William Howard Russell
War correspondent, The Times
Nearly fired after his first
major assignment for inadvertently giving away his scoop to the
opposition, his reporting from the Crimea is still, 150 years on, a beacon
of moral courage. He was the first professional journalist to really cover
a war, and did so with a frankness that shocked Victorian Britain to its
roots – from his account of the brave fiasco that was the Charge of the
Light Brigade (which he watched from a nearby ridge):
“…They advanced in two
lines, quickening the pace as they closed towards the enemy…At the
distance of 1200 yards the whole line of the enemy belched forth, from
thirty iron mouths, a flood of smoke and flame through which hissed the
deadly balls…”
To the army’s inadequate
supplies and medical facilities:
“…The commonest
accessories of a hospital are wanting; there is not the least attention
paid to decency or cleanliness…and, for all I can observe, these men die
without the least effort being made to save them…The sick appear to be
tended by the sick, and the dying by the dying.”
All this, despite almost
constant hostility from military authorities (at one point his tent was
sabotaged), and knowing that his honesty and patriotism were being
vilified back home. Then he had the guts to go to India and report the
racism he found there and atrocities against the ‘natives’, including,
in 1858, one captured mutineer:
“…he was pulled by the
legs to a convenient place, where he was held down, pricked in the face
and body by the bayonets of some of the soldiery whilst others collected
fuel for a small pyre, and when all was ready – the man was roasted
alive! There were Englishmen looking on, more than one officer saw it. No
one offered to interfere…”
Probably no reporter has
challenged popular orthodoxies as effectively as Russell did.