Sir William Howard Russell

War correspondent and writer, born near Tallaght, Co Dublin, E Ireland. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin, joined The Times (1843), and was called to the bar in 1850, but never practised. From the Crimea (1854–5) he wrote the famous despatches (collected 1856) which opened the eyes of the British to the sufferings of the soldiers. Among his other assignments were the Indian Mutiny (1858), the American Civil War (1861), and the Austro-Prussian War (1866). He established the Army and Navy Gazette (1860), and wrote several books, including a novel, The Adventures of Dr Brady (1868), Hesperothen (1882), and A Visit to Chile (1890).

William Howard Russell (March 28, 1821 - February 11, 1907) was an Irish journalist.

He was born in Lilyvale in the county of Dublin, and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and briefly at Cambridge. Russell was a journalist for The Times in Ireland, serving as their parliamentary reporter after 1843. Russell left Crimea in December 1855, to be replaced by the Constantinople correspondent of The Times.

In 1856 Russell was sent to Moscow to describe the coronation of Tsar Alexander II, and in the following year was sent to India where he witnessed the siege of Lucknow (1858). He later published diaries of his time in India, the American Civil War, and the Franco-Prussian War, where he describes the warm welcome given him by English-speaking Prussian generals such as Leonhard Graf von Blumenthal. Russell returned to England in 1863. In July of 1865 Russell sailed on the Great Eastern to document the laying of the Atlantic Cable, and wrote a book about the voyage with color illustrations by Robert Dudley.

In the 1869 General Election Russell ran unsuccessfully as a Conservative candidate for the borough of Chelsea.

He retired as a battlefield correspondent in 1882 and stood unsuccessfully as a Conservative candidate for Parliament, and founded the Army and Navy Gazette.

Russell was knighted in May 1895; Russell's dispatches via telegraph from the Crimea remain his most enduring legacy as, for the first time, he brought the realities of war, both good and bad, home to readers.

Russell's war reporting (often in semi-verbatim form) features prominently in Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson's reconstruction of the Crimean war in Breaking News (2003).