Late last summer,
Hollister Hovey and her sister Porter—friends of a friend—came to photograph my
house and interview me for one of the chapters of a book they were doing
entitled Heirloom Modern, which has
now been sumptuously published by the House of Rizzoli. It is, as the cover
copy states, about “homes filled with objects bought, bequeathed, beloved, and
worth handing down.” It was a lot of fun watching them work—while, of course,
being sure to let them get on with the job unmolested by proprietorial interference
or heavy-handed art direction manqué. But it is an especially intriguing and
distinctly odd experience to reabsorb my house as it now appears in the pages
of their beautiful book. On the whole, I would say that it does a splendid job
of representing these rooms as I have configured and arranged and decorated them
since I bought the place a few years ago, and therefore, I suppose, of displaying
me too. I did not do this unaided. George Knight designed my library; Leland Torrence managed the building of it, and Jared Nixon was my painter—and a truly brilliant one. Since the Hoveys were here I have rationalized the books, so that Australiana
and Asiatica (on the east wall, naturally) face off Britain (west) while dictionaries, encyclopedias and other works
of reference fit snugly in between (south), while three times great-grandmother Jane Pearson presides over the fireplace (north), but the effect is not radically different.
The other amusing aspect of participating in an exercise of this kind is the
surprisingly puffy air of satisfaction I have derived from comparing my house with
other people’s, and it is comical to reflect upon the fact that they are probably
experiencing exactly the same thing.
I possess a photocopy of an old off-print of a lengthy article in Burke’s Colonial Gentry entitled “Pearson of Kippenross,” that was carefully inscribed by our great-grandmother, “E[mily]. S[ophie]. Pearson, Kilmany Park, at ‘Craigends,’ Ayrshire, 1912,” shortly after she and her family arrived for an extended stay in Britain before World War I.
According to the preamble, “The old Scottish family of Person of Lochlands, Pierson of the barony of Balmadies, Forfarshire, and Pearson of the barony of Kippenross, Dunblane, Perthshire, of which the Hon. William Pearson [my great-grandfather] is head, appears under various spellings, in some of the earliest official records of Scotland.
This family is described as then “ancient,” in 1684, by John Ochterlony of The Guynd, in his Account of the Shire of Forfar” [a manuscript in the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh that was eventually published by the antiquarian James Maidment in his The Spottiswoode Miscellany: A Collection of Original Papers and Tracts, Illustrative Chiefly of the Civil and Ecclesiastical History of Scotland (Edinburgh: Printed for the Spottiswoode Society, 1844), Vol. I, pp. 311-350].
The unbroken descent of Pearsons appears to commence with Thomas Pierson, who died before 1524, and his first and, unfortunately, anonymous wife.
Of Thomas Pierson’s five sons, John the eldest, was a monk; Thomas, the third, became the ancestor of the Pearsons of Clow, and of Lady Paton, wife of the artist Sir J. Noel Paton, specifically a painter of fairy subject-matter; David, the fourth, obtained in 1576 the monastery charter of Nether Baith, thenceforth known as Peirson’s Baith; and Adam, the youngest, inherited abbey lands of Kepty, Smiddie Croft, and Lamblaw Croft, including Lochlands, a portion of Cairny.
It is the second son of Thomas Peirson’s sketchy first marriage, however, who concerns us here. His name was Walter Peirson. Having witnessed a charter by Alesone Charteris, relict of one “Fotheringham of Powrie,” which granted the lands of Forgandenny to one Cristopher Seton of Meldrum—an arrangement confirmed by Mary, Queen of Scots, on April 30, 1556—Walter Peirson expediently married Seton’s daughter, Isobel, a rare instance of shrewd financial management in the Pearson line.
Walter and Isobel Peirson had four sons and two daughters: (1) James, who married Elizabeth, daughter of Carnegy of that ilk; (2) John, who married another daughter, Margaret, of the same Carnegy of that ilk; (3) Alexander, of whom more presently; (4) Thomas, whose doughty child and heiress, Elspet, in 1645 subscribed “600 merks” to the defence of Dundee by Major Mungo Murray against the Marquis of Montrose.
The third son of Walter and Isobel Peirson, Alexander Peirson, represented Edinburgh in the Convention of Estates at Holyrood House, in 1602, and in the Scottish Parliament of 1608, having been since 1586 a merchant burgess of Edinburgh. From his first marriage to Bessie, the daughter of one Jhone Eistoun, he had five sons and two daughters: (1) Alexander, a brilliant advocate, who in 1634 distinguished himself in the defense of Lord Balmerino, and in 1649 rose to the bench as Lord Southall; (2) Adam, who succeeded his father as merchant burgess of Edinburgh; (3) James, of whom more presently; (4) John, who in 1646 served on the Committee of War, and in 1655 became Commissioner for the Shire of Edinburgh; (5) Thomas, a “bachelor”; (6) Elspeth, who married Thomas Cleghorn, a goldsmith, and (7) Margaret, who married Edward Edger of Wedderly, Co. Berwick.
