A Choice Collection of Medals to War Correspondents

The Queen’s South Africa Medal awarded to Mr. E. A. Brayley Hodgetts, who served as Special Correspondent for the Daily Express in South Africa during the Boer War; a noted and widely travelled journalist and author, his entertaining remembrances were published in 1924 under the title ‘Moss from a Rolling Stone’

Queen’s South Africa 1899-1902, no clasp (Mr. B. Hodgetts. “Daily Express”) good very fine £1,000-£1,400

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, A Choice Collection of Medals to War Correspondents.

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Edward Arthur Brayley Hodgetts was born in Berlin in 1859, a British subject by parentage, and was educated at Moscow. During a highly cosmopolitan career, he served as Russian Correspondent to The Times, the Daily Graphic and and Reuters for several years, was Paris Editor of Dalziel’s Agency, Foreign Editor of the New York World, Librarian to the Institution of Civil Engineers and wrote many books, the first of which - Personal Reminiscences of General Skobeleff - was published by W. H. Allen & Co. in 1884. He was fluent in many languages and widely travelled from a young age, spending time on the Continent as well as in America, Russia and Asia Minor - his experiences of the the latter two were related in two well-received travel memoirs: In the track of the Russian famine; the personal narrative of Journey through the famine districts of Russia, published by T. Fisher Unwin in 1892 and Round about Armenia: the record of a journey across the Balkans through Turkey, the Caucasus, and Persia in 1895, published by Low, Marston, 1896. He translated Johann David Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson into a widely read English language version in 1897 and throughout this period authored many articles for The Strand Magazine and The Pall Mall Gazette.

Following the outbreak of the Boer War, Sir Arthur Pearson secured the services of Brayley Hodgett to cover the conflict as Special Correspondent for his soon to be launched newspaper, The Daily Express. Having embarked for the Cape in the Dunvegan Castle in mid February 1900, Brayley Hodgetts is known to have been invalided with enteric fever during his time in South Africa.

Returning to London, he continued to write, his books now beginning to focus mostly on Russian and German historical themes: The court of Russia in the nineteenth century, Methuen 1908; The House of Hohenzollern: two centuries of Berlin court life, Dutton 1911; The life of Catherine the Great of Russia, Brentano’s 1914 and Glorious Russia : its life, people and destiny, Bristol 1915. In the 1911 census, however, he describes himself as an author of literature and Secretary of a public company in the Dynamite Trade; his book entitled ‘The rise and progress of the British explosives industry’ had been published two years earlier.
Towards the end of his career, in 1924, his wrote an entertaining and anecdote filled personal memoir, ‘Moss from a Rolling Stone’, in relation to which the following article appeared in The Scotsman, 31 March 1924:
‘Mr E. A. Brayley Hodgetts makes a very agreeable companion in his recollections of what has been a varied and active career. As a journalist and foreign correspondent he has visited many lands and met all sorts and conditions of men; and he records his impressions effectively, bringing many a good story to his aid. He was born in Berlin - “because a man is born in a stable he is not necessarily a horse, and my being born in Berlin of British parents did not involve the forfeiture of my birthright as an Englishman” - and his earliest recollection of Berlin was - “seeing a rather flush faced officer, clean shaven, in a military cap, and with strange, dreamy, blue eyes, driving in an open carriage. That was Frederick William IV., the mad king of Prussia!” Subsequent memories cluster round New York after the Civil War, London in the ‘eighties, Berlin under William II, Paris under the Republic, St. Petersburg under Alexander III. There are chapters on experiences in the Near East and in South Africa . Among well-known figures of whom there are glimpses in the course of the reminiscences are Ruskin, Bronte Harte, Oscar Wilde, Tolstoy, Gladstone, Joseph Chamberlain, Clemenceau, King Edward VII and Kaiser Wilhelm II.‘

He died at Kensington, London in 1932.