NOT LONG after his stepfather Peter Dobbs reached that stage in his life when he had to enter a nursing home, stepson Simon Parsons was going through his belongings – rummaging, as he says himself, writes PETER MURTAGH
Peter Dobbs maintained a family home in Blackrock, Co Dublin. His connection to the area went back to his own father, the Rev Canon Harry Dobbs, who had been rector at All Saints Church of Ireland church in Blackrock. Canon Dobbs’ wife, Kathleen, was perhaps almost as well known in the community as her husband, for she was, it seems, a formidable character.
Simon Parsons recalls her as an "elderly, imperious, upper-class woman who looked down her nose at people who didn't have the right name" – a sort of Lady Bracknell. Whatever about having the right name, Kathleen Dobbs's own maiden name was one to conjure with. She was a Knox, a niece of Lawrence Knox, founder, in 1859, of The Irish Times.
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When Kathleen died in the early 1970s at the age of 101, her possessions, including pieces of fine Victorian jewellery, were gradually dispersed among relatives or sold. And so when her son Peter entered a nursing home and Simon helped by looking after his affairs, there wasn’t a great deal left of Kathleen’s belongings when Peter’s home was being prepared for sale.
“I was looking in a box for some books on sailing, which I knew Peter had, but I didn’t find them,” Simon said in an interview last week. “There were some papers and letters. I was rummaging and just came across this small notebook. I didn’t think anything of it until I saw it was handwritten.”
What Simon had found was an extraordinary piece of history for this newspaper: a small, dark leather-covered notebook – the hitherto unknown diary of Lawrence Knox, written in his own hand and detailing his experiences as an officer in the British army during the Crimean War.
When Simon told Peter that he had found Knox’s diary, “his face lit up”.
“He was delighted I had found it and it wasn’t thrown out. When I discussed the diary with him, it was obviously something he took pride in.”
When Peter Dobbs died in January 2008, the diary became the possession of Simon. He keeps it in a safe at his home in Tecumseh, southeast Michigan, where he lives. But recently, he brought it to The Irish Timesoffices in Dublin, to show it to us in our 150th anniversary year.
This is the story it tells.
THE CRIMEAN WAR BROKEout in October 1853 and was fought between Russia, on one side, and Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire and Sardinia on the other. The conflict was a classic 19th-century imperial contest: the Ottoman Empire was declining and Russia was seeking to fill an emerging vacuum by asserting greater control and influence in the Black Sea and the Dardanelles. Britain and France, however, were determined to ensure that the Black Sea, plus the entrance to the Danube and the eastern Mediterranean generally, remained accessible to them.
The Crimean peninsula of modern day Ukraine became the theatre of conflict, with the allied forces (Britain and France) seeking to bolster the Turks as a bulwark against Russian expansion. Sabastopol, capital of the Crimea and home port of the Russian southern fleet, was put under siege for a year, starting in September 1854.
Lawrence Knox, or LE Knox, as he signed the front piece of his diary, aged 19 and Sussex-born to Irish parents, was a lieutenant in the 63rd Regiment of the British army.
His 134-page diary – 131 pages of text, three of drawings – begins without explanation or introduction on May 1st 1855. His writing is fluid but, for a future newspaper editor, it displays a strange aversion to punctuation. His first sentence, in small but neat and legible script, is a simple statement of where and why: “I am now in camp at Malta in charge of a draft of 50 men who are to go to the Crimea in a few days.”
Over the following initial pages, themes emerge that recur throughout the diary – Knox’s interest in sightseeing, local customs and horticulture. He displays a tendency to record what he sees rather than describe it. At times he seems more like a tourist than a soldier about to go into battle.
He visits a “very nice country house and gardens . . . [where] a good deal of fruit grows”; the cathedral in the Maltese capital Valletta (“The Cathedral of St John’s is very beautiful indeed and the interior is most magnificently fitted up.”); and he notes local fashion (“The Maltese ladies wear large black silk hoods over their heads instead of bonnets and generally dress in black but many of them I believe are giving up this ugly dress.”).
Four days later, on May 4th, the diary records the start of Knox's voyage to the Crimea on board the Emperor, a paddle steamer of some 900 tons ("nicely fitted up . . . with several well executed paintings") which used to ply between London and St Petersburg. But now it is carrying men and munitions to war.
Knox has with him a servant (as do many officers appearing later in the diary) who is never named, despite several mentions. And it emerges in later pages that Knox also has a dog in tow, a terrier named Jack.
As the Emperorsteams towards Constantinople (modern Istanbul), a man is put in irons for smoking. On arrival in Balaklava, he is flogged – the first of several such incidents detailed in the diary.
Having sampled the sights of Constantinople (the streets are “very dirty”), the bazaar (“worth seeing as something of every kind is to be found there”) and the mosque of St Sophia (“magnificent”), Knox delights in the scenic coast of the Crimea – “. . . most picturesque villas surrounded by gardens and enclosed by green trees . . . a very pretty sight”.
The Emperorspends several days anchored in a bay named Camise Bay by the French, the main military detachment based there. Knox notes that the town of Camise has "some very fine eating houses called restaurants and one kept apart for officers".
By May 20th, he is in Balaklava and on the 31st, he goes with Jack the terrier to view the site of a battle of monumental but heroic failure, made famous by the reporting of another notable Irishman, William Howard Russell. Russell’s eyewitness account as a special correspondent for The Times (of London) of what he saw on October 25th 1854 inflamed passions and pride in England and inspired Tennyson’s The Charge of The Light Brigade.
