G. W. Steevens

For the Shakespearean commentator, see George Steevens.

George Warrington Steevens (10 December 1869 – 15 January 1900)^[1] was a British journalist and writer.

G. W. Steevens
Born	George Warrington Steevens (1869-12-10)10 December 1869 Sydenham, England
Died	15 January 1900(1900-01-15) (aged 30) Ladysmith, southern Africa
Occupation	journalist, writer
Nationality	British
Alma mater	City of London School Balliol College, Oxford
Genre	Journalism non-fiction

Life

Steevens was born in Sydenham, and educated at the City of London School and Balliol College, Oxford. He was elected a fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1893 and also spent some time at Cambridge where he edited a weekly periodical.^[2]

As a journalist, he distinguished himself by his clearness of vision and vivid style, and was connected successively with the National Observer, The Pall Mall Gazette, and, from 1896, the Daily Mail.

He was the most famous war correspondent of his time,^[3] before being eclipsed by the daring escape of young Churchill from a Pretoria prison. Steevens utilised the articles which appeared in these and other publications in various books, such as Monologues of the Dead (1895), The Land of the Dollar (America) (1897), With the Conquering Turk (1897), With Kitchener to Khartum, chronicling his attachment to British forces during the Mahdist War in the Sudan, The Tragedy of Dreyfus and his posthumous From Cape Town to Ladysmith. He is also the author of In India, a series of articles on India published in 1899.

He was appointed by the Daily Mail as war correspondent to South Africa during the Second Boer War in 1899. Caught in the siege of Ladysmith, he kept up morale during the early months with his mordant witticisms appearing in Ladysmith Lyre (e.g. "a strange sideway out of Ladysmith" for death by disease or starvation).^[4] He died of enteric fever (now more commonly known as typhoid) on 15 January 1900, six weeks before the Natal Field Army of Redvers Buller relieved Ladysmith.

In popular culture

Jack London credited Steevens with inventing the cocktail Abu Hamed in the opening paragraph of The Inevitable White Man.^[5]

References

1. "Steevens, George Warrington". Nordisk familjebok. 1917. Retrieved 30 November 2017.
2. Chisholm 1911.
3. New International Encyclopedia Memoir in Volume I (1900) of the Memorial Edition of Steeven's writings, edited by Street and Blackburn.
4. Churchill, W.S. London to Ladysmith via Pretoria, London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1900, pp.215–16.
5. "The Inevitable White Man". Retrieved 3 July 2019.

Sources

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Cousin, John William (1910). A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London: J. M. Dent & Sons – via Wikisource.
• Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Steevens, George Warrington" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 25 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 869.
• Lee, Sidney (1901). "Steevens, George Warrington" . In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography (1st supplement). London: Smith, Elder & Co.
• Lee, Sidney; Stearn, Roger T. "Steevens, George Warrington (1869–1900)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/26356. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)

External links

• Works by George Warrington Steevens at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about G. W. Steevens at the Internet Archive
• The Land of the Dollar, Ayer Publishing, 1971
• From Capetown to Ladysmith by George Warrington Steevens at Project Gutenberg, An Unfinished Record of the South African War