author
Dalrymple J. Belgrave
1851–1922
A Victorian barrister-novelist who turned legal training and colonial experience into brisk, adventurous fiction. His stories of racing, law, and South Africa carry the pace of popular 19th-century entertainment with a strong sense of place.
1 Audiobook
Luck at the Diamond Fields
by Dalrymple J. Belgrave
About the author
Born in Portsea Island, Hampshire, in 1851, Dalrymple James Belgrave studied at Cambridge, then trained in law at the Inner Temple and was called to the bar in 1876. Sources also describe him as practicing before the Supreme Court at Griqualand West, linking him directly to the South African setting that would shape some of his fiction.
Belgrave wrote popular late-Victorian novels including Luck at the Diamond Fields (1887), A Great Turf Fraud (1888), Jack Warleigh: A Tale of the Turf and the Law (1891), and Turf and Veldt (1893). He is also noted as a contributor to the Dictionary of National Biography, where his articles were signed with the initials "D. J. B."
He married Isabella Richardson in 1893, and one of their children was Sir Charles Dalrymple Belgrave. Belgrave died on the Isle of Wight on May 2, 1922. I couldn't confirm a reliable portrait image from the sources I found, so none is included here.