REPORTER WAS HERO OF THE FORGOTTEN LIGHT BRIGADE
INTO the valley of Death rode the 600 … and into the workhouse limped the gallant survivors of The Charge of the Light Brigade, the most famous Cavalry Charge in history.
It was heartbreak on the battlefield and heartbreak when the heroes of Balaclava returned home to poverty. For England eventually turned its back on them.
But one journalist never gave up his fight for our surviving soldiers of the Crimea where 23,000 British troopers were slain in the campaign … 278 of them in the charge. And all because of a misunderstanding of orders.
He was Times reporter William Russell. A boisterous, rotund and outspoken man the establishment and many in the Army hierarchy cursed. Officers in the Crimea were ordered not to speak to him and Queen Victoria wanted to gag him. He preferred nothing more than drinking with the soldiers.
When Times editor John Thaddeus Delane called Russell into his office one autumn morning he was determined to get the real horror story of war and not the cover-up versions newspapers always published because they were dictated by the officers or the War Office.
He wanted colour and truth when there was no glory.
Russell did just that. He told of the freezing conditions soldiers lived in; their battle against disease; hunger; the lack of medical care and bed clothes and poor leadership.
He wrote: “There is no attention paid to decency or cleanliness, the smell is appalling … are there no devoted women among us, able and willing to go forth and minister to the sick and suffering soldiers in the hospitals out here?”
From the day the 11th Hussars and other regiments disembarked in Crimea, Russell told of how they went without adequate shelter, transport or supplies – and were led by officers who became notorious for incompetence.
It was his words that inspired Florence Nightingale to start her work in the Crimea and his words that inspired poet laureate Lord Alfred Tennyson to write his iconic poem about that glorious but most notorious fiasco in British military history on the morning of the charge on October 23,1854. That is why the verses are not all gung-ho but carry the message of the futility of war. Tennyson was moved by him.
“Every man who rode in the Charge will be provided for the rest of his life,” Lord Cardigan, who led the charge, had vowed after the tragic battle that day. Nothing was further from the truth. For as nation celebrated the bravery of the Light Brigade in the months ahead, thousands of returning wounded soldiers could not find work and ended up in the Manchester workhouse.
Russell: Brigade friend
As time moved on, a national fund was raised to spare the last 20 survivors of the Battle of Balaclava, to save them from poverty. But in a nation of 30 million people, only £24 was raised.
Kipling wrote a little-known poem about them: ‘The Last of the Light Brigade’ that was only discovered in 1913. It read:
There were thirty million English that
talked of England’s Might;
There were twenty broken troopers
that lacked a bed for the night;
They had neither food nor money, they
had neither service nor trade,
They were only shiftless soldiers, the
last of the Light Brigade.
Most newspapers in England used Russell’s reports from the Front as he slept and lived with the troopers for the entire 20 months of the Crimea campaign.
On the day itself, some of his report read: “At 1200 yards the whole line of the enemy belched forth, from iron mouths, a flood of smoke and flame through which hissed the deadly cannon balls. Their flight was marked by instant gaps in our ranks, dead men and horses, and by steeds running wounded or riderless across the plain.
“The first line was broken — it was joined by the second, the brigade never halted or checked their speed an instant. With diminished ranks, thinned by those guns, which the Russians had laid with the deadliest accuracy, with a halo of flashing steel of the sabres above their heads, and with a cheer which was many a noble fellow’s death cry, they flew into the smoke of the batteries; but ‘ere they were lost from view, the plain was strewed.”
For the first time the public was reading about the realities of major warfare, having been censored in the days before the electric telegraph system, and even that was information passed on by senior officers reporting their propaganda view of battles.
Shocked and outraged, the nation’s backlash from Russell’s reports led the Government to re-evaluate the treatment of troops and provide better medical care at the front.
A few years earlier Russell had been offered a job on the Daily News, under the editorship of Charles Dickens. Russell said later: “I didn’t think he was a good editor but probably the best reporter in London at the time. As a journalist nothing more.
