William Howard Russell Brompton Cemetery, London. He married twice. His first marriage was to Mary Burrows, of Irish origin. After her death in 1867, he married Countess Antoinette Malvezzi, an Italian. They remained married until his death. Russell's dispatches via telegraph from the Crimea remain as his legacy; for the first time he brought the realities of war home to readers. This helped diminish the distance between the home front and remote battle fields. Russell's war reporting (often in semi-verbatim form) features prominently in Northern Irish poet Ciarán Carson's reconstruction of the Crimean War in "Breaking News" (2003). His biography was written by
William Howard Russell of steel...". Following Russell's reports of the appalling conditions suffered by the Allied troops conducting the siege, including an outbreak of cholera, Samuel Morton Peto and his partners built the Grand Crimean Central Railway, which was a major factor leading to the success of the siege. He spent December 1854 in Constantinople on holiday, returning in early 1855. 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