George Ward Price

After having some articles published by The Captain magazine, Price wrote to the Daily Mail asking to have a proposed walk across Europe financed. The proposed articles were turned down but Price was taken on as a reporter, 'paid by results'. After a year this arrangement resulted in him being given a five-year contract.[1]

Colonel Sherbrooke-Walker recalled Price in this period when he came to report on a scout camp at Wisley:[2]

Tall, bronzed, handsome and monocled, with his duelling scar, the soul of kindness and with a delightfully dry sense of humour he at once became a boyhood's hero and the fun and entertainment he contrived for his friends' young brother will never be forgotten.

In 1910 he reported from Turkey and the First Balkan War. Following this, Price became the Daily Mail's Paris Correspondent at the age of 26.[1] The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand saw Price dispatched to Vienna to report on the funeral.[3]

The outbreak of the First World War saw Price return to Turkey to cover the Gallipoli campaign on behalf of the Newspaper Proprietors Association members.[1]

Following the evacuation he wrote:[4]

Although Sulva and Anzac have cost us much in blood, it would be a mistake to regard this withdraw as a confession of entire failure there. Both are names that will take a proud place in the list of the Battle Honours of our Imperial Army, for British troops from the farthest separated parts of the Empire there met and fought, not Turk and German alone, but disease and thirst, the heat of summer and the deadly bitter blizzards of winter.

After covering the evacuation which ended the campaign he moved to the Salonika front. Feeling things had quietened there he redeployed to the Italian Front and witnessed the retreat from Caporetto.[1]

He turned down a CBE for his wartime reporting, preferring to wait until combatants had been honoured.[1]

In 1919 Price attended the meetings in Paris that paved the way for the Treaty of Versailles. It was here he interviewed Marshal Foch for what became a four column piece. He attended further conferences in Cannes, Genoa and Lausanne before following the French Foreign Legion in Morocco in 1933.[1]

A 1928 advertisement for a share offering in Northcliffe Newspapers Limited lists Price as a Company Director. He is also listed as Director of the Associated Newspapers Ltd arm of the company.[5]

The 1930s saw Price carry out several interviews with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. During Anschluss, the German annexation of Austria, Price accompanied Hitler's party as they entered Vienna.[1] Of his interviews with Hitler, journalist John Simpson noted:[6]

George Ward Price and Tom Sefton Delmer didn't interview Hitler in the sense that a modern journalist is expected to interview a political leader, putting alternative points of view and bringing up instances where the facts run counter to political rhetoric. Instead, they simply steered him towards a particular subject, then recorded his answers. Getting in to speak to the great man in the first place was the hard part: the actual business of interviewing him was relatively easy.

— John Simpson, We Chose to Speak of War and Strife: The World of the Foreign Correspondent

In newsreel footage of the scenes in Vienna, Price can be seen near Hitler on the balcony of the Hofburg Palace.[7]

With the Munich Crisis, he covered the visit of Neville Chamberlain to Berchtesgarden and witnessed the entry of German troops in the Sudetenland.[1]

Reporting on the concentration camps Price wrote:[6]

To blacken the whole Nazi régime because a few subordinates may have abused their powers is as unfair as it would be to condemn the Government of the United States for the brutalities of some warder in charge of a chain-gang in the mountains of West Virginia.

Price returned to his work as a war correspondent at the start of the Second World War, working for three months at Arras. However, with the conditions of the time there was little to report, so Price toured through south-east Europe. He visited Turkey, Romania, Yugoslavia and Italy.[1]

He did not return to the war until 1942, when he covered the fighting in North Africa.[1]