This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Linde Lunney. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 11 December 1746, Ireland
Died: 31 October 1832
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Sarah Pim
Pim (later Grubb), Sarah (1746–1832), and her brothers Joshua Pim and Joseph Pike Pim, entrepreneurs, were among the sixteen children of John Pim, quaker businessman of Mountrath, Queen’s Co. (Laois), and his wife Sarah (née Clibborn), who was also of a quaker family from Moate, Co. Westmeath. John Pim was one of the most important woollen merchants of the time, said to have exported one-third of all the worsted yarn sent from Ireland to England during a period before the 1780s. He was a member of the Constitution Club of Dublin and of the Dublin Society in 1774, but moved to premises in Threadneedle St., London, probably the same year. His family was well educated and brought up in the quaker traditions of fair dealing and probity.
Sarah Pim, the eldest child, was born 11 December 1746; she lived for a time in the 1770s in London, where her younger sister Abigail Pim (1767–1821), who never married, later became a well known quaker minister and prison visitor. Sarah married (1778) John Grubb, who had a large grain milling business in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, one of several locally that were owned by quaker families. The Grubbs had five daughters before John Grubb died, in his late forties (1784). Unusually for the time, his widow took over running the enterprise on her own account, with the help of family members and quaker managers, and was extremely successful. Her business and professional skills were matched by her willingness to help the disadvantaged members of her community, and by her generosity in funding, among other things, the Friends’ Newtown School, Waterford, and the anti-slavery campaign of the early nineteenth century, in which quakers were very active. She was an elder in her local meeting, and was such a forceful and prominent person, in Clonmel and further afield, that people called her – only partly in jest – ‘the queen of the south’. She died 31 October 1832 at Clonmel, leaving a thriving business worth over £100,000. Her daughters married into other quaker families, further strengthening the quakers’ characteristic kinship and business links. John Grubb Richardson was a grandson. David Malcolmson (born 1765 in the north of Ireland) was related to Sarah Grubb, perhaps a cousin; he worked for her in Clonmel before founding the cotton factory and innovative model village of Portlaw, Co. Waterford, which was one of the biggest industrial complexes built anywhere in the world in the nineteenth century.