71. The Three Correspondents (1896)

Illustration by G. Montbard for The Windsor Magazine

This episode, we travel to Sudan in the 1890s where a naïve reporter learns a thing or two from his more experienced rivals in ‘The Three Correspondents’, first published in 1896.

You can read the story here.

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Synopsis

During the opening stages of General Sir Herbert Kitchener’s reconquest of the Sudan in the 1890s, a trio of British correspondents has become detached from the main body of Kitchener’s force. The group prepare to bed down for the night in a palm grove when they encounter a lone British railway engineer in a heightened state of agitation. Naturally, they scent a story in the air. Shortly afterwards, they encounter the engineer again. Shots ring out, accompanied by a small party of Mahdist warriors. The correspondents are armed but nevertheless this is real danger. It is also copy, and what is danger when each man here owes a level of duty to his editor and, of course, his readers…

Writing and Publication History

Map of Egypt and
the Sudan, 1894

‘The Three Correspondents’ was drawn directly from ACD’s brief experience of being a war correspondent in 1896.

Towards the end of 1895, Conan Doyle and his wife Louise travelled to Cairo for the winter, where they based themselves in the Mena House Hotel, the former hunting lodge of the Khedive. ACD started work on Uncle Bernac and a play based on Halves by James Payn, but the weather did not agree with him and he was listless.

However, shortly after returning from a Nile cruise in January 1896, he was invigorated by news that Kitchener was preparing to attack the Mahdists and revenge General Gordon. After applying to The Times, ACD was taken on by Newnes’s Westminster Gazette as a war correspondent. He spent a month with the troops and saw little action but came back armed with ideas for stories.

He appears to have written ‘The Three Correspondents’ on his return to England in May 1896. He also wrote The Tragedy of the Korosko (1897) and ‘The Debut of Bimbashi Joyce’ (1900) from this experience.

‘The Three Correspondents’ was first published in The Windsor Magazine in October 1896 and first anthologised in The Green Flag and Other Stories of War and Sport (1900).

Historical context – Sudan 1896

Gordon's Last Stand (1893)
by George W. Joy 

After the opening of the Suez Canal in Ottoman-controlled Egypt in 1869, Britain had a vested interest in protecting this new route to India. Disraeli took a controlling share in the canal, which was shared with the French. In 1882, a movement by native Egyptians to overthrow the Ottomans came to a head. The British suppressed the uprising at Tel El Kebir, after which Egypt was de facto controlled by the British, although it did not become a colony. With Egypt came the Sudan which had been conquered by the Egyptians authorities in the decade before.

Meanwhile, an uprising in the Sudan in 1881 led by Muhammad Ahmad, a Muslim prophet who called himself the Mahdi (“the expected one”), sought to push the Egyptians from the territory. Britain was reluctantly involved and sent a relief force, led by William Hicks, which was destroyed in 1883. This was followed in 1885 by the death of General Gordon and the fall of Khartoum, after which the Mahdist forces ruled much of Sudan for the next ten years.

By the end of 1895, rumours were swirling that Kitchener, who had been a military intelligence officer during the Gordon relief campaign and who idolised Gordon, intended to launch a military assault on the Sudan to restore British pride.

War correspondents

Frederick Burnaby (1870) by Tissot

Conan Doyle establishes three war correspondents – Mortimer, Scott and Anerley – the latter an avatar of ACD himself. ACD contrasts the solid Saxon Mortimer with the flighty and dramatic Celt Scott. Anerley has a droop of the lip reminiscent of the droop of ACD’s right eye, which was caused when he fell from a horse and kicked in the forehead while staying in Egypt.

While there had always been despatches from the front, war correspondents – reporters for newspapers who were on the ground – were a mid-19thC invention. Arguably the first was William Howard Russell (1827-1907), the Irish reporter with The Times, who spent 22 months covering the Crimean War, and later covered the Indian Mutiny, American Civil War, Austro-Prussian War, and Franco-Prussian War.

