Frank Magee
Over thirty years' experience as a newspaper cameraman has bestowed adventure in abundance upon Frank Magee. Few of his exploits, however, can have excelled those which he undertook during a day under the burning North African sunshine twenty-seven years ago.
Sent at a few hours' notice from photographing a Balham Baby Show to a camera assignation among the bullets of the Turkish-Italian conflict at Tripoli in 1911, Magee took a ticket for Naples with instructions to get to the front at all costs. All passenger ships having been requisitioned, the first cost was one of £500 for the hire of a vessel to carry him to the scene of his greatest picture scoop.
When the Arabs of Tripoli revolted and turned on the Italians Magee was isolated with his camera and a quaking heart in an Arab cemetery amid a hail of rifle fire. Fortunately for him, the revolt was quelled almost at his feet and he was enabled to secure his scoop-the mass execution of the rebels which, coupled with his pictorial record of the day's Turkish offensive, made Fleet Street history for that year.