Frederick David Baillie

Born in 1862, Frederick David Baillie is chiefly remembered for Mafeking: A Diary of the Siege, a contemporary account of the Siege of Mafeking during the Second Boer War. The book was published in 1900 and presents the siege in diary form, giving it an unusually direct, day-by-day quality.

Sources available here confirm that Baillie was known as Major F. D. Baillie, and that his book grew out of reporting written during the siege for a newspaper before being republished in book form. That background helps explain the brisk, eyewitness style of his writing, which combines military observation with the details of everyday life in a town under pressure.

Very little biographical information about him is easily confirmed from the sources retrieved in this session, so the safest picture is also the clearest one: Baillie stands out as a soldier-writer whose reputation rests on a single enduring work of war reportage and memoir.