A Second Bite Of Conference Pear
That the pear became an affordable fruit rather than a delicacy for the rich was due in no small part to the efforts of the Belgian plant breeder, Jean-Baptiste Van Mons, who for fifty-one years until his death in 1842 devoted his life and much of his money to improving the fruit. Among his innovations were the Bosc and d’Anjou cultivars. Mons’ mission was to develop pears that produced a good yield and were hardy, but also were juicy, soft and fragrant.
The first recorded instance of pear cultivation was in New England in 1629 from seeds brought over by settlers. While European varieties grew well in North America, the greater genetic variability of the American pears meant that they did not thrive in European soils. Ironically, the seeds of the crisis that led to the development of the Conference were sown when a schoolmaster from Aldermaston, John Stair, sometime between 1765 and 1770, produced a new variety of pear.
Known as the Stair or Aldermaston pear, it became the Williams pear when the eponymous nurseryman acquired the variety. James Carter introduced it to America in 1799, planting some trees on Thomas Brewer’s estate in Roxbury, Massachusetts. When Enoch Bartlett bought the estate, it had another name change, and the Bartlett pear proved so popular that it became one of the principal varieties grown in North America.
The development of the railways and refrigerated steamships meant that North American produce could easily be exported to Britain and Europe, and such was the volume of fruit produced that a Foreign Fruit Exchange was created in Covent Garden Market in 1887. Sensing the threat to their livelihoods and determined to fight back, British pear growers decided to select one main variety suitable for domestic conditions and large-scale production. The problem was determining which one. A group of head gardeners drew up a shortlist of favoured pears, but no consensus was forthcoming.
Help, though, was on hand from another Belgian grower, Leo Leclerc. Several decades earlier he had developed a pear, described by Thomas Hogg in his Fruit Manual (1860) as “flesh white, half-melting or crisp, juicy, sweet, and perfumed. An excellent stewing pear, which in some seasons is half-melting, and is in use from January to June”. It was this pear, the Leon Leclerc de Laval, that Thomas Frances Rivers from Sawbridgeworth used as the female parent for a new pear he developed at his nursery in 1884. The male parent is unknown.
The pear was an instant success, winning the first prize in October 1885 at the National Pear Conference held in Chiswick, at the Royal Horticultural Society’s gardens. His new cultivar, described as a mid-season dessert pear, also won first prize at the Apple and Pear Conference of 1888, where the vexed question of which pear to select to meet the American challenge was still being aired.
Heavy rain may have kept the crowds away, but Rivers’ success, and his influence as chairman of the Conference that year, resolved the committee’s dilemma. His pear’s characteristics, self-fertile, tasty, scab resistant, a heavy cropper and suitable for damp and cool conditions, made it ideal for reviving the British fruit growers’ fortunes. Having decided which variety of pear to grow, coming up with an imaginative name for it proved far too challenging. As a result, Rivers’ pear was simply known as a Conference after the conference at which it was selected.
The first commercial orchard was planted by Talbot Edmonds at Allington, near Maidstone, surviving until 1970. Conference pears have never looked back and are even widely grown in France and Belgium. Rivers would have appreciated the irony.
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