Phyllis Pearsall
| Phyllis Pearsall | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Phyllis Isobella Gross 25 September 1906 East Dulwich, London, England |
| Died | 28 August 1996 (aged 89) Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex, England |
| Occupation | Artist, writer and publisher |
| Known for | Geographers' A-Z Map Company |
| Spouse(s) | Richard Pearsall (m. 1927–1935) |
Phyllis Isobella Pearsall MBE (25 September 1906 – 28 August 1996) was a British painter and writer who founded the Geographers' A-Z Map Company. She created 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 Crowley, 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 re-launched 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. Her mother remarried but died some years later in an asylum.
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 a small school in Fécamp, Brittany. 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, when she left him in Venice while he was asleep, without telling him anything. She did not remarry.
By 1935, she 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.
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