Williams
williams
English
“A Berkshire schoolmaster bred a pear that a nurseryman renamed and made famous.”
In 1765, a schoolmaster named Stair grew an unnamed pear seedling in his garden at Aldermaston, Berkshire, and shared cuttings with neighbors over the following decades. The variety passed through several hands without attracting commercial attention until around 1816, when a nurseryman named Richard Williams obtained trees at his Turnham Green nursery in Middlesex. He introduced the variety to the English horticultural trade under his own name, and the pear has carried it since. Williams did not breed the fruit he made famous.
The same variety reached Massachusetts in 1817 through an American farmer named Enoch Bartlett, who imported trees without knowing their English origin and sold them from his estate in Northboro under his own name. For two centuries, the pear was called Williams in Britain and Bartlett in North America, a naming split that persisted until modern botanical catalogs reconciled the two. The full designation is Williams Bon Chrétien, the 'good Christian pear,' a title attributed to a French monk who found the variety exceptionally sweet. Three names, one fruit.
Alsatian and Swiss distillers recognized the Williams pear's aromatic potential by the late nineteenth century. The fruit contains ethyl decadienoate, a volatile ester that produces a strikingly floral aroma when the juice is fermented and distilled. Swiss producers in Valais and the Aargau were making Williams eau-de-vie commercially by the 1920s. The Swiss distillery Morand registered the trademark Williamine in 1948, the name by which many consumers still know the spirit.
Williams eau-de-vie is now produced across Alsace, Switzerland, Austria, and northern Italy. It is the one major fruit spirit whose name directly records a person: not a place, not a botanical descriptor, but a Middlesex nurseryman who propagated a tree he found rather than bred. The pear carries his name into every glass. A borrowed variety, a borrowed name, and a fruit that belongs to three continents have all traveled further than Richard Williams could have imagined from Turnham Green.
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Today
Williams is a pear variety and an eau-de-vie. In British greengrocers it is just the pear; in Alsatian restaurants it is the glass brought after cheese; in American supermarkets it is the Bartlett, its identity reset by a farmer who did not know he was renaming something that already had a name. The fruit exists in three parallel lexicons at once, and only the bottle label tends to resolve which one you are in.
What the Williams story shows is how casually the English-speaking world renamed things it imported. A Berkshire seedling, a Middlesex nursery, a Massachusetts farm: the pear was renamed at each crossing. The spirit kept the English version. A name outlasts the man who borrowed it.
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