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Beatrice Grimshaw (1870 - 1953):
Writer and traveller


Beatrice Grimshaw

Beatrice Grimshaw was born at Cloonagh, near Dunmurry, County Antrim on 3 February 1870. She was educated at Margaret Byers's Ladies' Collegiate College, Belfast, in Caen and in London. She was a keen cyclist, and broke the women's world 24 hour record by five hours. As a journalist in Dublin from 1891 to 1899 she became sub-editor of Irish Cyclist and from 1895 edited the Social Review for four years. Until 1903 she was a freelance journalist, a tour organiser and an emigration promoter. In that year she went to the Pacific, and from 1907 to 1934 lived in Papua New Guinea, where she ran a coffee plantation for several years. Sixteen of her novels are set in Papua, and nine on other Pacific islands. She published several travel books, including In the Strange South Seas, (illustrated by her own photographs) 1907; From Fiji to the Cannibal Islands, 1907 and The New New Guinea, 1910. Among her novels are When the Red Gods Call; Guinea Gold; The Mystery of Tumbling Reef and South Sea Sarah. She also published ten volumes of short stories and contributed articles to The National Geographic. There is a misleading claim, possibly based on the 1928 British Who's Who entries, 'that she was the first white woman to ascend the notorious Sepic and the Fly River'. She prided herself in writing for 'the-man-who-could-not-go' and said of herself: 'I have no new range of rivers to my credit, though I have mapped a few odd corners here and there, and often met natives who had never seen a white person - that is easy in Papua.' She died in Bathurst, New South Wales on 30 June 1953.



Born: 3 February 1870
Died: 30 June 1953
Kate Newmann