William Howard Russell
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William Howard Russell (March 28, 1821 - February 11, 1907) was an Irish journalist.
He was born in Lilyvale in the county of Dublin, and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and briefly at Cambridge. Russell was a journalist for The Times in Ireland, serving as their parliamentary reporter after 1843. He was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1851. On the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854 he was sent as a special correspondent. Although his reports reflected the prevailing viewpoints of his times (anti-Ottoman and anti-French), and included descriptions of events he could not have possibly seen for himself, they 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. 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.
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.
In the 1869 General Election Russell ran unsuccessfully as a Conservative candidate for the borough of Chelsea. His description of the burning of Paris by the Communards has been seen as his greatest triumph.
He retired as a battlefield correspondent in 1882 and stood unsuccessfully as a Conservative candidate for Parliament, 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).
