Sir Alfred Pease, 2nd Baronet

Sir Alfred Edward Pease, 2nd Baronet (29 June 1857 – 27 April 1939), was a British Liberal Party politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1885 to 1902 and was an early settler of British East Africa, now Kenya.

Sir Alfred Pease (centre) in 1909, hunting with former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (right) and Roosevelt's son Kermit

Pease, a member of the Quaker industrialist family, 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. He was educated at Grove House School, Tottenham, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a Director of Pease & Partners, a J.P. for North Riding of Yorkshire and a Deputy Lieutenant for London.

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 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 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. 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." In 1909 he was one of the founder members of the Shikar Club formed to promote the cause of hunting and shooting of big game animals.

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. The baronetcy passed in 2008, to his younger son by his third marriage, Joseph Gurney Pease.

See also

List of political families in the United Kingdom

External links

• Alfred E. Pease collection, 1918-1964 at library.mcmaster.ca
• Commonwealth War Commission entry for son Christopher
• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Sir Alfred Pease

Parliament of the United Kingdom
Preceded by Sir Frederick George Milner Ralph Creyke	Member of Parliament for York 1885 – 1892 With: Sir Frank Lockwood	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 and Pinchinthorpe) 1903 – 1939	Succeeded by Edward Pease