Edgar Amphlett was a British Olympic fencer

Fencing

Fencing, which is also known as modern fencing to distinguish it from historical fencing, is a family of combat sports using bladed weapons.Fencing is one of four sports which have been featured at every one of the modern Olympic Games...

 and Journalist. He won a silver medal in the team épée event at the 1908 Summer Olympics

1908 Summer Olympics

The 1908 Summer Olympics, officially the Games of the IV Olympiad, were an international multi-sport event which was held in 1908 in London, England, United Kingdom. These games were originally scheduled to be held in Rome. At the time they were the fifth modern Olympic games...

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Early life

Edgar Montague Amphlett was born on 1 September 1867 in Dorchester, Dorset

Dorset

Dorset , is a county in South West England on the English Channel coast. The county town is Dorchester which is situated in the south. The Hampshire towns of Bournemouth and Christchurch joined the county with the reorganisation of local government in 1974...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 the son of Henry James Amphlett. Amphlett was educated at Hull Grammar School

Hull Grammar School

Hull Grammar School was an independent secondary school in Hull, England, founded in 1486 by Dr. John Alcock. The school merged with Hull High School to form Hull Collegiate School in 2005.- History :The seventeenth oldest independent school in the U.K...

 and at 17 he joined the staff of the Echo and later worked for 16 years in the Press Gallery at the Houses of Parliament. In 1899 he joined the parliamentary staff of the The Times

The Times

The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

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First World War

During the First World War he first became a war correspondent in France

War correspondent

A war correspondent is a journalist who covers stories firsthand from a war zone. In the 19th century they were also called Special Correspondents.-Methods:...

. He remained in Boulogne after the British Army abandoned the town during the retreat from Mons and then moved to Arras joining a stream of refugees and produced a diary that was published in The Times. He wanted to join the Army but he was now in his late forties, eventually in September 1915 he was commissioned as a temporary Staff Captain and he served the next four years in France as a Train Conducting Officer and a Railway Transport Officer.

Post war

In September 1919 Amphlett re-joined the parliamentary staff of The Times. In 1920 he became a special correspondent in Ireland but later that year he was sent to Fiume where he was the only correspondent in the town during the Italian blockade in the days before the surrender of Gabriele d'Annunzio

Gabriele D'Annunzio

Gabriele D'Annunzio or d'Annunzio was an Italian poet, journalist, novelist, and dramatist...

. He later worked in the Paris office of The Times before returning to London in 1925 where he was responsible for special editions of the paper.

Fencing

Before the first world war Amphlett was the leading exponent of Foil and Épée fencing in Great Britain when he won the Épée championship in 1910 followed by the Foil championship in 1911. He represented Great Britain at the Olympic Games in 1908 (London), 1912 (Stockholm) and Paris in 1924.