[6] The Daily Mail newspaper recruited Lady Sarah after one of its correspondents, Ralph Hellawell, was arrested by the Boers as he tried to get out of the besieged town of Mafeking to send his dispatch.

[9][3] During her stay in the city, she also helped with nursing in a convalescent hospital, and was slightly wounded when it was shelled by Boer forces in late January 1900.

Yesterday we were heavily shelled and suffered eight casualties … Corporal Ironside had his thigh smashed the day before, and Private Webbe, of the Cape Police, had his head blown off in the brickfields trenches.

[11] Despite these cheery events, dwindling food supplies became a constant theme in the stories she sent back to the Mail and the situation seemed hopeless when the garrison was hit by an outbreak of malarial typhoid.

[12][3][Notes 2] In May 1901, Wilson was invested as a Dame of Grace of The Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem (DStJ),[13] and in December the same year King Edward VII personally conferred on her the decoration of the Royal Red Cross (RRC) for her services in Mafeking.

[15][16] At the outbreak of the First World War Lady Sarah went to France and was running a hospital for injured soldiers in Boulogne when she received the news of her husband's death at Klein Zillebeke.

Lady Sarah chose the lines “Life is a city of crooked streets Death the market place where all men meet” for Gordon Wilson's headstone.