The war in the Crimea provided British history with two of its most potent iconographic images, the Charge of the Light Brigade and the Lady with the Lamp. Various factors contributed - it was the first war in which the telegraph was to figure, and the first to be systematically photographed - but their immortality was chiefly ensured by William Howard Russell's reporting for The Times.

Russell, then a young reporter, had been sent to the Crimea as special correspondent in February 1854, by The Times's editor, John Thadeus Delane. Delane believed that he would be back by Easter, but events were to keep him there for 18 months.

By 1855, under the incentive of military requirements, a telegraph was established between Balaclava and Varna. Russell was aware of the advantages the telegraph offered but, because of military monopoly, was very rarely able to use it. Consequently the average time it took to get his messages from the front to The Times in London was three weeks.

Russell also witnessed the first use of the camera in war. His diary of March 19, 1855, records the arrival of Roger Fenton who had been commissioned to compile a photographic record of the conflict by Thomas Agnew & Sons of Manchester. Fenton brought with him two assistants, five cameras, 700 glass plates and a mobile darkroom, and spent nearly four months in the Crimea. However, the photographic technology of the time would not allow him to take action pictures and he had to content himself with images of landscapes, camp scenes, fortifications, and portraits of leading personalities. In May 1855 Russell had his own photograph taken by Fenton.

The Charge of the Light Brigade

The battle took place on the morning of October 25, 1854, at Balaclava. The first news to reach the British public came in The Times on November 4, in the form of a Foreign Office telegram from Constantinople (it had been passed to the paper by the Duke of Newcastle, then Secretary for War). The event would have remained just one military disaster among many, were it not for the vivid descriptive power of Russell's letter, dispatched on October 26. It took almost 20 days to reach London and was published in on November 14. Read an extract

It was this description of the battle that inspired Alfred Lord Tennyson to compose his Charge of the Light Brigade, published in a collection called Maud and other poems in 1855.

Florence Nightingale at Scutari

Russell's reports of the plight of the soldiers and his criticism of the medical facilities undoubtedly contributed to Florence Nightingale's determination to help. However, it was a report of the conditions at the military hospital at Scutari by Russell's colleague, Thomas Chenery, that proved the catalyst. Chenery wrote from Constantinople on September 30, 1854, the report appearing in the paper on October 12:

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On the same day, paper ran a leader:

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In direct response, Sir Robert Peel, son of the former Prime Minister, sent the editor of The Times a cheque for £200 to start a fund for supplying comforts to the sick and wounded - what was to become The Times Crimea Fund. Money poured in from all over Britain. On the October 13, Chenery again commented upon the excellent nursing work being done for the French by the Sisters of Charity and on the 14th a correspondent to the paper was asking "Why have we no Sisters of Charity?".

It would be wrong to claim that the decision of Florence Nightingale to assemble her team of nurses was a direct result of Chenery's exposures (approaches had already been made by Lady Maria Forester to Nightingale offering to pay for a nursing expedition), but there is little doubt that Chenery's and Russell's reports contributed to it. By October 21 she had assembled her first staff of 38 nurses, of whom 18 were nuns.

In the meantime, The Times Crimea Fund had amassed almost £7,000 and John C. MacDonald, engineer and later manager of The Times, was chosen to act as its almoner. Another Times colleague, Henry Reeve, was a friend of the Nightingale family and interceded with the editor, Delane, on behalf of the nurses. MacDonald was instructed to cooperate with Florence Nightingale and they sailed on the same ship from Marseilles.

On her arrival at Scutari, Nightingale embarked on radical changes to the medical arrangements. The public funds were hedged with bureaucratic procedures, and she had to meet costs partly from her own funds and partly through donations made by MacDonald from The Times fund. She and MacDonald evolved a close working relationship, and the fund became a powerful weapon against official incompetence. As a result the newspaper was subjected to a campaign of vilification from elements in the establishment, who either denied that things were as bad as reported or imputed base motives for the paper's involvement.

MacDonald filed a detailed report on the Sick and Wounded Fund and the condition of the hospitals at Scutari, which was published on February 3. This pre-empted the plan to wind up the fund. Instead a renewed appeal was made which brought in £8,000 in just four days.

MacDonald was subsequently replaced by W. H. Stowe as almoner of the fund. Stowe, a literary critic on the newspaper, arrived in the Crimea in the spring of 1855. In May, Russell left the Balaclava camp to accompany the expedition to Kertch and Stowe came from Scutari to take his place. Shortly after his arrival he contracted cholera. As a civilian he was refused admission to the military hospital, and died on June 22 age 30 years. The Times of July 6 published a eulogy of his work in the Crimea as well as an indignant protest at his treatment. The event has led to a determination in which we hope to have the concurrence of our supporters. We shall not send out another friend, another valuable life, to a service in which, among other dangers, British inhumanity is to be encountered. Whoever goes out to administer our Fund must expect that, in the event of his sickening in the crown - and almost everybody there does sicken at one time or another, till he is acclimated - he will be excluded from the hospitals where he is sent to minister, and deprived of the medical aid which he has, perhaps, assisted with the most needful supplies.

Another Times journalist, Frederick Hardman finished the work undertaken by MacDonald and Stowe. By this time the hospitals were well equipped, and little remained beyond supplying reading matter for the convalescents and supervising the "Inkerman Café" which The Times had established, with the collaboration of Florence Nightingale, between the two main hospitals at Scutari. The fall of Sebastopol in September represented the beginning of the end for the Russian forces.

Through its uncompromising reporting of the events in the Crimea The Times gained the respect of the public and achieved a standing never before reached by a newspaper. This did not come without cost. A significant section of the establishment accused the newspaper of providing information and encouragement to the enemy by publishing reports of the strength, situation and condition of the Army. Closer to home, the paper also lost one of its best journalists in William Stowe.

However, if Russell had not set out to shock the conscience of the nation there would have been no Times Fund, no mission of Florence Nightingale, no reform of the military commissariat, no shake-up of the political establishment, and no reinforcements on the scale eventually sent. The resultant condition of the Army would have left it in no state to pursue the war to its successful conclusion.