Charles Edward Finlason known affectionately as “Fin”, was a delightful personalty who made his name as a journalist and cricketer in South Africa during the eighties and nineties. Born in England, he came to Kimberley in his twenties and joined the Kimberley Independent. He played for the famous Kimberley Pirates Cricket Club and, in 1889, represented South Africa against Major Warton’s English team at Port Elizabeth.

A year after the Occupation of Mashonaland he journeyed to Salisbury by ox drawn cart and writes of his experiences with an appealing humour and modesty. Being so much the Tenderfoot he was blissfully unaware of the danger in which he often placed himself and was lucky not to have been taken by a lion or lost in the bush, with the compass he was unable to read correctly. Making his journey closely after Lord Randolph Churchill’s lavishly appointed expedition, one suspects that his choice of title for this book was a sly dig at the the noble Lord.

After his Rhodesian adventure he held editorial appointments in Pretoria and Johannesburg, including editorship of The Star in 1898. He returned to England early in 1900 and died there in 1917.