Sir Alfred Pease, 2nd Baronet
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Sir Alfred Edward Pease, 2nd Baronet (29 June 1857 – 22 April 1939), was a Liberal Party politician in the United Kingdom, and an early settler of British East Africa, now Kenya.
Pease, a member of the Quaker industrialist clan known in Britain as the Darlington Peases, was the elder son of Joseph W. Pease, 1st Bt and his wife Mary Fox. His younger brother was Joseph Albert Pease, 1st Baron Gainford. From 1885 until 1892 Pease was Member of parliament for York, and from 1897 until 1902 the Cleveland division of Yorkshire. He inherited the baronetcy on the death of his father on 23 June 1903.
Pease was also an adventurer and an explorer, and lived out much of his adult life in Britain's African colonies. He was a magistrate in the Transvaal in South Africa, and explored Sudan, Somaliland, and the northern Sahara.
In 1906, Pease leased more than 6,000 acres (24 km²) of prairie land in the Athi Plains region of British East Africa, southwest of present-day Nairobi. There he founded an ostrich-ranch, and pursued his hobby of hunting among the game which was plentiful on Kenya's high plateaus. Because of his ranch's position near the Uganda Railway, Pease played host to many of the famous travelers who hunted in the great age of safaris. As a result, he appears in various first-person accounts of the period.
Theodore Roosevelt, who enjoyed Pease's hospitality in 1909 at the start of his world-famous safari, described Pease as "a singularly good rider and one of the best game shots I have ever seen."[1]
Pease's first cousin was Katherine Routledge, who led (with her husband) the Mana expedition to Easter Island from 1913-1915, during which she carried out the pioneering excavations of the island's legendary monuments, and recorded the surviving oral history of the island's past.
Alfred Pease was also a founder and major supporter of the Cleveland Bay Horse Society.
His son Captain Christopher Y. Pease was a victim of the First World War, killed in May 1918 and is buried in the Mazingarbe Communal Cemetery Extension.
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ Roosevelt, Theodore, African Game Trails, New York 1910, Charles Scribner's Sons, page 26
[edit] External links
- http://library.mcmaster.ca/archives/findaids/fonds/p/pease.htm
- Commonwealth War Commission entry for son Christopher
| Parliament of the United Kingdom | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Sir Frederick George Milner Ralph Creyke |
Member of Parliament for York with Sir Frank Lockwood 1885–1892 |
Succeeded by Sir Frank Lockwood John George Butcher |
| Preceded by Henry Fell Pease |
Member of Parliament for Cleveland 1897–1902 |
Succeeded by Herbert Samuel |
| Baronetage of the United Kingdom | ||
| Preceded by Joseph Whitwell Pease |
Baronet (of Hutton Lowcross) 1903–1939 |
Succeeded by Edward Pease |
