THE FIRST WAR CORRESPONDENT

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1514, 7 March 1901, Page 59

THE FIRST WAR CORRESPONDENT

Who was the first war correspondent ? The title is generally applied to Sir William Howard Russell, iof the “Times. 5 ’ It should be remembered, however, that George Borrow, when he was in Spain acting as agent for the Bible Society, described in the “Morning Herald” the invasion of Spain by Don Carlos in 1839. Sir William Russell’s first letter to the “Times’ 5 was written from Malta on March 6, 1854, when he was on his way to the Crimea. A correspondent of the “Daily Chronicle’ 5 points out that Henry Crabb Robinson was long before both.

In January 1807 the “Times” sent him to Altona to report on the Napoleonic war which was then lively in that neighbourhood. “I was to receive from the editor of the 'Hamburger Correspondentin/” he records in his “Diary,” “all the public documents at his disposal, and was to have the benefit also of a mass of information of which the restraints of the German Press did not permit him to avail himself.” Next; year he did like .or more active work as a “war correspondent” in Spain. Between August, 1805, and the following January he published letters from “the shores of the Bay of Biscay.” With Corunna for his headquarters, he says, “my business was to collect news and forward it by every vessel that left the port.” Before those uates, according to a contemporary statement t enterprising editors had to bribe clerks in “the foreign department of the Post Office” to supply them in advance with “the principal contents of the Continental newspapers, translated into the English language, for a weekly or annual sum.” If we went further back Caesar might be regarded as the premier.