Henry Noel Brailsford (25 December 1873 – 23 March 1958) was the most prolific British left-wing journalist of the first half of the 20th century. A founding member of the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage in 1907, he resigned from his job at The Daily News in 1909 when it supported the force-feeding of suffragettes on hunger strike. He was the son of a Methodist preacher, he was born in Yorkshire and educated in Scotland, at the High School of Dundee.
Brailsford abandoned an academic career to become a journalist, rising to prominence in the 1890s as a foreign correspondent for The Manchester Guardian, specializing 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 1905 he was convicted of conspiring to obtain a British passport in the name of one person for another person to travel to Russia.
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 co-authored its report. Brailsford was an outspoken critic of Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. His books in the 1930s include the anti-colonialist classic Rebel India (1931) and the anti-militarist Property or Peace? (1934). In the late 1930s, he was one of the few writers associated with the Left Book Club, the New Statesman and Tribune who was consistently critical of the Soviet show trials. Following the Soviet invasion of Finland, Brailsford published a hostile essay about Stalin in Reynold’s News. Full biography of Brailsford can be found on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._N._Brailsford
On behalf of British Relief Fund, Brailsford and his wife Jane, spend the 5 months of winter 1903/4 in Monastir (Bitola) and Ochrida (Ohrid) where he met Miss Mary Edith Durham. He studied the ethnicities, the cultures, the history and the political situation in Macedonia after the failed uprising in Krushevo. Upon return in 1905, he published the book Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future. He also made the photographs for the book. (some photographs were made by Bertram Christian, Mr. Henry W. Nevinson and major Salman) The book is available for reading at the following link:
https://archive.org/details/macedoniaitsrac00braigoog/page/n8/mode/2up
