The Crimean War is where most histories of war reporting begin. It was not the first war to be written about in newspapers, but the National Army Museum in London describes it as the first campaign to be reported on by a war correspondent: a journalist sent by a newspaper, writing from the theatre of operations for readers at home. The same war was also photographed in a planned and systematic way. Words and pictures from the Crimea reached Britain side by side, and they told noticeably different stories.
The war in brief
According to the National Army Museum, the Crimean War was fought from 1854 to 1856 by an alliance of Britain, France, Turkey and Sardinia against Russia. It began with Russia's invasion of the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, in what is now Romania. Britain and France wanted to support the Ottoman Empire and to resist Russian expansion in the Near East. For the British Army it was the only major European conflict between 1816 and 1914.
Fighting took place in several regions, including Armenia and the Baltic Sea, but the museum notes that events in the Crimea had the biggest impact on Britain. The allied armies landed on the north-west coast of the peninsula in September 1854 and marched on the Russian naval base at Sevastopol. The battles that followed, at the Alma, at Balaklava (where the Charge of the Light Brigade took place) and at Inkerman, became some of the best-known episodes in British military history.
The museum's account then turns to the winter of 1854 to 1855, which it calls a nightmare for the British. A great storm in November destroyed tents and wrecked ships carrying supplies. Transport animals died of cold and hunger, the track between the port of Balaklava and the siege lines turned to mud, and troops in the trenches ran short of food, clothing, shelter, medical supplies and fuel. Disease spread through the camps.
A correspondent for The Times
The museum observes that problems of this kind were not new: almost every British overseas expedition had suffered similar failures of supply. What was new was that someone was reporting them as they happened. William Howard Russell, writing for The Times, sent home what the museum calls shocking accounts of the Army's shortcomings.
The museum describes Russell simply as "of The Times". That is the model the phrase "war correspondent" still calls to mind: an observer whose first loyalty is, in principle, to the reader rather than to the army being observed. Later guides show how often that principle was tested by censorship, accreditation and the practical need to travel with the troops.
The term today
In international humanitarian law, "war correspondent" now has a narrower, technical meaning: a journalist formally authorised to accompany armed forces. That meaning, and the protection it carries, is explained on the law page. In histories of the Crimea the phrase is used in its ordinary sense.
Reports with consequences
The National Army Museum links Russell's reporting directly to political change. In its account, the outcry that followed his dispatches led to the fall of Lord Aberdeen's government. The new government under Lord Palmerston appointed commissions of inquiry into the disaster.
The inquiries, the museum says, recognised that the lack of a metalled road between Balaklava and Sevastopol had contributed to the breakdown of supply, but they also criticised the government for failing to provide adequate equipment and materials, and blamed senior Army officers for delays in distributing stores. In response, military administration was reorganised, plans were made for a Land Transport Corps, and a railway was started at Balaklava. A separate sanitary commission was sent out, and the museum credits its work, alongside that of Florence Nightingale's nurses, with halving the death rate in the hospital at Scutari within weeks.
The museum also says that the revelations from the Crimea prompted the nursing work of Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole. For the history of reporting, the important point is the chain the museum describes: published accounts from the front reached the public, public reaction reached the government, and policy changed while the war was still being fought.
Roger Fenton's photographs
The Library of Congress holds one of the best-known sets of photographs from the war. In an article on its Prints and Photographs blog, the Library describes Roger Fenton's Crimean War photographs as one of the earliest systematic attempts to document a war through photography.
Fenton travelled to the Crimean peninsula in early March 1855. In less than four months, from 8 March to 26 June 1855, he produced 360 photographs; the Library holds 263 of them as salted paper and albumen prints. The pictures show leading figures of the allied armies, the camp life of British soldiers, and scenes in and around Balaklava and on the plateau in front of Sevastopol.
The work was physically hard. The Library notes that Fenton used glass photographic plates, and that flies, dust and extreme heat made it difficult to keep them clean, while his chemicals behaved differently in high temperatures and dried much faster in the Crimean climate. The quality of the light limited the times of day he could work, and part of his time went on soldiers who wanted their portraits taken.
Glass-plate photography of this period was a slow, wet process. The US National Park Service, describing the technique in use a few years later, explains that a plate was coated with a sticky liquid called collodion, made light-sensitive in a bath of silver nitrate minutes before the exposure, and developed before the coating dried. Every picture needed a darkroom close at hand.
What the pictures leave out
The Library of Congress is direct about the gap in Fenton's record: he took no images of combat or of its human consequences. His photographs show little of the disease, the shortage of food and the other dire conditions that, as the Library notes, the newspapers had been reporting for months.
The Library sets out several explanations and presents them together rather than choosing one:
- Convention. Victorian standards of propriety ruled out showing dead bodies.
- Technology. Long exposure times made it impossible to capture action, and the whole process was intricate at best.
- Intent. Fenton worked with the support of the British government and with financial backing from a publisher, Thomas Agnew and Sons, which hoped to temper negative press accounts by selling sets of the photographs.
Those three explanations, convention, technology and intent, recur throughout the history of war imagery. They are a useful frame for any war photograph, and the war photography guide follows them forward from the 1850s.
Reading the record today
The Crimean record is unusual because it holds two kinds of evidence made at the same time by people with different backers and different aims. One is a stream of newspaper reports written for a public that wanted to know how the army was faring. The other is a set of photographs made with official support and commercial backing, under technical limits that ruled out the very scenes the newspapers described.
Worked example: questions to ask of a single source
This is an illustration of method, not an account of any real document. Suppose a reader finds a photograph of an orderly army camp dated 1855. Before treating it as evidence of conditions, it helps to ask who paid for the picture and why; what the equipment of the time could and could not record; what the conventions of the day allowed to be shown; and what written sources from the same weeks say about the same place. A calm picture and an alarming report can both be accurate about what they show while disagreeing about the whole.
Neither kind of source is simply right or wrong. Read together, the National Army Museum's account and the Library of Congress's account show a pattern that the later guides return to: the people who report a war and the people who fund or permit the reporting often have different interests, and what reaches the public depends on both.