THE FIRST WAR CORRESPONDENT

New Zealand Times, Volume LXXI, Issue 4301, 9 March 1901, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE FIRST WAR CORRESPONDENT

Who was the first war correspondent ? The title is generally applied to Sir William Howard Russell, of tho “Times. It should bo remembered, however, that George Borrow, when ho was in Spam acting as agent for tho 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” was written from. Malta on March 6, 1854, when He was on his way to the Crimea. A correspondent of Hie “Daily Chronicle” points out that Henry Crabh 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 tho editor of the ‘Hamburger Correspondentin,’” be 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 tho restraints of the German Press did not permit him to avail himself.” Next year ho ’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, ho says, “my business was to collect news and forward it by every vessel that left the! port.” Before those nates, according to] a contemporary statement, enterprising: editors had to bribe clerks in “the fore- I ign department of the Post Office” to; supply them in advance with “the prin-j cipal contents of the Continental news-j papers, 'translated into the English lan-i guage, for a weekly or annual sum.” Ifwe went further back Caesar might- he j regarded as tho premier.