James Cameron

Mark James Walter Cameron CBE (17 June 1911 – 26 January 1985) was a British journalist and writer, in whose memory the annual James Cameron Memorial Lecture is given. Early life Cameron was born in Battersea, London, of Scottish parentage. His father, William Ernest Cameron, was a barrister who wrote novels under the pseudonym Mark Allerton and his mother was Margaret Douglas (née Robertson) Cameron. Career Cameron began as an office dogsbody with the Weekly News in 1935. Having worked for several Scottish newspapers and for the Daily Express in Fleet Street, he was rejected for military service in World War II. After the war, his experience of reporting on the Bikini Atoll nuclear experiments and the first British nuclear test in South Australia turned him into a pacifist and, later, a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He continued to work for the Express until 1950, after which he briefly joined Picture Post, where he and photographer Bert Hardy covered the Korean War, winning the Missouri Pictures of the Year International Award for "Inchon". Tom Hopkinson, the editor of Picture Post, lost his job as publisher when he defended the magazine's coverage of atrocities committed by South Korean troops at a concentration camp in Pusan. Cameron wrote, "I had seen Belsen, but this was worse. This terrible mob of men – convicted of nothing, un-tried, South Koreans in South Korea, suspected of being 'unreliable'." The founder of the Hulton press, Edward G. Hulton, decided to "kill" the story. In 1952 Cameron wrote an obituary essay for The Illustrated London News, "The King Is Dead", about the death of King George VI. Cameron then spent eight years with the News Chronicle until the paper ceased publication, in 1960. In 1953 he visited Albert Schweitzer in Lambaréné, in French Equatorial Africa (now Gabon) and found flaws in the practices and attitudes of Schweitzer and his staff. This was the subject of The Walrus and the Terrier, a BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Play by Christopher Ralling, broadcast on 7 April 2008.