NO.122
T H E T R U S T Y S E RVA N T
Following in the Footsteps of George Steer
David Fellowes (I, 63-67) writes upon his
return from leading this year’s Wykeham
Patrons’ trip to the Basque Country in
September:
I sometimes shudder at the thought
that, had it not been for my fairly random
challenge of ‘Can anyone think of
another interesting Wykehamist for me to
follow?’ issued to my colleagues on the
School’s Senior Management Committee
about four years ago, I might never have
heard of one George Lowther Steer.
Winchester has an extraordinary habit of
throwing up the most fascinating subject
matter and the catalyst for this year’s
Patrons’ trip was certainly no exception.
George Steer was born in the Eastern
Cape of South Africa on 11th November
1909. He was in College from 1923 to
1928 and gained a Double First in Classics
at Christ Church, Oxford in 1932. After
just two years working as a journalist in
Cape Town and Yorkshire, he became The
Times correspondent in Ethiopia during the
Abyssinian War, before transferring to
Spain to cover the Civil War in August
1936. This led him to report so famously, in
The Times and on the front page of The
New York Times, on the bombing of
Guernica on 26th April 1937. It brought
to the world news of the massacre by
German pilots of more than 1,000 civilians
in the Basque town. The outrage felt by
Pablo Picasso inspired his masterwork,
Guernica, on which he started working in
Paris just a few days later.
In his review of Telegram from
Guernica, Nick Rankin’s excellent
biography of Steer, Martin Bell wrote:
‘George Steer achieved renown without a
byline; he showed us that to be a fairminded war reporter was not to stand
neutrally between good and evil: he was
the real – and unacknowledged – hero in
Waugh’s Scoop; all who came after him
stand forever in his debt.’
Wykeham Patrons group at George Steer’s bust in Guernica
12
It would be impossible to do justice in
these few allotted lines to Steer’s
extraordinary life, so tragically
foreshortened by a motor accident in
India on Christmas Day 1944, whilst on
active service, but it is to be hoped that a
few extracts from Rankin’s biography
might encourage you to read both it and
also, of course, Steer’s own masterpiece of
history The Tree of Gernika (this being the
Basque spelling of the town the Spanish
spell Guernica).
‘(Philip) Noel-Baker (a Labour MP
and a great friend of Steer’s) wrote: “He is
a remarkable man: the most brilliant
scholar of his year at Oxford, and now a
very keen student of war, who has been in
the front-line throughout the whole of
the Abyssinian conflict and throughout
most of the fighting in Spain.”’
‘With the rat-like cunning of the
scoop-minded reporter, Steer warned the
other journalists that the enemy was on