Knox’s diary entry for May 31st 1855 goes thus: “I went up this morning on a pony borrowed from the 42nd highlanders and I went up to Cathcart’s hill and then rode down by the Woronzoff road to the place where the celebrated light cavalry charge took place and there are still numerous skeletons of horses laying about and one skeleton of a man in the 11th hussars who still had on his red cherry-coloured trousers and was laying on his back in a sort of recess in the hill. So I suppose he had laid down there and died. How cavalry could attempt to take such a place is wonderful.”
Later, anchored off the Kertch peninsula, the horrors of war become more real for Knox. Patrolling on shore and in command of a party of 50 men, he enters an abandoned farmhouse and finds “a young woman was laying on a sofa with her throat cut and it was supposed to have been done by the Turks [allies of the British and French]. We left the house at once . . .”
Disease breaks out on the ship. “We have cholera on board; Mitchell Bowles’s servant died of it today,” records the diary entry for June 3rd, “. . . the poor man was in dreadful agony and quite doubled up by the pain; we threw him overboard in the afternoon having read the Service over him.”
Within days, “the town of Kertch is in flames this evening and the whole sky is red from it”.
From mid-June until early September, Knox was encamped with British forces south east of the Russian naval base of Sabastopol which was under siege. His diary during this period is an eclectic mix of the mundane, the odd and the vicissitudes of war.
At one turn, he and his colleagues are duped by a Russian “sentry”, at whom they expend many rounds until realising that the sentry is nothing more than a figure painted on a gate. There are courts martial and floggings; a soldier apparently asleep in a trench (“we found it was a corporal of the 20th who was dead, being, I suppose, wounded and trying to get home. . . ”); and there were flies everywhere, especially in the intense summer heat.
All about the hills and valleys outside the walls of Sabastopol, the war rages: Cossacks and Cavalry joust; British and French riflemen embedded in trenches try to pick off Russians on the walls protecting the city; Russian batteries in two redoubts, the Redan and the Malakoff, shower attackers with cannonballs. Casualties on all sides are appalling.
On August 17th the diary records what Knox and three colleagues saw when they rode to the Field of the Tchernaya following a major battle between the French and Russians.
“The ground was covered with dead Russians who in several places appeared to have been mown down in lines by the Artillery. In one place, the stream of the Tchernaya was almost blocked up with dead bodies of the Russians who, while ascending the steep banks, were shot and fell one on top of another into the stream.”
But the diary has glimpses also of civilisation continuing alongside barbarity. At a camp about six miles from Balaklava, Knox came across an enemy family, “a Russian Colonel and his two daughters living here as prisoners”, as his diary notes on July 1st. “He was I believe a very gentlemanlike man and spoke French well.”
On Sundays, officers were wont to take a break from the fighting and “dine at Camise Bay”. As Knox notes on July 19th: “It makes a very pleasant change after the monotony of camp.”
On July 26th, Knox records what might be described as The Curious Incident of the Sheep. “When I came into camp this afternoon,” he writes, “I found two sheep in a hole I had made in case of being able to get wood to make a hut and [unclear] told me he had found them straying and was going to kill them and divide them among the officers so when it got dark he got Masons’s servant who had been a butcher and killed them and cut them up and he kept a part for our tent and it was very good but I should not have liked to have done it although none of us minded eating them. Major Higginbotham was very glad to get a leg.”
With the following day’s entry, the origin of the meat becomes clear. “Dull day. We have found that the sheep belonged to Col Garrett of the 46th who is having a great search made for his sheep and they are a great loss to him as I believe he is very fond of a good dinner and they were very good.”
Knox’s war ended through a combination of injury (perhaps) and illness. On August 18th, he records being sent to a cave under Greenhill battery. “A piece of shell came in and hit just above Butler and myself and fell between us in the cave.”
The diary is silent until September 4th when, without explanation, Knox notes a board of surgeons has dispatched him for a month to the hospital at Scutari in Constantinople. Subsequent diary entries while at Scutari make clear he had fever and, on September 21st, he was ordered back to England “by the first ship”. By then, the Russians had fled Sabastopol and the war was all but over.
"I was obliged to leave my servant behind," Knox writes on September 24th on board the HMS Transitheading for Malta, Gibraltar, Plymouth and, finally, Portsmouth, "but I got him a place under the Provo[st] Marshall for which he gets 6d a day extra pay and little to do and a roof over him for the winter and it is considered a very good thing. He seems quite satisfied."
Knox was back in London on October 19th. The final diary entry notes he is off to see his father. Within four years, the soldier Knox had become the journalist Knox – founder and first editor of The Irish Times.
That Lawrence Knox’s diary did not vanish during the more than a century and a half since the Crimean War is a wonder. Had it not been for his niece Kathleen, her son Peter Dobbs, and, crucially, Simon Parsons, it might never have seen the light of day. That it does so, thanks to Simon, at the close of the 150th anniversary year of the newspaper he founded is itself another wonder.
Peter Murtagh is writing a chapter on the life of William Howard Russell for More a Disease than a Profession – Irish Journalism History, to be published later this year by Manchester University Press, edited by Kevin Rafter of the school of creative arts at IADT
