Percival Andrée Pickering 1810-1876
On 15th October 1805 Edward Rowland Pickering [aged 26] and [his mother] Mary Vere [aged 22] were married. They had eleven children, three daughters and eight sons.
William de Morgan and his Wife Chapter 5. 1808. An anecdote of his childhood has survived which at least bespeaks imagination and kindliness of heart. Percy, as he was called, had been receiving religious instruction from his mother, who had imparted to him the sad fate of Adam and Eve, summed up in that melancholy sentence 'Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.' The words sank into the child's mind and made an impression which his elders little suspected. Afterwards, seated at the window gazing out on to the chill March day, he was heard to be weeping bitterly. Kind arms enclosed him, and sympathetic inquiries were made respecting the cause of his woe. But the child wept on unrestrainedly; till at length, pointing to the street where the chill winds were blowing the dust in clouds past the house, he exclaimed tragically, 'Oh! poor, poor Adam and Eve! — how they are blowing about!' The Divine vengeance which had apparently condemned our first parents to drift helplessly— and dirtily — through the ages appalled his tender heart and left him so crushed with despair that for long he refused to be comforted.
William de Morgan and his Wife Chapter 5. In those days the custom still prevailed of concentrating all care and expenditure upon the education of the eldest son, while furnishing the younger members of the family only with the good solid instruction suitable to whatever profession they were destined to pursue. Edward Rowland [aged 13] did not follow this system. Each of the young Pickerings went to Eton, where several were distinguished both as scholars and cricketers, and then to the University. At Eton, Percy was known by the name of 'Mop-stick' on account of his curly hair, and his good looks were proverbial. He became a great friend of young William Ewart Gladstone [aged 14], who for many years subsequently kept up a conespondence with him, in which he expressed himself enthusiastically Tory in principle; and only his change of politics, later in life, made a severance between the friends. At Cambridge, after going to Trinity College, Percy, like his elder brother, became a Fellow of St. John's. By and by, at the Bar, he was noted for his eloquence, his penetration and his sense of humour.
William de Morgan and his Wife Chapter 5. But the course of the romance did not at first run smoothly; and three or four years passed before, at his third proposal [Percival Andrée Pickering [aged 42] and Anna Spencer-Stanhope [aged 28]], his devotion found its reward. After their marriage the young couple lived first in Green Street, in a little house with a bay window, now pulled down, which during a former generation had sheltered another romance, for there had resided the beautiful Miss Farren who became Lady Derby.
In 1863 [his mother] Mary Vere [aged 80] died.
