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Phyllis Pearsall
Phyllis Isobella Pearsall (25 September 1906 – 28 August 1996) was a British painter, publisher, artist and writer who founded the Geographers' A–Z Map Company, for which she is regarded as one of the most successful business people of the twentieth century. She has erroneously been credited with creating London's first popular indexed street map.
She was born Phyllis Isobella Gross in East Dulwich, London on 25 September 1906. Her father, Alexander Gross (originally Grosz), was a Hungarian-Jewish immigrant and her mother, Isabella Crowly, an Irish-Italian Roman Catholic suffragette, whose parents disapproved of the match. Phyllis Gross was baptised a Roman Catholic.
She grew up with her older brother, the artist Anthony Gross, in London and travelled all over Europe from an early age. Her father founded the cartographic company Geographia Ltd, which produced, among others, street maps of most British towns and although successful, eventually went bankrupt; Gross relaunched the company in the United States as the Geographia Map Company a few years later.
Her parents had a very tense marriage which soon dissolved.[citation needed] Her mother remarried but died some years later in an asylum.[citation needed]
Phyllis Gross was educated at Roedean School, a private boarding school near Brighton, which she had to leave when her father went bankrupt. She then became an English tutor in France, at a small school in Fécamp, Normandy. Later, she studied at the Sorbonne, spending her first few months in Paris sleeping rough before moving to a bedsit where she met the writer Vladimir Nabokov. She started working as a shop assistant in a big department store, selling gloves.
She married Richard Pearsall, an artist friend of her brother. They were together for eight years, travelling in Spain and living in Paris. She left him in Venice while he was asleep, without telling him anything.[citation needed] She did not remarry.
By 1935, Pearsall had become a portrait painter but became lost in London while using the latest map she could find, which was 17 years old. This stimulated her to produce a new map to cover the rapidly expanding area of London, including places of interest such as museums, bus routes etc.
Pearsall claimed that the work involved walking 3,000 miles to check the names of the 23,000 streets of London, waking up at 5am every day, and not going to bed until after an 18-hour working day. In her autobiography she points to one novelty: "House numbers along main roads; I've walked them from start to finish; you won't find them on any other London map." It is often claimed to be the first indexed London street map, but this claim is easily refuted by reference to Bartholomew's Reference Atlas of London and Suburbs, which was published and widely available from 1908 onwards. The first Pearsall A–Z claimed on its front cover to include "9,000 more [streets] than any similar atlas index", but in fact it had almost the same number of streets as the Bartholomew's version.
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Phyllis Pearsall
Phyllis Isobella Pearsall (25 September 1906 – 28 August 1996) was a British painter, publisher, artist and writer who founded the Geographers' A–Z Map Company, for which she is regarded as one of the most successful business people of the twentieth century. She has erroneously been credited with creating London's first popular indexed street map.
She was born Phyllis Isobella Gross in East Dulwich, London on 25 September 1906. Her father, Alexander Gross (originally Grosz), was a Hungarian-Jewish immigrant and her mother, Isabella Crowly, an Irish-Italian Roman Catholic suffragette, whose parents disapproved of the match. Phyllis Gross was baptised a Roman Catholic.
She grew up with her older brother, the artist Anthony Gross, in London and travelled all over Europe from an early age. Her father founded the cartographic company Geographia Ltd, which produced, among others, street maps of most British towns and although successful, eventually went bankrupt; Gross relaunched the company in the United States as the Geographia Map Company a few years later.
Her parents had a very tense marriage which soon dissolved.[citation needed] Her mother remarried but died some years later in an asylum.[citation needed]
Phyllis Gross was educated at Roedean School, a private boarding school near Brighton, which she had to leave when her father went bankrupt. She then became an English tutor in France, at a small school in Fécamp, Normandy. Later, she studied at the Sorbonne, spending her first few months in Paris sleeping rough before moving to a bedsit where she met the writer Vladimir Nabokov. She started working as a shop assistant in a big department store, selling gloves.
She married Richard Pearsall, an artist friend of her brother. They were together for eight years, travelling in Spain and living in Paris. She left him in Venice while he was asleep, without telling him anything.[citation needed] She did not remarry.
By 1935, Pearsall had become a portrait painter but became lost in London while using the latest map she could find, which was 17 years old. This stimulated her to produce a new map to cover the rapidly expanding area of London, including places of interest such as museums, bus routes etc.
Pearsall claimed that the work involved walking 3,000 miles to check the names of the 23,000 streets of London, waking up at 5am every day, and not going to bed until after an 18-hour working day. In her autobiography she points to one novelty: "House numbers along main roads; I've walked them from start to finish; you won't find them on any other London map." It is often claimed to be the first indexed London street map, but this claim is easily refuted by reference to Bartholomew's Reference Atlas of London and Suburbs, which was published and widely available from 1908 onwards. The first Pearsall A–Z claimed on its front cover to include "9,000 more [streets] than any similar atlas index", but in fact it had almost the same number of streets as the Bartholomew's version.
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