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Edmund O'Donovan

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Edmund O'Donovan (13 September 1844 – 5 November 1883), Irish war correspondent, was born in Dublin. In 1866 he began to contribute to The Irish Times and other Dublin papers. He was the first journalist killed in the Kurdufan area during the Sudan campaigns while reporting for The Daily News.[1]

Early life

Edmund O'Donovan was born on the 12th of September 1844 at Bay View Avenue, Dublin. He was the son of John O'Donovan, a well known scholar and topographer from Kilkenny. O'Donovan studied medicine and free-lance journalism at Trinity College Dublin.[2]

As teenagers, O'Donovan and most of his brothers joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret society banded together to achieve Irish independence. He was arrested three times and detained for some months. He was subsequently an active IRB organiser in the north of England, while turning to journalism as a career. His sense of enjoyment and pranks was pronounced. He delighted in adventures and was a skilled linguist, as well as a weapons expert. O'Donovan remained on excellent terms with Irish revolutionaries to the last.

Newspaper career

He began his newspaper career with The Irish Times in 1866. After the Battle of Sedan, fought on 1 September 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, O'Donovan joined the Foreign Legion of the French army, and was wounded and taken prisoner by the Germans. In 1873, the Carlist rising[3] attracted him to Spain, and he wrote many newspaper letters on the campaign.[4]

From 1876 O'Donovan represented the Daily News during the rising of Bosnia and Herzegovina against the Turks, and in 1879, for the same paper, made his adventurous and famously hazardous journey to Merv. On arrival at Merv, the Turcomans, suspecting him of espionage for the Russians, detained him.[4] The British officer and spy, Lieutenant Colonel C.E. Stewart, who was posing as an Armenian horse trader, expressed surprise that the journalist should be so intrepid, but O'Donovan had told him he was determined to record General Skobelev's troop movements in southern Transcaspia when staying at Mahometabad for weeks. But O'Donovan resolutely decided on watching the Turcomans' stronghold of Geok Tepe, when the Russian advance began. He had negotiated for safe passage when he fell ill, fearing the worst from Persian obstruction. Astutely, O'Donovan refused to reveal Stewart's secret identity to the paper, but events were subsequently released in a book on The Merv Oasis as well as a report to the Royal Geographic Society. In 1881 he was released to greet the Turcomans at Geok Tepe, who were under the impression he was there to assist them.[5][6]

The Turcoman garrison was about 10,000 soldiers and 40,000 civilians. On the other side the Russian general could call on 7,000 men. The Turcomans fought fiercely to defend the fortress, while Skobelev used mortars to shell it. The Turcomans were overwhelmed when the Russians breached the walls with explosives and swarmed into the fortress. Bloody slaughter ensued, later justified by Skobelev as necessary to control the enemy. Stewart disappeared from Mahometabad, and reported to the British Mission in Tehran.[7] O'Donovan had witnessed the whole grisly business from a vantage point out of harm's way high in the hills overlooking the city.[8] Viceroy Lord Curzon later wrote

I do not think that any sight could have impressed me more profoundly with the completeness of Russian conquest than the spectacle of these men, only eight years ago the bitter and determined enemies of Russia...

What O'Donovan had witnessed was the end of Turcoman independence.

London was deeply concerned that the Russians would march on Merv, which was a natural gateway to Afghanistan and Herat. St. Petersburg, having dismissed General Skobelev, renounced all claim to Merv when the Tsar himself approached Lord Dufferin, the British ambassador. The consequence was to switch the city from Russian allied hands, Persia, to the Turcomans; the Cossacks continued to accompany the Turcomans to Merv for trade, where in the meantime, the story ran that O'Donovan had been installed by the local chieftains as The Supreme Ruler. When they discovered his newspapers were not bank notes, he fled for his life to Tehran, from what he described as "a city of hovels".[9][5]

It was only after several months' captivity that O'Donovan managed to get a message through to his principals in Persia, whence it was telegraphed to England. The adventures were described in The Merv Oasis published in 1882. The following year O'Donovan, still in search of adventure, accompanied the ill-fated expedition of Hicks Pasha to the Egyptian Sudan;[4] he perished along with most of the Anglo-Egyptian expeditionary force at the Battle of El Obeid.[1][10][11]

Memorial

O'Donovan is listed as one of seven journalists on a war memorial in St Paul's Cathedral in London for journalists who were killed during the Mahdist War between 1883 and 1885.[12]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b O'Donovan, William (24 November 1883). "Edmund O'Donovan: The Journalist's Career as Outlined by his Brother". Chicago Daily Tribune. ProQuest 172853412.
  2. ^ "Old Kilkenny Review 1972 – Kilkenny Archaeological Society". Retrieved 6 August 2021.
  3. ^ Preston, J.W. (December 1873). "Carlism in Spain". The Century Magazine.
  4. ^ a b c  One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "O'Donovan, Edmund". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 20 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 9.
  5. ^ a b O'Donovan, Edmund (1977). "Chapter 15, Merv and Its Surroundings". In Cumming, Sir Duncan (ed.). The Country of the Turkomans. London: Oguz Press and the Royal Geographical Society. ISBN 0-905820-01-0.
  6. ^ Stewart, Lt. Col. C.E. (1977). "Chapter 11, The Country of the Tekke Turkomans and the Tejend and Murghab Rivers". In Cumming, Sir Duncan (ed.). The Country of the Turkomans. London: Oguz Press and the Royal Geographical Society. ISBN 0-905820-01-0.
  7. ^ Col. H.C. Stewart, "Through Persia in Disguise"
  8. ^ Hopkirk, p.404-6, 442
  9. ^ "The Irish Khan of Merv".
  10. ^ "The massacre at El Obeid". The New York Times. 30 January 1884. ProQuest 94236211.
  11. ^ "The recollections of a war correspondent (Archibald Forbes)". The Irish Times. 26 September 1895. ProQuest 516940928.
  12. ^ Clarke, Bob (2004). From Grub Street to Fleet Street: An Illustrated History of the English Newspaper to 1899. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. p. 219. ISBN 9780754650072.
Secondary sources
  • Cowling, Maurice (1981). "Lytton, the Cabinet and the Russians August to November 1878". EHR. lxxvi.
  • Duthie, John Lowe (1980). "Lord Salisbury, the Forward Group and Anglo-Afghan Relations 1874–78". Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. viii.
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