“He had no political instincts or knowledge and was ignorant of and indifferent to what are called ‘Foreign Affairs’.”
Russell was described by a soldier as: “A vulgar low Irishman who sings a good song, drinks anyone’s brandy and water and smokes as many cigars as a Jolly Good Fellow can.”
Just before Russell was knighted in 1902, King Edward, who respected his work, told him: “‘Don’t kneel Billy, just stoop’.
Russell died in 1907, aged 82, and is buried in Brompton Cemetery. He was to remain a good friend of Dickens all his life. There is a bust of him in the crypt at St Paul’s Cathedral.
GO GET ‘EM GIRL
From the Dundee Courier 1924
I wonder what the outcome was? Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Government lasted only nine months at that time.
THE DIRTY DEALINGS OF A
CROOKED WILLIAM HICKEY
“I HAVE cartloads of stories locked up in my safe that would turn New York upside down!”
These were the words of a man who brought the world of the Fleet Street gossip columns to America, war hero Colonel William d ’Alton Mann, when he returned from living in England and took over a society magazine that became loathed, loved, and feared by the moneyed class in the US.
He was a brave man of many talents, but a sort of crooked William Hickey. He had fought at Gettysburg under Colonel Custer; designed a boudoir railroad sleeping car which he sold to the Pullman Company, become a millionaire magazine owner and editor and turned into an extortionist.
He hated the rich of The Gilded Age — the Astors, Morgans, Vanderbilts, Wall Street bankers, industrialists and others because they flaunted their money. And he discovered they were prepared to pay small fortunes to keep their lovers and ‘dirty deeds’ out of his publication Town Talk. He simply sold his silence to the upper crust. It was quite simply blackmail.
In the late 1800s, he preyed on housemaids; butlers, manservants and even dressmakers recruiting them as spies on their masters and mistresses and they did, to earn extra cash to make ends meet. And there was no shortage of love affairs and skeletons in the cupboard, among the 400 richest and most powerful people of New York for his copy.
There were no boundaries. He made embarrassing insinuations about sexual identity, illegitimate children, adultery, parentage, abortion and even AIDS. (Yes it was around at that time).
On the days before Town Topics went to press, worried members of society would arrange meetings with Mann at his favourite haunts such as Delmonico’s, New York City’s iconic restaurant at which he had his own table.
He would negotiate a settlement over the house speciality eggs benedict and wine. Railroad tycoon William Vanderbilt was rumoured to have coughed up $25,000 (worth around $500,000 today).
Under Mann’s editorship, circulation rose from 60,000 to 140,000 and he was soon a dollar millionaire keeping several homes — a brownstone Manhattan mansion, a country house and a private island retreat on Lake George. If that isn’t flaunting money, what is?
Town Talk was a genteel magazine about art, music, literature and society people but when Mann came back from England and it took over from his brother, he wanted to make it more like the London gossip columns he admired so much with titillating stories about the movers and shakers of society in New York, Boston and Philadelphia. So, he launched a section called ‘Saunterings’.
Once he had the juicy gossip supplied to him by a ‘spy’ he would print a page and send it to the victim a week before publication suggesting they might wish to send him any corrections.
Shocked that news of their affair or wrongdoing was being published, they always made contact, met for lunch, and paid up. Mann made a small fortune. The monies paid to him were ‘loans’ he said. No repayment dates were ever set.
But he didn’t always directly name the lady or gentleman he was referring to in the story. Instead, he would cleverly print the piece revealing the latest society scandal without divulging the identities of those involved.
It would be followed by a shorter general piece about a wedding or party. Those mentioned in these harmless short notices were the subject matter of the juicy article that had preceded it, and it was easy to work out who they were.
Mann’s downfall came when libel suits came tumbling in many years later when publishing laws changed, and his tactics became known to the public.
One of his scandals involved socialite Alice Roosevelt, the eldest child of U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt. Society turned its back on the magazine and circulation tumbled.
He died aged 80, in his Manhattan mansion on May 17, 1920.
TERRY MANNERS
28 July 2025
