Weetman Dickinson Pearson was born near the West Yorkshire town of Huddersfield in 1856, the same year in which his grandfather Samuel and his father George formally became partners in the manufacturing and contracting firm of S. Pearson & Son. Rather than pursue formal study, he left school at 16 to learn his engineering, accounting and management skills in the family firm. At the age of 23 he became a junior partner, and three years later (in 1882) he moved the firm’s base from Bradford to London.
Over a period of 40 years between 1880 and 1920, S. Pearson & Son completed more than 80 world-wide engineering (and mostly sub-aquatic) contracts on three continents: such as the Admiralty Harbour at Dover (1898), the Hudson and East River Tunnels in New York (1889 and 1904) and the Sennar Dam in the Sudan (1922). Other projects included railway and port installations in Ireland, Spain, Chile, Brazil and Colombia.
Notwithstanding the undoubted importance of his other international projects, the catalyst for the expansion of Pearson’s business empire was to be found in Mexico. Between 1889 and 1905, Pearson won a series of major contracts from the government of Porfirio Díaz for a series of large-scale public works and engineering projects, receiving as much as a third of all Mexican investment financed by public debt between 1890 and 1911.
Pearson’s first major contract in Mexico involved the construction of a 30 mile Drainage Canal (Gran Canal del Desagüe) to the north of Mexico City to relieve the persistent (and perennial) problem of flooding in Mexico City. On the back of this notable success, in 1895, Pearson won the contract for the reconstruction and refurbishment of Veracruz, which since the beginning of the colonial era had been Mexico’s most important Atlantic port. Three years later, in 1898, Pearson won the most important, and certainly the most expensive contract ever awarded by a Mexican government since independence: the re-construction of the inter-oceanic railway across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico.
On the basis of these government contracts Pearson was able to develop an extensive business empire in Mexico, which involved a broad range of enterprises: in mining, public utilities (light and power companies), manufacturing, and transportation (not just railways, but tram and steamship companies). Most significantly of all, Pearson entered the nascent Mexican oil business, channelled through Pearson’s El Aguila (Mexican Eagle) Petroleum Company, first established in 1908. Over the next decade, as demand for oil grew exponentially during WWI, El Aguila and its subsidiaries became Pearson’s most lucrative enterprises.
From modest beginnings, Weetman Pearson thus became not only one of the world’s most important engineering contractors, and unquestionably the most influential British businessman in late nineteenth-century Mexico, but also arguably the most successful British entrepreneur anywhere in Latin America at the time. He invested the profits from Mexican oil in the diversification of the family business and the foundation of the global media empire which over the course of the twentieth century became Pearson plc. As a result of the amount of time he spent in Mexico, and as a reflection of the importance of his Mexican enterprises, Pearson had been known in the British House of Commons, as the ‘Member for Mexico’. As a mark of his personal affection and respect for Mexico – and also undoubtedly as recognition of the fortune which derived from his Mexican enterprises -the Cowdray coat of arms displays a symbolic representation of a Mexican peon (laborer).
Pearson’s successful business career was mirrored by a successful career in politics. Awarded a knighthood in 1894, he entered the House of Commons the following year as the Liberal MP for Colchester. In 1910 he was awarded a peerage by Liberal PM Herbert Asquith. He chose to associate his title with the property which he had acquired in Midhurst in Sussex, known as the Cowdray estate, and entered the House of Lords as Baron Cowdray of Midhurst. In 1917, he became a member of PM David Lloyd George’s wartime cabinet as President of the Air Board, and was awarded the title of Viscount Cowdray.
S.Pearson and Sons had already moved out of contracting before Weetman’s death in 1927, and moved into corporate finance and investment through the Whitehall Trust and the acquisition of Lazard Brothers merchant bank. After the 1960s Pearson diversified its portfolio of investments to include Chateau Latour, Madame Tussauds, and Royal Doulton, as well as the Financial Times and the Economist. The late 1990s saw a significant restructuring of the Pearson Group in order to concentrate on what became its core businesses – publishing, media, and education, including Thames Television, The Financial Times, the Economist, Penguin, Longman, (UK), the Gredos publishing group (Spain), and educational publishers Addison Wesley and Simon &Schuster (USA).
Source: Paul Garner British Lions and Mexican Eagles: Business, Politics and Empire in the Career of Weetman Pearson in Mexico 1889-1919 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011)
Author: Paul Garner
How to cite: To cite from this page, please use any style (Chicago, Harvard, etc). Our preferred citation form is: Garner, Paul, ‘Pearson, Weetman Dickson, first Viscount Cowdray (1856-1927)’, The Hispanic-Anglosphere: transnational networks, global communities (late 18th to early 20th centuries), project funded by the AHRC and University of Winchester in partnership with the National Trust, [https://hispanic-anglosphere.com/individuals/pearson-weetman-dickson-first-viscount-cowdray-1856-1927/, accessed – please add date].
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