daughters. In 1870 he was called to the bar at the Middle Temple, and began to practise in London. In addition to his legal practice, he undertook literary and administrative work. He was for a time private secretary to Frederic Temple, at that time bishop of Exeter; he was also general secretary of the Social Science Association from 1868 to 1872, and of the International Prison Congress in 1872, and edited the transactions of both those bodies. In 1872 he was also editor of the Law Magazine. This accumulation of activities began to tell upon his health, and when, in January 1873, he learnt accidentally that the practice of Sir Charles Parker Butt [q.v.] at the Constantinople bar was vacant, he went out to Constantinople to take up this work provisionally. This accident determined his career. He became a permanent resident in Turkey, rose to the highest position open to him in that country in his own profession (becoming president of the European or consular bar in Constantinople in 1881), and made a name for himself as a newspaper correspondent and as an historian of his adopted city. He became perhaps the best-known member of the British colony in Turkey since Sir Paul Rycaut.
Pears's political attitude and activity in the Levant were determined by the facts that he was not born there and did not settle there till his thirty-ninth year, when he had already made in England political and personal connexions which he always kept up. Consequently, though he rapidly rose to be one of the leaders of the British colony, he retained an independent and critical point of view in regard to local affairs and to the Eastern Question. Holding, as he did, strong liberal convictions, he did not become imbued with that complacency towards the Turks—right or wrong—to which there has often been a tendency among Western residents in the Levant, particularly in the British and French colonies since the Crimean War. He had no more illusions regarding Sultan Abdul Hamid's intelligence than others had in regard to his character, and he expressed his views of that sovereign in his Life of Abdul Hamid (1917). Here he showed himself as accomplished a student of contemporary history as he was of the Middle Ages, on which he wrote two standard monographs, The Fall of Constantinople [in 1204] (1885) and The Destruction of the Greek Empire [in 1453] (1903). He played a part of European importance in 1876, when, as correspondent of the Daily News, he had the judgement and the courage to expose the Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria. His statements were confirmed both by diplomatic and by journalistic investigators; and on the strength of this information, Mr. Gladstone launched a celebrated political campaign. During a long career, Pears invariably acted with frankness and uprightness towards the many and diverse communities in his adopted country and yet remained in good relations with each and all of them; though his extensive practice at the local bar involved delicate relations with them and especially with the ruling race. He was knighted in 1909. Pears stayed on in Constantinople after Turkey's intervention in the European War, but was forced to leave the country in December 1914. He returned in April 1919, but died at Malta (from an accident at sea) on 27 November of the same year.
[Sir E. Pears, Forty Years in Constantinople, 1916; private information.]
PEARSON, Sir CYRIL ARTHUR, first baronet (1866–1921), newspaper proprietor, was born at Wookey, Somerset, 24 February 1866, the only son of the Rev. Arthur Cyril Pearson, rector of Springfield, Essex; his mother, Philippa Maxwell-Lyte, was a granddaughter of the hymn-writer, Henry Francis Lyte [q.v.], author of ‘Abide with Me’. Pearson went to Winchester in 1880, but the straitened circumstances of his father prevented him from staying there more than two years. He continued his education under his father till 1884, when he won a clerkship offered by (Sir) George Newnes [q.v.] as a prize for a competition in Tit-Bits, a new species of popular journal. A year later he became Newnes's manager, but his salary never exceeded £350, and in 1890, being a married man with two children, he set up in business for himself as proprietor of Pearson's Weekly. Chiefly by means of ingenious guessing competitions he won a huge circulation for this venture, and started many other popular papers. In 1900 he brought out the Daily Express at a halfpenny, four years after Alfred Harmsworth (afterwards Viscount Northcliffe) had produced the Daily Mail. He advocated a protectionist policy before Mr. Chamberlain began his crusade, and he was the founder of the tariff reform league in 1903. Mr. Chamberlain described him as ‘the greatest hustler I have ever known’. In 1904, having acquired
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