His father Bernard Nahum Goldmann had left eastern Germany after the German revolutions of 1848–1849, because of his political involvements.

[4] Bernard Goldmann ran a shop at Burgersdorp for the Mosenthal brothers, and prospered;[5] he was appointed Justice of the Peace for the Albert district of Cape Colony in 1869.

[6] He was a director of the Albert Bank, with his brother Louis Goldmann, who had arrived in Cape Town in 1845 with his family from Breslau, had gone into business with the Mosenthals and moved to Burgersdorp.

[16] Bernard Goldmann having died (by 1894), the family moved by stages to London, with Edwin remaining in Freiburg, Germany; and Sydney left Johannesburg.

Initially attached to Sir Redvers Buller's relief force, he travelled with them as far as Ladysmith after which he transferred to the cavalry advancing north in order to report on their endeavours.

At this period, Goldman worked as a cameraman for the Warwick Trading Company, taking over when Joseph Rosenthal left in the middle of 1900.

[21] Clinton Edward Dawkins described Goldman to Leo Maxse in 1904 as: ...full of S. African shares, also of public spirit and of imperial devotion...[who] desires to excel as a writer or pamphleteer.

Garvin quickly transformed the journal into a publication of note, but the paper failed to turn a profit.

After a series of disagreements between the two men over business matters, Goldman sold the paper to Lord Iveagh in October 1906.

[25] On the tone of Edwardian period imperialist writers, contrasted with Leonard Woolf, Simon Glassock writes: Garvin, Goldman and St Loe Strachey demonstrate how writers at the turn of the twentieth century might have allied economics, politics and history with appeals for the reader to take modest but deserved pride in the imperial achievements of the British.

[29] He involved himself in politics directly by entering Parliament, winning the Penryn and Falmouth seat in the January 1910 general election as a Unionist.

In 1913 Goldman was a captain in the Royal Garrison Artillery;[30] and during World War I, served as a major in it, in Cornwall.

In England Goldman lived at Trefusis House, Falmouth until about 1929, after which he moved to the Jacobean mansion at Yaverland Manor.

[47] She was decorated with the Royal Red Cross, and was in December 1901 appointed a Lady of Grace of the Venerable Order of Saint John of Jerusalem.

[48] After Emily Hobhouse had written in The Contemporary Review about British concentration camps in South Africa, and in particular about the number of Africans remaining in them, John Smith Moffat replied in the same periodical.