Sir Alfred Pease, 2nd Baronet

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. [A Wealth of Happiness and Many Bitter Trials. Joseph Gurney Pease. 1992. ISBN 1 85072 107 6]

Pease was also an author, adventurer and an explorer, who lived out some years of his adult life in Britain's African colonies. He was a resident magistrate at Barberton, Mpumalanga in the Transvaal of South Africa, and explored Sudan, Somaliland, and the northern Sahara.

In 1906, Pease leased more than convert|6000|acre|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. Examples of his collections can be found at the Dorman Museum.

Theodore Roosevelt, who enjoyed Pease's hospitality in 1909 at the start of his world-famous safari, described Sir Alfred as "a singularly good rider and one of the best game shots I have ever seen." [Roosevelt, Theodore, "African Game Trails", New York 1910, Charles Scribner's Sons, page 26]

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 youngest son Captain Christopher York Pease was a victim of the First World War, killed in May 1918 and is buried in the Mazingarbe Communal Cemetery Extension. His eldest son, Edward Pease (1880-1963, succeeded to the baronetcy and upon his death, this passed to his eldest son by his third marriage, Alfred Vincent Pease (1926-2008), who died without issue. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pease_Baronets]

Footnotes

External links

* [http://library.mcmaster.ca/archives/findaids/fonds/p/pease.htm Alfred E. Pease collection, 1918-1964 ] at library.mcmaster.ca
* [http://www.cwgc.org/search/casualty_details.aspx?casualty=181183 Commonwealth War Commission entry for son Christopher]