Edgar Wallace’s War: Reporting and Making the News in South Africa, 1898–1902

Abstract

This paper examines Edgar Wallace’s career as a news correspondent during the South African War. It looks at five incidents: the publication of Wallace’s poem, ‘A Tommy’s Welcome to Rudyard Kipling’; his coverage of growing Anglo-Boer tensions for the local South African press; his brief career as a Reuters correspondent reporting on Methuen’s advance to Magersfontein and Carrington’s attempt to relieve Mafeking via Rhodesia; his days as a Daily Mail reporter and his investigation into the alleged murder of British wounded at the Battle of Vlakfontein; and his last big scoop, the announcement of peace at Vereeniging in May 1902. Wallace’s experiences as a journalist in the 1890s offer insight into the changing role of the late-Victorian press, military censorship, civil-military relations, imperial attitudes, and Anglo–Boer relations at the turn of the century.