The third of these—and a curious pattern of descent from second or third son to second or third son is here beginning to emerge, and lasted as far as our great-grandfather, William Pearson, who was also a third son, as is my elder brother Hamish—was James Pearson, of Kippenross in Perthshire, who was born in 1594; took his M.A. from Edinburgh University in 1615, was ordained in the Church of Scotland, and was eventually appointed by King James to be Dean of Dunblane Cathedral.
Dean Pearson used this benefice extremely effectively (after the example of his shrewd grandfather) to enrich himself and his family, before coming under the notice of the authorities in 1649, who forced him by Act of Parliament to lend his money to the public purse. Nevertheless Dean Pearson survived more or less intact until he died in 1658.
Dean Pearson, James, married Jean, the second daughter of David Drummond of Innermay, and had three sons and a daughter, viz.: (1) James, the eldest son and namesake, who was born in 1637, was in 1678 appointed one of the Commissioners of Supply for Perthshire, having in 1661 married Helline, daughter of Sir John Rollo of Bannockburn, who was, in turn, the second son of the first Lord Rollo; (2) David, a bachelor; (3) Alexander, another bachelor, and (4) Jean, who married into the family of James Belshes of Tofts.
James and Helline (Helen) Pearson had an enormous family of two sons and seven daughters who survived infancy: (1) James, of whom a little more presently; (2) John Pearson of Kippenross, our ancestor; (3) Janet, who in 1691 injudiciously married Patrick Graeme of Inchbraikie, soon after he was outlawed for having fought and won a fatal duel with the Master of Rollo; (4) Isabelle, a spinster; (5) Elizabeth, who married Walter Buchanan of Wester Spittlehau; (6) Annabella, another spinster; (7) Anna (the name seems unoriginal, poor girl), who evidently remained yet another spinster.
Now, John Pearson, the second son of James and Helen Pearson, was born in 1667, and eventually married Jean, daughter of the first Sir Patrick Threipland, baronet, a noted Royalist during the Argyll Rebellion of 1685, and Lady Threipland, whose first husband, Linton of Pittendreich, was a victim with John Pearson’s older bachelor brother, James Pearson, of what is remembered as “Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiell’s very sad and unwarrantable Mistakes.”
According to Burke, this surviving John Pearson and his wife Jean were wise enough to keep their heads down.
John Pearson “became noted throughout his part of Scotland for his gigantic size, and for his hospitality and good-fellowship according to the customs of the day. They had two sons and two daughters, of whom the eldest son died young, and the second son, Hugh Pearson, inherited Kippenross, as well as several useful legacies from his spinster aunts.
Hugh Pearson of Kippenross took the Grand Tour in the late 1730s, and on a visit to the Lake of Albano somehow thought that the evergreen oak trees in the vicinity were rather similar in shape and as large as the Kippenross Tree, a huge sycamore, which makes you wonder how much he really benefited from the experience.
Upon returning to Scotland, Hugh Pearson took great interest in the improvement of his property, and in 1742 laid out the Beech Walk, along the banks of Allen Water. He married Agnes, the daughter and co-heir of William Gibb, a surgeon of Edinburgh.
Their second and youngest son, William Pearson of Kippenross, who was born on January 27, 1750, married Jane, the only daughter of Sir James Campbell of Aberuchill and Kilbride, fourth baronet.
He actually lost the freehold of Kippenross to one John Stirling of Kippendavie “at dice or cards,” so recalled Aunt Anne, “on the night of the worst storm in years, which was nothing compared with the one he encountered when he got home, and told Jane wot ’e dun.”
William and Jane Pearson are fortunate to have qualified for inclusion in our select club of sixty-four, mercifully (as far as I know) unrelated great-great-great-great grandparents.
Jane Pearson was the daughter of Sir James Campbell of Aberuchill, third baronet (1723–1812), and his first wife Margaret, née Ball, who was the daughter and heir of the splendidly named Captain William Conductor Ball of Hatton Garden, London, “land commissioner for Scotland.”
As a young man, Sir James Campbell served in the Scots Greys, and was present at the Battle of Fontenoy (May 11, 1745) in the War of the Austrian Succession, which unfortunately the Anglo-Dutch-Hanoverian forces lost woefully, in what is now Belgium.
