William Simpson sketched this scene in 1855, showing the railway at Balaclava during the Crimean War. The 14-mile standard-gauge (probably) and steam-hauled ‘Grand Crimean Central Railway’ ran between between Balaclava and the besieged Russian port at Sevastopol, and was engineered by Samuel Peto and Thomas Brassey. The initiative came from Peto, prompted by reading of the problems suffered by the besieging army during a Crimean winter, and was completed in just seven weeks. Sevastopol fell in September 1855, and Peto was created Sir Samuel Morton Peto, 1st Baronet for his efforts.
Part 1 of 2
IN February 1853, Tsar Nicholas I of Russia rode to the rescue of the Ottoman Empire’s beleaguered Orthodox Christians. The Turks had humiliated them for generations, but now France’s Napoleon III was demanding that Constantinople hand over Greek Orthodox churches in the Holy Land to the Roman Catholics. A French warship arrived in the Black Sea to concentrate the Sultan’s mind.
Nicholas responded by calling for the Empire’s twelve million Greek Orthodox,* plus Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia,* to be placed under his personal protection. When Constantinople refused, Nicholas ordered troops into Romania, and in October Turkey declared war.
Over in London, Prime Minister Lord Aberdeen’s cabinet cared little for Turkey but was convinced that Nicholas had designs on India, and the sinking of a Turkish flotilla at Sinope on the Black Sea, portrayed as a war crime by the excitable British press, was the last straw. Britain joined France on Turkey’s side on March 28th, 1854. Austria, not liking the Tsar’s intervention in the Balkans, followed suit.
Strictly speaking, at this time what we now call Romania was the duchies of Wallachia and Moldavia, under Ottoman rule since 1417. Assisted by Russia’s intervention, they united to become Romania in 1866, and then the Kingdom of Romania in 1881.
When the Turks captured Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire, in 1453, the Greek-speaking, Greek-culture, predominantly Orthodox Christian inhabitants of Anatolia (Asia Minor) and Greece came under its control. Greece itself achieved independence following the revolution of 1821.
Part Two
Times correspondent William Howard Russell in 1855, embedded with the British army during the Crimean War. Russell was an Irishman with a gift for being able to get alongside the ordinary soldier and lower-ranking officers, men who could be relied on to be a little indiscreet. More senior officers, such as Lord Raglan, turned him away. Raglan was a veteran of Waterloo, who scored notable if costly victories at the River Alma and Inkerman in the Crimean campaign. Much of the public bitterness was directed at him, and Raglan died on June 28th, 1855, ten days after a failed assault on Sevastopol, suffering from dysentery and depression.
THE British campaign centred on the Crimean port of Sevastopol, which they besieged with the help of a specially-built railway.* A Russian relief force was rebuffed at Balaclava, and there were victories at Alma Heights and Inkerman.
But casualties were high and in an age of mass-produced print, that could no longer pass unnoticed. The public was reading Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade within six weeks. The ‘thin red line’ of the 93rd Highlanders; bitter winter, inadequate equipment, festering disease; Florence Nightingale,* the ‘lady with the lamp’, nursing amid the ‘humane barbarity’ of field hospitals — all struck home though the colourful pen of William Howard Russell of the Times, the first embedded war correspondent.
The rising scandal cost Aberdeen his position, and Lord Palmerston, no friend of Russia, agreed peace at Paris on 30th March, 1856; the Russians were only too ready to sign, thanks to the Royal Navy’s threatened blockade of St Petersburg. Turkey undertook to be nicer to Christians but the Balkans remained under Ottoman suzerainty, and for a generation hysterical Russophobia blinded Westminster to the growing threat from Berlin.*
The ‘Grand Central Crimean Railway’ was a 14-mile stretch of track from the Alliance’s harbour at Balaclava to the Russian port of Sevastopol. It was the brainchild of engineers Samuel Morton Peto and Thomas Brassey, and boasted several steam locomotives including an armoured 0-6-0 tank ‘Alliance’, built in Leeds and adorned with English, French, Sardinian, and Turkish flags. For more detail, see Anthony Dawson’s blog Notes from the Crimea. Another novel but thoroughly shameful military innovation was an invitation from the Government to Michael Faraday to experiment with chemical weapons, which was very firmly turned down.
Florence was a pioneer in nursing education, sanitation and the logistics of battlefield medical treatment, who worked her social contacts in Government and the press to great effect. See Florence Nightingale.
See Misreading Russia, taken from a pamphlet written in 1856 by Richard Cobden MP. Cobden had spent time in Russia, and believed that, other than to rescue Orthodox Christians from oppression in the Muslim Ottoman Empire, the Russian people had no appetite for territorial expansion.
.jpg){kind=link}
