Sarah Wilson

Lady Sarah Isabella Augusta Wilson (née Spencer-Churchill; 4 July 1865 – 22 October 1929) became one of the first female war correspondents in 1899, when she was recruited by Alfred Harmsworth to cover the Siege of Mafeking for the Daily Mail during the Second Boer War.

Family Born on 4 July 1865 at Blenheim Palace, Lady Sarah Spencer-Churchill was the youngest of the eleven children of John Spencer-Churchill, 7th Duke of Marlborough, and his wife, the former Lady Frances Vane, daughter of the 3rd Marquess of Londonderry. Her eldest brother was George Spencer-Churchill, 8th Duke of Marlborough, and another brother was Lord Randolph Churchill, father of the Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Anne, Duchess of Roxburghe, was her elder sister.

She married Gordon Chesney Wilson of the Royal Horse Guards, son of Jennie Campbell and Sir Samuel Wilson, MP. Her husband was killed in action on 6 November 1914, at the First Battle of Ypres. 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 Boers 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, 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.

Three soldiers talk with Sarah Wilson in Mafeking. She is seated by the door to her bomb shelter. On 26 March 1900, toward the end of the siege, she wrote:

Although death and destruction surrounded her, the Mails 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.

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 personally conferred on her the decoration of the Royal Red Cross (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:

The lines are an adaptation from William Shakespeare's The Two Noble Kinsmen. 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