Thomas and Edith Pears

[Bibliophile]

Andrew Pears, the father of Thomas Pears, was active in local politics in Isleworth where he lived for a time in Spring Grove before moving the more modest Mevagissey lived in after his death by Tom and Edith. He was Chairman of the Brentford Liberal Association and an alderman on Middlesex County Council 1892-1901. He was said to have been a ”stalwart radical” in his politics.

Tom does not seem to have been active in political circles but he followed his father in playing a prominent role in local affairs with his active support for the Pears Athletics Club, his concern for the welfare of his employees and his involvement in his local Anglican parish church of St John the Baptist where he was proposed as a sidesman. He was also associated with a number of charities.

The Pears were locally prominent, socially and even politically, and exerted influence as employers.

 

[Arun Vajpey]

Edith Pears drove an ambulance, and later joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service (formed in 1916).

She did indeed; but according to her ET bio, once she changed to the WRNS, Edith drove a cab ferrying high-ranking Royal Naval officials to and from their clubs. At the time she shared a flat with a Norah Crowe, daughter of a family friend; it was Norah's brother D V Crowe who became Edith's second husband and it is his background that I have an interest in.

Back in 1968, as a 12-year old I was travelling in and around the tea plantations near Ootacamund, India, where some British planters had lived back during the Raj. There were remnants of a few coffee estates nearby and I learned at the time that a Crowe family of Woodcut Grove in Sussex, had coffee and cotton plantations throughout that area during the Raj, extending into Ceylon (now better known for its tea). I wonder if Edith Pears' second husband D V Crowe, an electrical engineer turned tea planter in Travancore (which was in the same area belt controlled by the Crowes of Woodcut Grove), was a relative. The whole area came under what was then the Madras Presidency and until the early 1980s, many Indian old-timers from Travellers' Bungalows in that region used to tell old stories and even show old photographs about the Crowe family who lived there during the Raj and made an impression; but I don't remember anyone mentioning a Titanic connection. By the time I became an ET member, learned about Edith Pears and her eventual marriage into the Crowe family, those Indian old-timers were all long gone.

Edith's first child from her second marriage, Sheila Crowe, was definitely born in Travancore in 1920 but the son, Frank in Surrey UK, according to ET. So, it looks like the former Edith Pears spent at least a few years in southern India before returning to the UK.