William Thomas Stead was an influential newspaper editor and publisher who started his journalistic career in Darlington with the Northern Echo, before moving to London to work on the Pall Mall Gazette and work as a pioneer in investigative journalism. In 1899 he founded the Review of Reviews. Initially a friend of Cecil Rhodes, he was struck off the list of Rhodes' executors after supporting the Boers' cause in the press. As a supporter of the Peace and other political Movements, Stead was invited to speak at a Peace Congress at Carnegie Hall in 1912, having reputedly been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize that year; tragically his ship sank on the way and Stead became the most famous Englishman to perish on the *Titanic*. Stead helped women and children into the lifeboats and gave his life-jacket to another passenger; he was last spotted alongside John Jacob Astor IV clinging to a raft and his body was never recovered. Curiously Stead wrote articles in both 1886 and 1892 that featured the loss of life on a voyage due to insufficient lifeboats and to collisions with icebergs. W.T. Stead served as a crucial early mentor to the prolific crime and mystery novelist Marie Belloc Lowndes (The Lodger)