Sarah Wilson (war Correspondent)
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Lady Sarah Wilson
DStJ The Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem (), commonly known as the Order of St John, and also known as St John International, is an order of chivalry constituted in 1888 by royal charter from Queen Victoria and dedica ...
RRC (born Lady Sarah Isabella Augusta Spencer-Churchill; 4 July 1865 – 22 October 1929) became one of the first female
war correspondent A war correspondent is a journalist who covers stories first-hand from a war, war zone. War correspondence stands as one of journalism's most important and impactful forms. War correspondents operate in the most conflict-ridden parts of the wor ...
s in 1899, when she was recruited by
Alfred Harmsworth Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe (15 July 1865 – 14 August 1922), was a British newspaper and publishing magnate. As owner of the ''Daily Mail'' and the ''Daily Mirror'', he was an early developer of popular journal ...
to cover the
Siege of Mafeking The siege of Mafeking was a 217-day siege battle for the town of Mafeking (now called Mahikeng) in South Africa during the Second Boer War from October 1899 to May 1900. The siege received considerable attention as Lord Edward Cecil, the son o ...
for the ''
Daily Mail The ''Daily Mail'' is a British daily Middle-market newspaper, middle-market Tabloid journalism, tabloid conservative newspaper founded in 1896 and published in London. , it has the List of newspapers in the United Kingdom by circulation, h ...
'' during the
Second Boer War The Second Boer War (, , 11 October 189931 May 1902), also known as the Boer War, Transvaal War, Anglo–Boer War, or South African War, was a conflict fought between the British Empire and the two Boer republics (the South African Republic and ...
.


Family

Born on 4 July 1865 at
Blenheim Palace Blenheim Palace ( ) is a country house in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England. It is the seat of the Dukes of Marlborough. Originally called Blenheim Castle, it has been known as Blenheim Palace since the 19th century. One of England's larg ...
, Lady Sarah Spencer-Churchill was the youngest of the eleven children of
John Spencer-Churchill, 7th Duke of Marlborough John Winston Spencer-Churchill, 7th Duke of Marlborough, (2 June 18224 July 1883), styled Earl of Sunderland from 1822 to 1840 and Marquess of Blandford from 1840 to 1857, was a British Conservative cabinet minister, politician, peer, and noble ...
, and his wife, the former Lady Frances Anne Emily Vane, daughter of the 3rd Marquess of Londonderry. Her eldest brother was George Charles Spencer-Churchill, 8th Duke of Marlborough, and another brother was
Lord Randolph Churchill Lord Randolph Henry Spencer-Churchill (13 February 1849 – 24 January 1895) was a British aristocrat and politician. Churchill was a Tory radical who coined the term "One-nation conservatism, Tory democracy". He participated in the creation ...
, father of the Prime Minister
Winston Churchill Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British statesman, military officer, and writer who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 (Winston Churchill in the Second World War, ...
. Anne, Duchess of Roxburghe, was her elder sister. She married
Gordon Chesney Wilson Lieutenant-Colonel Gordon Chesney Wilson (3 August 1865 – 6 November 1914) was a British Army officer and husband of the war correspondent Lady Sarah Wilson. As an Eton College student he assisted in thwarting Roderick Maclean's assassinati ...
of the
Royal Horse Guard The Crown Horse Guard Regiment () was a military unit of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and then of Poland. Formed in 1717 as a dragoon regiment by Jacob Heinrich von Flemming, it was initially commanded by Colonel William Mier, a Scottish ...
s, son of Jennie Campbell and Sir Samuel Wilson, MP.See also Christ-Church-Oxford-Cathedral Memorial
Gordon Wilson
Accessed 5 September 2015.
Her husband had also witnessed the attack by
Roderick Maclean Roderick Edward Maclean ( – 8 June 1921) was a Scotsman who attempted to assassinate Queen Victoria on 2 March 1882, at Windsor, England, with a pistol. This was the last of eight attempts by separate people to kill or assault Victoria over ...
on Queen Victoria, and was called, an Eton school boy, to the Berkshire Assizes to testify at the trial. See Christ-Church Oxford Memorials
Gordon Wilson
Accessed 5 September 2015.
Her husband was killed in action on 6 November 1914, at the
First Battle of Ypres The First Battle of Ypres (, , – was a battle of the First World War, fought on the Western Front (World War I), Western Front around Ypres, in West Flanders, Belgium. The battle was part of the First Battle of Flanders, in which German A ...
. They had one son, Randolph Gordon Wilson (1893–1956).


