- Hardcover: 256 pages
- Publisher: Biteback; First Edition edition (20 Oct 2009)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1849540128
- ISBN-13: 978-1849540124
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
835,100 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #44 in Books > History > Britain & Ireland > Crimean War
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Product Description
Product Description
In his role as editor of The Times during the Crimean War of 1853-1856, John Delane revealed to the British people all the horror and incompetence of that conflict, setting in chain events that would in time lead to the fall of the government of his day. Delane sent his trusted correspondent William Howard Russell to cover the Crimean War. In a decision it would surely come to regret, the War Office allowed Russell to accompany a regiment, in so doing laid itself open to unprecedented operational exposure. For the first time a war correspondent dared to criticise the Army s arrangements. Delane trusted Russell completely and printed his despatches verbatim. Furthermore, Russell s reports prompted a horrified Delane to visit the Crimea for himself, finding the commanders completely lacking in unity and decision and the ranks decimated by cholera. On his return Delane published a series of articles highlighting the hardships of the soldiers and the incompetence of their commanders. The articles prompted the first English newspaper appeal for funds for a good cause and inspired Florence Nightingale s endeavours in the Crimea. What Delane published inevitably set him on a collision course with senior officers in the British Army, but his dogged refusal to moderate or desist would eventually lead to events of even greater importance the recall of the Queen from Balmoral, questions in Parliament and a vote of no confidence in the government conducting the war. A fascinating history, vividly recounted, Delane s War has striking parallels with contemporary events, from the embedding of journalists with army units in Afghanistan to the decision to hold a public inquiry into the Britain s role in the war in Iraq.
From the Author
Tim Coates, on why he wrote Delane's War:
I imagine most writers sit, like I do, at the laptop wondering what comes next- until it comes in a bus load. Delane's War took a long time to write. It started when I came across some official Government reports about Florence Nightingale which complained, with evidence to support the objections, that she was procuring huge quantities of port wine for the use of her patients in the hospital at Scutari during the Crimean War.They were drunk to avoid the pain of death. Those comments come from a Select Committee report of 1855 which is in five volumes, in the last few paragraphs of which she is named as one of the handful people who had acted, in the view of the Committee members, honourably in the appalling events into which they had been asked to inquire.
I followed the trail back, not just for her but for the other people on that short list, of whom I had never heard. There was the Reverend and Honourable Sidney Godolphin Osborne, who turned out to be the vicar of a tiny parish church in Dorset, but who wrote letters to The Times and frequently had them printed. Augustus Stafford the independent MP for Northampton who had travelled to the Crimea to observe for himself the appalling events in the war zone, and John MacDonald the printing engineer of The Times newspaper who had been sent out to administrate The Times Fund - which had been set up by the editor to help bring comfort to the soldiers injured and made sick in the war. The assembly of the stories of all the people gave many possibilities for the tale that needed to be written; the Rev Osborne, when asked about supplies that failed to reach the Crimea, told the committee that he believed that the whole subject should be handed to the police to investigate.
Florence Nightingale, from what I was reading, was most certainly not the angelic lady of the lamp we have all been told about in school and the writings and speeches of Augustus Stafford could hold their own anywhere. But the siftings and tellings of the story in the end all pointed to the person who was driving the moral backlash against the government and the army and he, too, was someone lost in the obscurity of Victorian history: John Delane the editor of The Times, who never put his own name to any article. I then read the daily editions of the great newspaper in the original copies that are held, neatly and magnificently bound in the basement of the London Library, from July 1854 to March 1855. And from these the real story became clear: it was the editor who had fought his own war against the Government of the day, in a way that showed courage almost beyond our experience and conception. I was writing this at the same time that the Blair Government and Alastair Campbell were locked in battle with the BBC and Andrew Gilligan over the reporting of the Iraq war, and the story each day was almost identical -- except that in the version of 1855, the journalists held out to win, which sadly was not the case one hundred and fifty years later.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I enjoy Tim Coates' approach to history. This book is even better than his earlier "Patsy". He tells a good story primarily by using and quoting contemporary sources. In this case the story is drawn mainly from The Times at the time of the disastrous Crimean War (1854). The war correspondent reports - the first ever to report honestly at the time on a military campaign as it went wrong - are given added insight and poignancy by other extracts from The Times. Soldiers' letters, family letters and also personal ads put you there and then in the Victorian age in a way that post-event history cannot do. But Tim Coates' commentary is also pointed and wise, drawing the parallels lightly to our own recent history.
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