BORN in Christchurch, Hampshire, on March 8, 1849, Charles William Deecker arrived in Liskeard in the late 1850s when his father, Henry, opened a Printing and Stationery shop in Market Street. By 1871 the business, with accommodation above, had moved to Fore Street, where Charles trained as a printer.

Apart from being elected Secretary of Liskeard Cricket Club in 1874, the next we hear of Deecker is his arrival at Port Elizabeth, South Africa, in 1876. He then travelled by ox-wagon to the Transvaal where he became Special Correspondent for the London Standard, the Natal Witness and the Cape Times. Deecker then published the first English newspaper in South Africa, the Transvaal Argus, and won a contract to print the South African Government’s Gazette.

At the outbreak of the short lived first Boer War in 1881 Deecker became a Captain in the Pretoria Volunteer Rifle Corps receiving pay of 15 shillings a day. The Boers, for the 100 days of the war, blockaded Pretoria which suspended the printing of the Argus. Deecker moved his printing machinery into the military camp and began to publish a four-page newspaper, priced 6d, called ‘News of the Camp-A Journal of Fancies, Notifications, Gossip and General Chit Chat Published in the Military Camp of Her Majesty’s Forces Defending the Beleaguered Inhabitants of Pretoria.

Transvaal, with Pretoria, was eventually handed over to the Boers on August 3, 1881, and Deecker printed his last copy of the Argus a month later. He left Transvaal, but stayed in South Africa, working in Natal on the Newcastle Echo, then the Natal Mercury, eventually acquiring the Farmers’ Chronicle and the East London Advertiser. His obituary of 1912 includes ‘wherever he has lived and worked the interests, welfare and progress of his community has always been his aim regardless of creeds, nationality or politics’.