Edward Brent Prest
(1830-1903)
27 February 1862

Volume 6, page 56, sitting number 7096. 

[The following sitting in the daybooks is this sitter’s wife, recorded as ‘Mrs E.B. Prest.’]

Born on 4 January 1830 at Stapleford in Cambridgeshire, Edward Brent Prest was the eldest son of Samuel and Mary Ann Prest. He was baptised at Stapleford on 13 March 1830. 

He was educated at Eton and at Trinity College, Cambridge (BA, 1852). He was called to the Bar on 26 January 1855. 

On 20 February 1862 he married Margaret Anne Pelham Papillon, the sixth daughter of Thomas Papillon of Crowhurst Park, Sussex. 

The couple appear on the 1871 census living at 9 Scrope Terrace in Cambridge with their four young children and five servants. For his profession Edward gave ‘District Auditor Poor Law Board / Barrister at Law.’

He was later described as ‘a district auditor under the Local Government Board, which existed prior to the creation of the Ministry of Health’ (Obituary of Major Edward Papillon Prest, Newmarket Journal, 1 October 1932). 

During the 1890s he was the ‘Auditor of the Poor-Law Accounts of the Newmarket Union’ (Cambridge Chronicle and Journal, 10 January 1896). 

In 1901 he was a ‘Retired Barrister’ living at 78 Chesterton Road in Cambridge with his wife Margaret, three adult children and two servants (a cook and a parlourmaid). 

Edward Brent Prest died, aged 73, on 8 June 1903 at 78 Chesterton Road, Cambridge. He left an estate valued at £3768.