Pids

Collingwood father William was known in the family, for reasons now unknown, as Pids. His mother was known as Minima, presumably because of her size. William’s father Herbert Ingram was a butcher’s son from Boston in Lincolnshire. In 1852, after making money selling quack longevity pills, he founded the Illustrated London News, the first pictorial newspaper. He soon became part of the British establishment and an MP, but some of his business methods were dubious, while his private life led him close to serious trouble.[1] After his death in 1860, drowned in a ferry accident in the USA, first his wife and then his sons William and Charles took over as proprietors of the paper.

William, like his father, was energetic, able, and confrontational, not noticeably softened by public school and university. He split the family in a feud with his mother when she remarried, aged 80.[2] His five sisters sided with their mother and were cut out of the family tree and none of them is mentioned in Collingwood’s diaries and journals.

William  was wealthy and didn’t hide his wealth – he owned a yacht, racehorses, substantial property in Westgate-on-Sea, in addition to a seaside home there. He built a grand house in Monte Carlo, owned a castle in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, and built a house on stilts by the river at Streatley-on-Thames near the racing stables at Compton where his horses were trained. The main family home in London was in Cromwell Road, South Kensington.

More unexpectedly, he had a love of birds and kept many in aviaries and free-flying around the house.