Sir Arthur Pearson, 1st Baronet

Pearson was born on 24 February 1866 in the village of Wookey, Somerset, a son of Arthur Cyril Pearson and Phillippa Massingberd Maxwell Lyte, who was a granddaughter of the hymn-writer and poet Henry Francis Lyte. He was educated at Winchester College in Hampshire. His father became rector of Drayton Parslow in Buckinghamshire. His first job was as a journalist working for the London-based publisher George Newnes on Tit-Bits magazine. Within his first year he had impressed Newnes enough to be made his principal assistant.

In December 1887, Pearson married Isobel Sarah Bennett, the daughter of Canon Frederick Bennett, of Maddington, Wiltshire, with whom he had three daughters. In 1897, Pearson married, as his second wife, Ethel, daughter of William John Fraser. Ethel, Lady Pearson, would be appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE). The couple had a son, Neville (birth registered in Farnham, Q1 1898), and three daughters.

In 1890, after six years of working for Newnes, Pearson left to form his own publishing business and within three weeks had created the periodical journal Pearson's Weekly, the first issue of which sold a quarter of a million copies. A philanthropist, in 1892 he established the charitable Fresh Air Fund, now part of the Sheldon Trust, to enable disadvantaged children to partake in outdoor activities. In 1898, he purchased the Morning Herald, and in 1900 merged it into his new creation, the halfpenny Daily Express.

The Express was a departure from the papers of its time and created an immediate impact by carrying news instead of only advertisements on its front page. He was successful in establishing papers in provincial locations such as the Birmingham Daily Gazette. He came into direct competition with the Daily Mail and in the resulting commercial fight almost took control of The Times, being nominated as its manager, but the deal fell through.

In 1898, Pearson founded The Royal Magazine, a monthly literary magazine which remained in publication until 1939.

In 1900 Pearson despatched the explorer and adventurer Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard to Patagonia to investigate dramatic reports of a giant hairy mammal inhabiting the forests, and conjectured to be a giant ground sloth, long since extinct. Hesketh-Prichard's reports from 5,000 miles away gripped readers of The Express, despite his finding no trace of the creature.

During this same period, Pearson was also active as a writer, and wrote a number of tourist guides to locations in Britain and Europe. Under the pseudonym of "Professor P. R. S. Foli", he wrote Handwriting as an Index to Character in 1902, as well as works on fortune-telling and dream interpretation. Pearson was a strong supporter of Joseph Chamberlain's tariff-reform movement, and organised the Tariff Reform League in 1903, becoming its first chairman. In 1904 he purchased the struggling The Standard and its sister paper the Evening Standard for £700,000 from the Johnstone family.

He merged the Evening Standard with his St James's Gazette and changed the Conservative stance of both papers into a pro-Liberal one, but was unsuccessful in arresting the slide in sales and in 1910 sold them to the MP Sir Davison Dalziel, and Sir Alexander Henderson.