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 Question:
What do the following have in common?
Crimean War (1854-5)
Indian Mutiny (1858)
American Civil War (1861-2)
Austro-Prussian War (1866)
Franco-Prussian War (1870-1)
Tentative
answer: They were all wars fought in the second half of the nineteenth
century?
Correct
as far as it goes, yes. More interestingly: those wars were all reported
on first-hand in The Times by the same remarkable man – William
Howard Russell. It is now 143 years since his name first came to
prominence with his reporting of the Crimean War, yet still he is
regarded by many as the greatest war correspondent of all time, and
indeed he may truly be said to have invented the art.
In
addition to all his war despatches, Russell also reported on the Irish
potato famine, the Crystal Palace Exhibition, the Duke of Wellington's
funeral, the coronation of Czar Alexander II in Moscow, the wedding of
the Prince of Wales, an attempt to lay the Atlantic Cable, a visit to
Egypt and Palestine he took on the invitation of the Prince of Wales, a
visit to India, also with the Prince of Wales, and the later stages of
the Zulu War (this time for the Daily Telegraph).
(The
edition I am working from here is that of the Folio Society (William
Russell, Special Correspondent of The Times, 1995), which is a
selection of Russell's writings with an introduction by Max Hastings.)
Russell
was born in County Dublin in 1820 and educated at Trinity College
Dublin. His aim was to become a barrister, though at one stage he
contemplated army enlistment, having been fascinated from childhood by
the activities of soldiers in the nearby barracks. In the words of
Hastings,
He
seems to have been a rumbustious, cheerfully combative young man, prone
to the usual range of adolescent enthusiasms for whiskey and modest
riot.
It
was in Ireland in fact that Russell did his first work for The Times,
where he operated as a supplementary reporter during the parliamentary
elections. Here his flair immediately became apparent, when he chose to
make the local hospital his base. In this way he could meet the
casualties coming in from various political meetings. Impressed, The
Times offered him a position on its House of Commons staff in 1842.
By
1854 Russell had built himself a reputation at The Times as an elegant
writer who was able to paint in vigorous words time and place and
person, so when the Crimean conflict broke out the editor John Delane
selected him as the newspaper's representative. It was his reporting of
this war that made Russell's a household name among the reading public
in England, a popularity he never lost for the remaining fifty years of
his life.
But
this early fame came at a price. Before the Second World War the
conditions under which newspaper reporters attached to armies had to
operate were quite inadequate, to say the least. They had to look after
themselves as best they could, to get as close to the action as possible
by their own efforts, to compose their news bulletins wherever they
could and as rapidly as possible, and then make their own arrangements
for despatching them. Thus in the Crimea Russell endured all sorts of
hardships: he had to supply his own horse and his own tent, and for a
while his own rations.
There
can be little doubt that it was Russell's comments on the plight of the
sick and wounded in the Crimea that convinced Florence Nightingale to
travel out to Turkey and establish efficient and sanitary nursing
facilities first at Üsküdar (now part of Istanbul) and later at
Balaklava in the Crimea. And who knows? Perhaps Russell's graphic
portrayal of the heroic though futile Charge of the Light Brigade in
October 1854 directly inspired Tennyson's celebrated poem.
Certainly,
Russell's eyewitness reports (assisted by Delane's thundering
editorials) helped bring down a prime minister – the Earl of Aberdeen
– in 1855. The Times drew attention to military and administrative
incompetence in the conduct of the war, and other papers took up the
cry. As a result, public confidence in the whole system was undermined,
first in the higher command, then in the dubious methods of military
promotion, and finally in the aristocracy itself. In vain did alarmed
conservatives fulminate against the vulgar power of the press.
Just
as he told the Crimean War as he saw it, in the future Russell never
shrank from criticising what appalled him. British colonialism, in
particular. En route to India to cover the Mutiny, for instance, he
reported how he was forced to hear from “pundits” on board all
manner of repugnant racial prejudice:
As
you listen to this chaos of opinions, you see a row of animated machines
sitting crouched down on the floor of the cabin, swaying listlessly to
and fro, as they pull the punkahs. Their slender, well-knit frames,
bright eyes, and glistening teeth, give those poor “niggers” some
claims to be thought, as Mr Carlyle would say, not quite unlovely, but
they have a dark hide — they are low Mohammedans, and, to the
intelligent Briton, they are as the beasts of the field. “By Jove!
sir,” exclaims the major, who has by this time got to the walnut stage
of argument, to which he has arrived by gradations of sherry, port, ale,
and Madeira — ”By Jove!” he exclaims, thickly and fiercely, with
every vein in his forehead swollen like whipcord, “those niggers are
such a confounded sensual lazy set, cramming themselves with ghee and
sweetmeats, and smoking their cursed chillumjees all day and all night,
that you might as well think to train pigs. Ho, you! punkah chordo, or
I'll knock — Suppose we go up and have a cigar!”
The
fact is, I fear that the favourites of Heaven — the civilisers of the
world — la race blanche of my friend the doctor, are naturally
the most intolerant in the world.
Listen
next to his scathing comments on slavery in America. On those “gentlemen”
.
. . who indulge in ingenious hypotheses to comfort the consciences of
the anthropoproprietors. The Negro skull won't hold as many ounces of
shot as the white man's. Potent proof that the white man has a right to
sell and to own the creature! He is plantigrade, and curved as to the
tibia! Cogent demonstration that he was made expressly to work for the
arch-footed, straight-tibiaed Caucasian. He has a rete mucosum and a
coloured pigment! Surely he cannot have a soul of the same colour as
that of an Italian or a Spaniard, far less of a flaxen-haired Saxon! See
these peculiarities in the frontal sinus — in sinciput or occiput! Can
you doubt that the being with a head of that shape was made only to
till, hoe, and dig for another race? Besides, the Bible says that he is
a son of Ham, and prophecy must be carried out in the rice-swamps,
sugar-canes, and maize-fields of the Southern Confederation. It is flat
blasphemy to set yourself against it. Our Saviour sanctions slavery
because he does not say a word against it, and it is very likely that St
Paul was a slave-owner. Had cotton and sugar been known, the apostle
might have been a planter! Furthermore, the Negro is civilised by being
carried away from Africa and set to work, instead of idling in native
inutility. What hope is there of Christianising the African races,
except by the agency of the apostles from New Orleans, Mobile, or
Charleston, who sing the sweet songs of Zion with such vehemence, and
clamour so fervently for baptism in the waters of the “Jawdam”?
(This
article on William Russell will be concluded in the
next issue of Bikwil.)
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