Herbert Melville Guest (29 January 1853 – 29 June 1938) was an author, newspaper owner and politician of the Transvaal.

[1] In 1869, diamonds were discovered on a farm belonging to the De Beers brothers in Colesberg Kopje, which was to become Kimberley, sparking off a rush.

[4] The following year, Herbert Melville moved to Kimberley with the staff of the new Diamond News, published by the owners of the Grahamstown Journal.

Shortly before the outbreak of the Anglo Boer War, Guest ceased publication of the newspaper and took his family away from Klerksdorp.

[5] On 19 April 1877, Guest and Lucy Charlotte Lucas were married at St.Bartholomew’s Church, by the Lord Bishop of Grahamstown.

After the regiment was disbanded at the end of the campaign, he was commissioned as a machine gun officer in the Second Cape Corps for service in East Africa;[8][9] he was killed in action on 6 November 1917[10] at the Battle of Mahiwa while checking the advance of a vastly superior enemy force.

Between the wars, he became a lawyer and was admitted to the High Court of Southern Rhodesia (present day Zimbabwe) and moved to Bulawayo and then joined the firm of Coghlan and Welsh in the Salisbury office.

He was elected in 1928 to represent Charter in the Legislative Assembly for the Rhodesia Party and was appointed a cabinet minister in 1938 by Godfrey Huggins.

Guest's two youngest sons, Cecil Marmaduke (1888–1954), known as Duke, and Oliver Basil (born 1891), served in the Transvaal Scottish in the First World War.