James R. A. Bailey

James Richard Abe Bailey, CBE, DFC (23 October 1919 – 29 February 2000), often known as Jim Bailey, was an Anglo-South African World War II fighter pilot, writer, poet and publisher. He was the founder of Drum, the most widely read magazine in Africa.

Born in London, the son of Sir Abe Bailey and pioneer aviator Lady Mary Bailey, Jim Bailey was educated at Winchester College and Christ Church Oxford. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was called up from the Oxford University Air Squadron and joined the Royal Air Force as a pilot in September 1939. He served with 264 and 85 Squadrons, flying Defiants, Hurricanes and Beaufighters.

In 1951 he provided financial backing to Bob Crisp to start a magazine called African Drum based in Cape Town, and aimed at a Black readership, but as readership dropped, Bailey took full control. The monthly magazine was renamed to simply Drum and the head office moved to Johannesburg. Anthony Sampson was appointed editor. Bailey also founded in 1955 the Golden City Post, the country's first black Sunday tabloid.

Bailey's book The God-Kings and the Titans: The New World Ascendancy in Ancient Times (1973) was a controversial work on pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact, which claimed that thousands of years before Columbus Mediterranean sea voyagers among other peoples from the Old World landed on both the Atlantic and Pacific shores of America. The book has been referenced by many pseudohistoric writers.

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