Lines of Life (ePub)

Henry Woodd Nevinson was born on October 11th, 1856.

Nevinson was schooled at Shrewsbury School and at Christ Church, Oxford. John Ruskin influenced his time at Oxford. Fascinated by German Culture he spent some time at Jena before publishing, in 1884, Herder & His times, a study on Johnann Gottfried Herder.

In 1897 he became the Daily Chronicle's reporter for the Greco-Turkish War. He was also noted for his reporting on the Second Boer War.

During the 1880s Nevinson had attached his politics to Socialism and by 1889 had joined the Social Democratic Federation.

In 1904, he was hired by Harper's Monthly Magazine to report on a supposed trade in slaves from Angola to the cocoa plantations of São Tomé. He produced evidence of people being trafficked to settle debts or seized by Portuguese agents and taken in shackles to the coastal towns. Once there he wrote that Portuguese officials "freed" them and continued the charade by declaring they were now voluntary workers who agreed to go to São Tomé for five years. Despite severe ill health he continued to follow the slaves to São Tomé. He found plantation conditions so appalling that one in five workers died each year. His account was serialised from August 1905 and then published as "A Modern Slavery" in 1906.

He was also a suffragist, being one of the founders in 1907 of the Men's League for Women's Suffrage.

In 1914 he co-founded the Friends' Ambulance Unit and later in World War I, as a war correspondent, was wounded during the infamous Gallipoli campaign.

E. M. Forster described Nevinson's book, More Changes, More Chances in 1925 as "exciting", and that "He has brought to the soil of his adoption something that transcends party-generosity, recklessness, a belief in conscience joined to a mistrust of principles".

A committed Socialist Nevinson could see, during the 20s and 30s, the foundations of a titanic struggle began to gather its forces. In Nancy Cunard's Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, Nevinson said "I detest the cruel systems of persecution and suppression now existing under Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy and Stalin in Russia".

Nevinson married Margaret Wynne Jones and after her death in 1933, he married his long-time lover, and fellow suffragist, Evelyn Sharp.

Henry W. Nevinson died on November 9th, 1941