The Scots Greys were beaten on that day by the French under Marshal Maurice de Saxe, much assisted by the “Wild Geese,” the famous itinerant brigade of Irish cavalry who fought on the side of Bonnie Prince Charlie when and wherever possible, usually on the continent.
Sir James Campbell of Aberuchill, my five times great-grandfather, had two large families. With his first wife, Margaret, whom he married in the same year in which he inherited the baronetcy (sensible), he had at least two sons who survived infancy, (1) Jane’s brother Colin, a captain in the 19th Regiment of Foot, a brevet major and eventually lieutenant-colonel of the Perth militia, who died “unmarried” in 1811, and (2) Alexander, the future fourth baronet (1757–1824).
Jane herself and one of the other issue, so inadequately described in Burke’s Colonial Gentry, all of whom died young, may well have been born at Aberuchill in Perthshire between 1755 and 1757. Her mother, Margaret, the first Lady Campbell, died in 1766, possibly in childbirth.
Sir James remarried (to Mary Ann, daughter of Joseph Burn, who was evidently a good deal sturdier than my poor five times great-grandmother), and presented him with another eight children, viz. four sons: (1) Thomas, 1769–1799, gentleman, who died “unmarried”; (2) William, 1774–1849, a writer to the signet; (3) Frederick, 1779–1816, of the 42nd Highlanders; (4) John, 1785–1867, a surgeon; and four daughters, about whom, thanks to the meticulous suppression by Burke’s Colonial Gentry of any available detail, we know absolutely nothing.
This impressively enormous family of at least six sons and five daughters who survived infancy may have been a factor in causing Sir James to sell the estate of Aberuchill in 1772.
According to Burke’s Colonial Gentry, “in 1800 he executed an entail of the barony and estate of Kilbryde,” the Regency equivalent of taking out a double mortgage. At his death these passed in the manner of a bad check to Jane’s brother Alexander, for whom the baronetcy was at best a consolation prize.
In 1775, Jane Campbell married William Pearson of Kippenross, Perth. With ineffable ill judgment, perhaps genetically encoded, three years later Mr. Pearson is said to have lost the freehold of the estate of Kippenross in a game of dice or cards with his neighbor, John Stirling of Kippendavie, but managed to retain a lease on it for the remainder of his life.
These William Pearsons, my four times great-grandparents, had four sons and two daughters, namely (1) Commander Hugh Pearson, R.N.; (2) John Pearson, 1783–1807; (3) Major James Pearson, b. 1787, who served in the Indian Army, was awarded the Peninsular medal with Java clasp; joined the expeditions against Palembang and Nepal, and became commanding officer of the 65th Regiment at Agra; (4) William, b. 1790, “d.s.p.”; (5) Margaret, 1776–1840, who married the Rev. Dr. David Ritchie, D.D., Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland; and (6) Agnes Catherine, 1780–1865, a “spinster.”
Somewhere out of this respectably fertile soup of Pearson uncles descended the thread of kinship at the end of which dangled the late Lucy Pearson, another “spinster,” who was a closer friend to Granny than she was evidently the remotest of cousins.
They must have made friends when Gran was living in England shortly before and during World War I.
In 1975 Mum and Aunt Anne, who kept in touch with Lucy, took me, aged eleven, to visit her in the comfortable but slightly forlorn flat where she lived in genteel poverty, just off Knightsbridge. We had tea, and sardines on soggy toast.
The high point in Lucy’s career was the invitation in about 1963 to sail out to Melbourne as a semi-official “companion” to Joyce, Lady Delacombe, whose husband, Sir Rohan, a former military governor of the British sector of Berlin, was lately appointed Governor of Victoria.
Although nothing at all was explicitly stated to me by Loris Callander or Charlie Curwen, who were both very much in evidence at Government House during the Delacombe era, I gather that Lucy Pearson’s tour of duty was not an unqualified success, and before long she flew back to London.
Within the vice-regal household, Lucy was known, no doubt affectionately, as “Juicy Lucy,” and the sense was quite definitely ironic.
This portrait of old Mrs. Pearson, our common ancestor, was probably painted in Edinburgh around 1828–30, when she was an old lady of about seventy, presumably around the time of her husband’s death, and she was obliged to vacate Kippenross.
In about 1860, Helen Pearson (née Littlejohn), the widow of Commander Hugh Pearson, Jane Pearson’s eldest son, brought the portrait to the first homestead at Kilmany Park near Sale in East Gippsland, when she sailed out to live in quiet retirement with her son, daughter-in-law, and their family. It passed thence to my grandmother’s sister, Aunt Mim, and down the line to our Davidson cousins.
