Beatrice Grimshaw 1871-1953

            Beatrice Grimshaw was born a few miles outside Belfast, Ireland in a big country house.  She was an adventurer at heart since childhood and an independent soul who longed to travel to far away places.

            When Beatrice was 21 years old, she went away to Dublin to work as a journalist.  She was a keen cyclist and broke the women’s world 24 hour record by five hours.  As a journalist in Dublin from 1891 she became sub-editor of “Irish Cyclist” and from 1895 edited the “Social Review” for four years.  Later on she moved to London, where she continued working as a journalist.  However, her dreams of travel persisted and although in those times travel was not only uncommon for a single woman but also expensive, she managed to get a commission to write newspaper publicity for the shipping companies in return for travel around the world.  She provided for her other expenses by commissions for articles from various newspapers.

            Until 1903 Beatrice had been a freelance journalist, a tour organiser and an emigration promoter but her dream was to go to the South Pacific islands.  She sailed in early 1904 with the Union Steamship Company of New Zealand.  Embarking from San Francisco, she sailed first to Tahiti, followed by a four month voyage through the South Pacific and an additional two months on the island of Niue.  During this trip, she visited Tonga, Samoa, Fiji, Rarotonga and some of the Cook islands.  She returned to London with enough material to publish “In the Strange South Seas” and “From Fiji to the Cannibal Islands” in 1907.

            In these books, Grimshaw not only recounts her adventures in the South Seas, but she also describes the customs and lifestyles of the native populations as well as giving an exhaustive picture of the region’s fauna and wildlife.  The books also contain accounts of cannibalism, head-hunting, poisoning and tribal magic.  She managed to skilfully mix tales of exotic jungle adventure with romantic descriptions of the South Sea allure.

            Now established as a professional travel writer, Beatrice left in November 1907 for Papua New Guinea where she lived for many years and where she owned two plantations as well as being the manager of one.  During those years she also wrote 37 books, mainly novels which were inspired by the many interesting people she met.

            Eventually, Beatrice settled in Bathhurst, Australia where she died in 1953 at the age of eighty two with no descendants.  In her book “Isles of Adventure” she provided an accurate epitaph for herself: “I have written as a traveller, a wanderer, to whom new and strange things are the chief happiness of my life”.

            Beatrice Grimshaw’s books had a large readership but were unjustly forgotten in later years.  Trotamundas Press is bringing back into print some of the travel books that so well describe the allure of the South Pacific islands that she dreamt of when she was a young woman in Ireland and that she loved so much.