richard Hornsby, who appears in my mother's wedding photograph of July 1915 but died in the 1920s. But I knew my great-aunt "Polly" very well, as she stayed once or twice with my grandmother when I was there and I also visited her house with my mother when young. She was a "typical Pearson", of fairly slender build and medium height, with brown eyes and a wide mouth rather resembling my grandmother's. After Richard Hornsby died Mary went to live at Redcar, where she died shortly before the Second World War. She had no children.

Next: Joseph & Elizabeth Ann Wilson