Burleigh (Bennet)
Desert Warfare, being the Chronicle of the Easter Soudan Campaign.
With Official Maps.
Description:
FIRST EDITION, 11 maps of various sizes, 3 of which folded (and one of these torn), a few faint spots to borders, occasional light handling marks to same,
pp. x, 320, 32 [publisher's list], 8vo,
original green cloth, backstrip lettered in gilt, star and crescent stamped in gilt to front and backstrip, publisher device in blind to lower board, lean to spine, general wear and soiling, a little cracking to rear hinge, fair
Publication Details:
Chapman & Hall, 1884
Notes: Inscribed by the author at the head of the title-page: 'To my dear Father, Bennet, 10 July 1884'. Bennet Burleigh was the most famous British war correspondent of his time - for the Daily Telegraph, he covered British imperial activity in Africa in the final decades of the nineteenth-century. Retirement brought his career to a close in 1913 and he died on the eve of the First World War, a cataclysm that consigned lofty plans of commemoration - a memorial tablet in St Paul's Cathedral, and a statue for which King George V had asked Churchill to chair a committee - to the scrap heap. Burleigh's ...moreInscribed by the author at the head of the title-page: 'To my dear Father, Bennet, 10 July 1884'. Bennet Burleigh was the most famous British war correspondent of his time - for the Daily Telegraph, he covered British imperial activity in Africa in the final decades of the nineteenth-century. Retirement brought his career to a close in 1913 and he died on the eve of the First World War, a cataclysm that consigned lofty plans of commemoration - a memorial tablet in St Paul's Cathedral, and a statue for which King George V had asked Churchill to chair a committee - to the scrap heap. Burleigh's route to a career in journalism was a complex one, which took him from the shipping industry in Glasgow, leaving behind a young family, to the US, where his opportunistic instincts alighted upon the Civil War - he was imprisoned by the Confederates as a spy, but he ingratiated himself with them and enlisted, serving as a Confederate pirate; he was repeatedly imprisoned and repeatedly escaped. During a period of illness that prevented him from soldiering he had made a false start in the career that brought him fame; it began in earnest after the war for the Houston Telegraph, and then in Brooklyn, before returning to Britain where he was hired by the Telegraph - for whom his coverage of the war in Sudan, and particularly of the Fall of Khartoum, quickly established his reputation. His father, Robert Burley, was a joiner and inventor, whose designs for a submarine battery and torpedo boat were in his son's pockets when he arrived in Virginia; during his imprisonment, his father lobbied with the British Government for his release. HIDE
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