Now, This is History

She wanted to cause a stir... and she did

A new version of Fanny Duberly's Journal about the horrors of the Crimean war will ensure she gets the place in history she deserves

Were she living today, Fanny Duberly would be a Kate Adie or an Orla Guerin, filing vivid accounts "from our own correspondent" for the BBC. She had passion, bite, an eye for detail and fearless determination to see events for herself.

Her report on the Charge of the Light Brigade inspired Tennyson's thundering poem: "...Into the valley of Death/ Rode the six hundred."

At the time, the Turkish commander, Omar Pasha, described Fanny as a "beautiful woman with long flaxen curls". Indeed, she had so many admirers that numerous copies were made of an image of her on her beloved horse, Bob, by Roger Fenton, the first war photographer.

But Fanny's contribution did not get the respect it deserved. This has its roots in her decision to accompany her husband, Henry Duberly, paymaster of the 11th Hussars, to live among the soldiers fighting for the Russian port of Sebastopol in the Crimean Peninsula, a diamond of land that dangles into the Black Sea, off the coast of what is now Ukraine.

It was considered unseemly behaviour for a woman, and this view of her as a hard-hearted flirt who dared to wear trousers (albeit under her skirt) prevailed throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

Ridiculed and slandered by most of her contemporaries, she has gone down in history as the mistress of Lord Cardigan, commander of the Light Brigade, a man whom she detested.

Her letters detail the folly of the British commanders: commander-in-chief Lord Raglan was remote and indecisive, while Lord Cardigan - known as Lord Chargeagain - was so obsessed by practice charges that his men were exhausted and the horses were dying of infected saddlesores.

One of Fanny's letters to her MP was passed on to the Advertiser, a national newspaper that published it anonymously. It tells of how Cardigan pitched his tent by a fountain, and gave instructions that no soldier was allowed to let his horse drink there, so they had to walk three miles to find another.

Undrained, however, the fountain overflowed and Cardigan's tent was flooded. "I thought I should die of suppressed laughter," she tells her sister, when the outraged commander read the letter out to her, unaware she was the source.

Fanny was not the only officer's wife to travel to the Crimea with her husband, but she was the only one to stay throughout the campaign, let alone to report on it. It was just the kind of opportunity this orphaned tomboy of 23 had been looking for, a welcome change from the dreary round of genteel visits and needlework that were the normal lot of women of her class.

Widely read, good at languages but penniless, she had married at 20 and seems - despite the scurrilous gossip - to have been devoted to her husband, Henry. The Crimea was, she wrote, "no place for a woman", but although she suffered from cold, hunger and dysentery she rarely complained on her own account.

As she wrote to Selina: "This life is full of charm for me. You have an adventure, a danger, an excitement, every hour."

An accomplished horsewoman, she rode Bob to vantage points overlooking the fighting where she could observe the horror of moments such as that on October 25, 1854 when Cardigan instructed the Light Brigade to charge up the wrong valley into Russian guns. "Fire seemed to be pouring from all sides... Faster and faster they rode..."