The Golden Three

William Tufnell Le Queux (2 July 1864 - 13 October 1927) was an Anglo-French journalist and writer. He was also an honorary consul for San Marino, an avid traveller, a flying buff who officiated at the first British air meeting at Doncaster in 1909, and a wireless pioneer who broadcast music from his own station before radio was generally available.

Born in London, England, in 1864, his father was a French draper’s assistant and his mother was English. He was educated in Europe and studied art under Ignace Spiridon in Paris. He carried out a foot tour of Europe as a young man before supporting himself writing for French newspapers. In the late 1880s he returned to London and edited the magazines Gossip and Piccadilly before joining the staff of the The Globe as a parliamentary reporter in 1891. In 1893, he abandoned journalism to concentrate on writing and travelling. His best-known works are the anti-French and anti-Russian invasion fantasy The Great War in England in 1897 (1894) and the anti-German invasion fantasy The Invasion of 1910 (1906), which originally appeared in serial form in the Daily Mail newspaper from 19 March 1906; the latter became a huge success, was translated into 27 languages, and sold over one million copies in book form.

Le Queux was also interested in radio communication. He was a member of the Institute of Radio Engineers and carried out some radio experiments in 1924 in Switzerland with Dr. Petit Pierre and Max Amstutz. That same year he was elected the first President of the Hastings, St. Leonard’s and District Radio Society.

In addition to fiction, Le Queux also wrote extensively on wireless broadcasting, produced various travel works including An Observer in the Near East and several short books on Switzerland, and wrote an autobiography, Things I Know about Kings, Celebrities and Crooks (1923). He published well over 150 novels and stories.

He died in Knokke, Belgium in 1927, aged 63.