WAR PICTURES.

By a staff of Fifty Photographers and Artists now in South Africa. The story of the War told in Brief Published every Wednesday morning.  

16 issues of 32 pages each – 512 pages in all, recently bound in quarter dark green leather with cloth sides, bound without the original paper covers, profusely illustrated throughout with photographs and drawings by war artists. 

Greenwall (Ryno) Artists and Illustrators of the Anglo-Boer War (1992), page 61, ‘War Pictures. C. Arthur Pearson’s publication, was launched on 10 February 1900. It was priced at two pence and appeared weekly on Wednesdays until its abrupt demise with No. 16 on 26 May 1900. Despite the editor’s claim to have a ‘staff of 50 photographers and artists in South Africa’ most of the illustrations were borrowed, without acknowledgement, from its rivals. However it did publish facsimile drawings by Gordon Grant and J.C.L. Booth. Nevertheless it seems as if Fred Howard, Clement Flower and Lawson Wood were the only original home-based contributors. The later issues carried a claim by a newsagent, Mr. G. Vicary, that of all the Boer War periodicals displayed in his shop the Princess of Wales preferred War Pictures,remarking that ‘it was very good indeed’.’ 

As well as photographs and drawings War Pictures ran articles by several of the war correspondents of the major daily newspaper such as the Daily Telegraph and Daily News. Of particular note is the article in Number 4, March 2, 1900, pages 98–104, by Winston Churchill: How I Escaped from Pretoria. My Subsequent Adventures on the Road to Delagoa Bay. (Cohen (Ronald I.) Bibliography of the Writing of Sir Winston Churchill (2006), volume 2, page 1200, C.104b. This would appear to be a copy of Churchill’s article with the same title published in the Morning Post (the paper for which he was a correspondent in South Africa) dated January 24, 1900.