Author: Margeret Ashdown

Editor, The Cape Chronicle, 1886–1901

Margaret Ashdown was born in 1849 in Port Elizabeth, the daughter of a Methodist minister whose sermons, she later joked, taught her everything she needed to know about holding an audience's attention through discomfort. She was educated at a small mission school that took the unusual step, for its time, of teaching girls rhetoric alongside needlework, and she left it with a taste for argument that never left her.

Her early career was built in temperance journalism, writing for church-affiliated newsletters and reform pamphlets throughout the 1870s. It was unglamorous, poorly paid work, but it taught her two things she carried into every newsroom she later ran: how to make dry statistics — on drink, on disease, on wages — land with the force of a story, and how to keep writing in the face of an audience that would rather not hear it. By the early 1880s she had moved into more general reform journalism, covering public health and workhouse conditions for a Cape Town weekly, where her columns first caught the attention of the Chronicle's board.

Her appointment as editor in 1886, succeeding Edmund Carrow, was contentious before she had written a word in the role — she was the paper's first woman editor, and at least two board members are recorded as having voted against her purely on those grounds. She did little to soothe the skeptics and much to justify their worry, in the sense that they had feared exactly what she intended to do: widen the Chronicle's attention far beyond the trade and political coverage that had defined it for a quarter century.

Under Ashdown, the paper began running sustained investigative coverage of public health conditions in the city's poorer districts, of school overcrowding, and — most controversially — of labor conditions among dockworkers, a subject the paper's traditional readership among shipping interests found considerably less comfortable than harbor tariffs. The factory-conditions series of 1889, which documented injury rates and wage practices in unflinching detail, prompted the resignation of several board members who accused her of turning the Chronicle into an instrument of agitation rather than a newspaper. Ashdown's response, preserved in the paper's own pages, was simply that she intended to keep printing what was true whether or not it was comfortable.

Whatever the board's discomfort, the readership's was evidently smaller: circulation nearly doubled over her tenure, as the Chronicle became required reading for exactly the kind of reform-minded, church-going, increasingly literate public Ashdown had spent the 1870s writing for. She stepped down in 1901, worn by fifteen years of institutional friction, and spent her later years involved in public health advocacy work in Cape Town. She died in 1919.