William Howard Russell

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William Howard Russell, ca. 1854

Caricature from Punch, 1881: "Our Own Correspondent — The Man for the Times"

William Howard Russell (March 28, 1821 Lilyvale, County Dublin - February 11, 1907) was an Irish reporter with The Times, and is considered to have been one of the first modern war correspondents, after he spent 22 months covering the Crimean War.

Raised by a Protestant father and Catholic mother in Ireland, Russell's family moved to Liverpool, England while he was still a child. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and briefly at Cambridge. As a young reporter, Russell reported on a brief military conflict between Prussian and Danish troops in Denmark in 1850.

Initially sent by editor John Delane to Malta to cover English support for Russia in 1854, Russell despised the term "war correspondent" - though his coverage of the conflict brought him international renown, and Florence Nightingale later credited her entry into wartime nursing to his reports. He was described by one of the soldiers on the frontlines thus, "a vulgar low Irishman, [who] sings a good song, drinks anyone's brandy and water and smokes as many cigas as a Jolly Good Fellow. He is just the sort of chap to get information, particularly out of youngsters".^[1] This reputation however, led to Russell being blacklisted from some circles, including British commander Lord Raglan who advised his officers to refuse to speak with the reporter.

His dispatches were hugely significant: for the first time the public could read about the reality of warfare. Shocked and outraged, the public's backlash from his reports led the Government to re-evaluate the treatment of troops and led to Florence Nightingale's involvement in revolutionising battlefield treatment.

On September 20, 1854, Russell covered the battle above the Alma River - writing his missive the following day in an account book seized from a Russian corpse. The story, written in the form of a letter to Delane, was supportive of the British troops though paid particular attention to the battlefield surgeons' "humane barbarity", and the lack of ambulance care for wounded troops. He later covered the Siege of Sebastopol where he coined the contemporary phrase "thin red line" in referring to British troops, writing that "[The Russians] dash on towards that thin red streak topped with a line of steel..."

He spent the month of December 1854 in Constantinople, on holiday, returning in early 1855. He was close to Field Marshal Raglan, who he would avoid criticising, but was disliked by Codrington, who became commander in 1855. Russell left Crimea in December 1855, to be replaced by the Constantinople correspondent of The Times.

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In 1856 Russell was sent to Moscow to describe the coronation of Tsar Alexander II, and in the following year was sent to India where he witnessed the siege of Lucknow (1858). In 1861 Russell went to Washington. He later published diaries of his time in India, the American Civil War, and the Franco-Prussian War, where he describes the warm welcome given him by English-speaking Prussian generals such as Leonhard Graf von Blumenthal. Russell returned to England in 1863. In July of 1865 Russell sailed on the Great Eastern to document the laying of the Atlantic Cable, and wrote a book about the voyage with color illustrations by Robert Dudley.

He was awarded the title of Commander of the Royal Victorian Order by King Edward VII, who reportedly told Russell "Don't kneel Billy, just stoop"^[1] during the ceremony. Russell later accused fellow war correspondent Nicholas Woods of the Morning Herald of lying in his articles about the war, trying to improve his stories.

In the 1869 General Election Russell ran unsuccessfully as a Conservative candidate for the borough of Chelsea.

He retired as a battlefield correspondent in 1882 and founded the Army and Navy Gazette.

Russell was knighted in May 1895; he married twice. Russell's dispatches via telegraph from the Crimea remain his most enduring legacy as, for the first time, he brought the realities of war, both good and bad, home to readers. Thus he helped to diminish the distance between the home front and remote battle fields.

Russell's war reporting (often in semi-verbatim form) features prominently in Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson's reconstruction of the Crimean war in Breaking News (2003).