Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 44.djvu/192

P (Invasion of the Crimea, ii. 54) ridiculed their action. Pease was M.P. for South Durham from 1857 to 1865. In 1867 he visited Napoleon III with a deputation from the Peace Society, but their request for permission to hold a peace congress during the International exhibition in Paris was rejected. He was chairman of the first Darlington school board in 1871, first mayor of the town, president of the Peace Society from 1872, and on 27 Sept. 1875 chairman of the railway jubilee held at Darlington, at which eighty British and thirty foreign railways were represented. He was always a prominent member of the Society of Friends. He died in Finsbury Square, London, while attending the yearly meeting, on 30 May 1881, and was buried at Darlington. Pease married, on 25 Feb. 1835, Anna, only daughter of Richard Fell of Uxbridge, who died on 27 Oct. 1839, leaving a son, Henry Fell Pease, M.P. from 1885 for the Cleveland division of Yorkshire; secondly, he married Mary, daughter of Samuel Lloyd of Wednesbury, by whom he had three sons and two daughters.

Schools and a library were presented by members of the Pease family to Darlington, which greatly benefited by their munificence.

[Cat. of Devonshire House Portraits, pp. 487–95, 503, 507; Annual Monitor, 1859 pp. 122–64, 1873 pp. 101–10, 1882 iii. 122; Foster's Pease of Darlington; Our Iron Roads, 1852; Smiles's Lives of the Engineers; Illustrated London News, 7 Aug. 1858; the Engineer, 1858, ii. 103; Times, 2 Aug. 1858; Notes and Queries, 8th ser. vii. 465; Joseph Pease, a Memoir, reprinted from the Northern Echo of 9 Feb. 1872, with Appendix, and 31 May 1881; Longstaff's Hist. of Darlington, pp. xciv, 318, 333; Random Recollections of the House of Commons, p. 289; the Peases of Darlington, British Workman, February 1892; Smith's Catalogue, ii. 278; information from Henry Fell Pease, esq., and personal knowledge.] and 

PEAT, THOMAS (1708–1780), almanac-maker, was born in 1708 at Ashley Hall, near Wirksworth, Nottinghamshire, where his father held a farm. He early acquired a taste for learning, which his father strove to repress. A brother, a joiner in Nottingham, to whom he became apprenticed, gave him no more encouragement; but Cornelius Wildbore, a master-dyer, and like the Peats, a regular attendant at the presbyterian High Pavement chapel, noticed him, and supplied him with the means of obtaining books. Peat devoted himself chiefly to the study of mathematics and astronomy, and in 1740 he was one of the principal projectors of ‘The Gentleman's Diary, or Mathematical Repository.’ The first number appeared in 1741, with Peat as joint-editor; in 1756 he became sole editor, and filled that office until his death in 1780, his successor being a Rev. Mr. Wildbore, probably a son of Peat's early benefactor. In addition to the usual information contained in almanacs, ‘The Gentleman's Diary’ was largely devoted to the solution of mathematical problems. The original editions in the British Museum are not complete. A collected edition was published in 1814 (3 vols.) The numbers edited by Peat occupy the first two volumes.

Subsequently Peat became editor of the ‘Poor Robin's Almanac,’ which is erroneously said to have been started by Herrick (Notes and Queries, 6th ser. vii. 321–3). It was conducted anonymously. Peat's share in it ceased some time before his death.

Peat was also a surveyor, architect, and schoolmaster, using his almanacs as means for advertising himself in each of these capacities; he is also said to have been ‘not a bad censor of poetry.’ About 1743 he projected a course of fourteen lectures at Nottingham on mechanics, hydrostatics, optics, pneumatics, astronomy, and the use of globes; the price of a ticket for the course was a guinea, and a syllabus of the lectures was published at Nottingham. In 1770 he proposed to publish a map of Leicestershire, drawn from his own survey; at that time he was residing at Thringstone; in 1771 he removed to Swannington, both in Leicestershire, and in 1777 he returned to Nottingham, where he died, at his residence at Greyfriars' Gate, on 21 Feb. 1780, aged 72.

[Prefaces to the Gentleman's Diary, signed Thomas Peat; Syllabus of Lecture, 1744?; Wylie's Old and New Nottingham, p. 158; Brown's Nottinghamshire Worthies, p. 379; Nichols's Illustr. of Lit. viii. 465.] 

PEBODY, CHARLES (1839–1890), journalist, the son of Charles and Eliza Pebody, was born at Leamington, Warwickshire, on 3 Feb. 1839. His parents removing to Watford, Leicestershire, where the family had lived for some three hundred years, Pebody went to the village school, and afterwards was taught privately by the schoolmaster. At the age of fourteen he came up to London, and entered a lawyer's office, but soon found work as a reporter, and afterwards joined the staff of the ‘Chelmsford Chronicle.’ At the age of twenty-one he was appointed editor of the ‘Barnstaple Times.’ From Barnstaple he moved to Exeter as editor of the ‘Flying Post,’ and from Exeter to Bristol as editor of the ‘Bristol Times and Mirror.’ It was while at Bristol that Pebody obtained