Siege of Mafeking correspondent

The ''Daily Mail'' newspaper recruited Lady Sarah after one of its correspondents, Ralph Hellawell, was arrested by the
Boer Boers ( ; ; ) are the descendants of the proto Afrikaans-speaking Free Burghers of the eastern Cape frontier in Southern Africa during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. From 1652 to 1795, the Dutch East India Company controlled the Dutch ...
s as he tried to get out of the besieged town of Mafeking to send his dispatch. She was in the right place at the right time to step into the journalistic breach, having moved to Mafeking with her husband, Captain Gordon Chesney Wilson, at the start of the war, where he was ''aide-de-camp'' to Col.
Robert Baden-Powell Lieutenant-General Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell, ( ; 22 February 1857 – 8 January 1941) was a British Army officer, writer, founder of The Boy Scouts Association and its first Chief Scout, and founder, with ...
, the commanding officer at Mafeking. Baden-Powell asked her to leave Mafeking 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. Eventually, she was captured by the Boers 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 of trenches had been dug and 800 bomb shelters built to protect residents from the constant shelling of the town. During her stay in the city, she also helped with nursing in a convalescent hospital, and was slightly wounded when it was shelled by Boer forces in late January 1900. On 26 March 1900, toward the end of the siege, she wrote: 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.Wilson, chapter XIII. The siege finally ended after 217 days, when the Royal Horse and
Canadian Artillery The Royal Regiment of Canadian Artillery () is the artillery personnel branch of the Canadian Army. History Many of the units and batteries of the Royal Regiment of Canadian Artillery are older than the Canada, Dominion of Canada itself. The fi ...
galloped into Mafeking on 17 May 1900. Only a few people standing in a dusty road, singing "
Rule, Britannia! "Rule, Britannia!" is a British patriotic song, originating from the 1740 poem "Rule, Britannia" by James Thomson and set to music by Thomas Arne in the same year. It is most strongly associated with the Royal Navy, but is also used by th ...
", were there to greet their saviours. But in
London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...
it was a different scene as more than 20,000 people turned out in the streets to celebrate the relief of Mafeking.The boisterous celebration ensuing from the lifting of the siege created the word, '' to maffick'', for extravagant and public celebrations).See ''Pall Mall Gaz.'' 21 May 2/2 "We trust Cape Town..will ‘maffick’ to-day, if we may coin a word, as we at home did on Friday and Saturday." Complete definition: "To celebrate uproariously, rejoice extravagantly, esp. on an occasion of national celebration (originally the relief of the British garrison besieged in Mafeking (now Mafikeng), South Africa, in May 1900). In later use usually with pejorative connotations." "maffick, v." OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. Web. 5 September 2015.


Later life

In May 1901, Wilson was invested as a Dame of Grace of The Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem (DStJ), and in December the same year
King Edward VII Edward VII (Albert Edward; 9 November 1841 – 6 May 1910) was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India, from 22 January 1901 until his death in 1910. The second child and eldest son of Queen Victoria and ...
personally conferred on her the decoration of the
Royal Red Cross The Royal Red Cross (RRC) is a military decoration awarded in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth for exceptional services in military nursing. It was created in 1883, and the first two awards were to Florence Nightingale and Jane Cecilia Deeb ...
(RRC) for her services in Mafeking. She returned to South Africa with her sister Countess Howe from September to November 1902. The Countess (as Lady Georgina Curzon) had throughout the war been involved with raising money for the Imperial Yeomanry Hospital. At the outbreak of the First World War Lady Sarah went to France and was running a hospital for injured soldiers in Boulogne when she received the news of her husband's death at Klein Zillebeke. Gordon's brother Herbert who served in the same regiment sent Gordon’s personal effects to Lady Sarah. In Gordon’s writing case, she found a newspaper cutting containing lines from the 17th-century gravestone of James Handley. It reads: ‘This world is a city full of crooked streets Death is a market place where all men meet. If life were merchandise that men could buy Rich men would ever live and poor men die” The lines are an adaptation from
William Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 23 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...
's last play the
Two Noble Kinsmen ''The Two Noble Kinsmen'' is a Jacobean tragicomedy, first published in 1634 and attributed jointly to John Fletcher and William Shakespeare. Its plot derives from "The Knight's Tale" in Geoffrey Chaucer's ''The Canterbury Tales'' (1387–140 ...
. Lady Sarah chose the lines “Life is a city of crooked streets Death the market place where all men meet” for Gordon Wilson's headstone.


Notes and references


Notes


Citations

* S. J. Taylor (1996). ''The Great Outsiders: Northcliffe, Rothermere and the Daily Mail''. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. .


External links

* * * *
Portrait of Lady Sarah Isabella Augusta Wilson (1865-1929), daughter of 7th Duke of Marlborough at the National Portrait Gallery
* ''South African Memories

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wilson, Sarah 1865 births 1929 deaths Sarah Wilson Daughters of British dukes 19th-century British women journalists 19th-century British journalists British war correspondents British women war correspondents War correspondents of the Second Boer War Women in the Second Boer War Daily Mail journalists Dames of Grace of the Order of St John Members of the Royal Red Cross