Lady Sarah Wilson

The first woman war correspondent was Lady Sarah Wilson who covered the Siege of Mafeking for the Daily Mail during the Boer War.

The newspaper recruited Lady Sarah after one of its correspondents, Ralph Hellawell, was arrested by the Boers as he tried to get out of the besieged town to send his dispatch.

Lady Sarah was in the right place at the right time to step into the breach, having moved to Mafeking with her husband, Lieutenant-Colonel Gordon Chesney Wilson at the start of the war.

Gordon Chesney Wilson was aide-de-camp to Colonel Robert Baden-Powell, commanding officer at Mafeking, who asked her to leave for her own safety after the Boers threatened to storm the British garrison.

This she duly did, and set off on a madcap adventure in the company of her maid, travelling through the South African countryside until she was finally captured by the enemy and returned to the town in exchange for a horse thief being held there.

When she re-entered Mafeking she found it had not been attacked as predicted. Instead over four miles of trenches had been dug and 800 bomb shelters built to protect the residents from the constant shelling of the town.

Although untrained as a reporter, Lady Sarah soon gained a huge following among Mail readers back in England who appreciated her matter-of-fact writing style.

On March 26, 1900, she wrote: “The Boers have been extremely active during the last few days. Yesterday we were heavily shelled and suffered eight casualties … Corporal Ironside had his thigh smashed the day before, and Private Webbe, of the Cape Police, had his head blown off in the brickfields trenches.”

But although death and destruction surrounded her, the Mail’s fledgling war correspondent preferred not to dwell too much on the horrors of the siege. She described cycling events held on Sundays and the town’s celebration of Colonel Baden-Powell’s birthday which was declared a holiday.

Despite these cheery events, dwindling food supplies became a constant theme in the stories she sent back to the Mail and the situation seemed hopeless when the garrison was hit by an outbreak of malarial typhoid. In this weakened state the Boers managed to penetrate the outskirts of the town but the British stood firm and repelled the assault.

The siege finally ended after 217 days when the Royal Horse and Canadian Artillery galloped into Mafeking on May 17, 1900. Only a few people standing in a dusty road, singing Rule Britannia, were there to greet their saviours. But in London it was a different scene as more than 20,000 people turned out in the streets to celebrate the Relief of Mafeking.

Lady Sarah’s dispatches and the desperate circumstances of the small outpost had made it a symbol of the ‘bulldog spirit’ and there was much rejoicing at this triumph over adversity.

Reference

• S. J. Taylor (1996). The Great Outsiders: Northcliffe, Rothermere and the Daily Mail. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-75380-455-7.

External Link

• Works by Lady Sarah Wilson at Project Gutenberg
  • South African Memories[1]

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