War correspondents were often celebrities in their own right. They included Frederick Gustavus Burnaby, himself a soldier who died during the Gordon relief expedition; Colonel Valentine Baker, a disgraced solider who served in the Turkish and Egyptian army; Frederick Bowles, co-founder of Vanity Fair; Winston Churchill, who was present at Ombdurman and annoyed Kitchener with his accounts; Charles Norris-Newman (“Noggs”) who covered the Zulu war; G. W. Steevens, who covered the 1898 Sudan campaign ad wrote With Kitchener to Khartoum and George A. Henty who was a famed author of jingoistic historical adventure fiction for boys.

ACD as war correspondent

Reginald Wingate

ACD was well aware that a military expedition was in the offing at the end of 1895. Shortly after his arrival in Cairo in November 1895, he met and conversed with Major F. Reginald Wingate, the Director of Military Intelligence. ACD decided to stayed on in Cairo in March when it became apparent preparations were afoot for action, and planned to journey to Wadi Halfa with Julian Corbett of the Pall Mall Gazette (later a great naval historian and military strategist). ACD originally sought a posting with The Times but they did not reply. He probably leaned on his connection to Newnes to be engaged by the Westminster Gazette.

ACD filed eight reports for the Gazette between 1 April and 11 May, often commenting on the state of the troops, the Egyptian and Sudanese forces, the landscape – but little by way of military action. One of his best letters is that of 1 April 1896 which describes the officers at the Turf Club in Cairo, with pen-portraits of Cromer and Kitchener. ACD had hoped to reach Wadi Halfa by 11 April but only made it as far as Sarras where he had the assurance of Kitchener himself that there was no use in waiting until supplies were sent to the front.

ACD’s later career as war correspondent included The Great Boer War (1900), The Cause and Conduct of the War in South Africa (1900) and A Visit to Three Fronts (1916), all of which drew on first-hand experience.

Romance versus Realism

The Egyptian experience appears to have resolved a tension ACD had experienced in his own writing during the preceding years, namely the pull between the romantic and realist schools. He had experimented with realism with A Duet and various stories in Round the Red Lamp, notably ‘The Curse of Eve’, but had often in the latter diverted into the gothic.

On 29 June 1896, Conan Doyle gave a speech to the author’s club on the work of storytelling. In it – as well as famously claiming the death of Sherlock Holmes was justifiable homicide – he rejected the idea of a tension between realism and romance, suggesting that the focus of the storyteller should be on interest. This reconciliation of realism and romance can be seen in ‘The Three Correspondents’ and two years later in a companion piece, ‘The Debut of Bimbashi Joyce’ (1900).

‘The Debut of Bimbashi Joyce’ (1900)

Illustration for Punch by Tony Wilkinson

First published in Punch, 3 Jan 1900, this vignette tells of a newly posted Bimbashi (a major in the Egyptian army) who is sent on a mission to capture and interrogate travellers at an intersection of two major caravan routes. He is frustrated by one man, who refuses to talk and disappears in the night. Reflecting on his failure to the intelligence chief and the General, he is shocked to discover the man was the General in disguise.

The senior characters are based on Wingate and Kitchener. The latter was a very experienced military intelligence officer who has served as part of the Gordon relief campaign. Before that, he had been based in the middle east for many years, spoke fluent Arabic and Turkish and was well acquainted with local customs.

Joyce is a newbie character like Anerley, this time seconded from the Royal Mallow Fusiliers, a fictitious regiment most likely based on the Royal Munsters, who were based in Mallow, County Cork. The Mallows are also referenced in ‘The Crooked Man’.

‘Bimbashi Joyce’ was reprinted in 1914 in the Princess Mary's Gift Book alongside a story about fairies which contains the drawings that the Cottingley Fairies girls used to fabricate their photographs. It’s ironic that ACD never noticed the source of the fairy images in a book in which he was also published.

Next time on Doings of Doyle…

We return to Feldkirch for ‘A Pastoral Horror’ (1890). You can read the story here.

Acknowledgements

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Image credits: Thanks to Alexis Barquin at The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopaedia for permission to reproduce these images. Please support the encyclopaedia at www.arthur-conan-doyle.com.

Music credit: Sneaky Snitch Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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