Edmund O'Donovan

Edmund O'Donovan (13 September 1844 – 1883), Irish war correspondent, was born in Dublin. In 1866 he began to contribute to The Irish Times and other Dublin papers. He was the first journalist killed in the Kurdufan area during the Sudan campaigns while reporting for The Daily News.^[1]

Early life

Edmund O'Donovan was the son of John O'Donovan (1809–1861), a well-known Irish archaeologist and topographer. He was educated in medicine at Trinity College in Dublin.^[1]

As teenagers, O'Donovan and most of his brothers joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret society banded together to achieve Irish freedom. He was arrested three times and detained for some months. He was subsequently an active IRB organiser in the north of England, while turning to journalism as a career. His sense of enjoyment and pranks was pronounced. He delighted in adventures and was a skilled linguist, as well as a weapons expert. O'Donovan remained on excellent terms with Irish revolutionaries to the last.

Newspaper career

He began his newspaper career with The Irish Times in 1866. After the Battle of Sedan, fought on 1 September 1870 during the Franco–Prussian War, O'Donovan joined the Foreign Legion of the French army, and was wounded and taken prisoner by the Germans. In 1873, the Carlist rising^[2] attracted him to Spain, and he wrote many newspaper letters on the campaign. In 1876 he represented the London Daily News during the rising of Bosnia and Herzegovina against the Turks, and in 1879, for the same paper, made his adventurous and famous journey to Merv. On his arrival at Merv, the Turcomans, suspecting him to be a Russian spy, detained him. It was only after several months' captivity that O'Donovan managed to get a message to his principals through to Persia, whence it was telegraphed to England. These adventures he described in The Merv Oasis (1882). In 1883 O'Donovan accompanied the ill-fated expedition of Hicks Pasha to the Egyptian Sudan, and perished along with the other Europeans in the force.^[1][3][4] See Battle of El Obeid.

Memorial

O'Donovan is listed as one of seven journalists on a war memorial in St Paul's Cathedral in London for journalists who were killed during the Mahdist War between 1883-1885.^[5]

See also

• List of journalists killed during the Sudan Campaign

References

•  Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "O'Donovan, Edmund". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.