H. N. Brailsford

Henry Noel Brailsford (1873 – 1958) was the most prolific British left-wing journalist of the first half of the 20th century.

The son of a Methodist preacher, he was born in Yorkshire and educated in Scotland, at the High School of Dundee. He abandoned an academic career to become a journalist, rising to prominence in the 1890s as a foreign correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, specialising in the Balkans, France and Egypt.

In 1899 he moved to London, working for the Morning Leader and then the Daily News. He led a British relief mission to Macedonia in 1903, publishing a book, Macedonia. Its Races and Their Future, on his return.

In 1907 he was convicted of conspiring to obtain a British passport in the name of one person for another person to travel to Russia.Brailsford's appeal is reported in the Law Reports of the Court of Kings Bench as R v Brailsford 2 KB 730

Brailsford joined the Independent Labour Party in 1907 and resigned from the Daily News in 1909 when it supported force-feeding of suffragette prisoners. Over the next decade he wrote several books, among them Adventures in Prose (1911), Shelley, Godwin and his Circle (1913), War of Steel and Gold (1914), Origins of the Great War (1914), Belgium and the Scrap of Paper (1915) and A League of Nations (1917).

In 1913-14 Brailsford was a member of the international commission sent by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to investigate the conduct of the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. He...
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