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John Osborne’s almost entirely unused
screenplay for Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade
(1968) has not as yet been published, and so cannot be compared with Mrs.
Cecil Woodham-Smith’s historical account, The Reason Why, nor
with Charles Wood’s screenplay as eventually filmed. Many other
documents pertaining to Osborne’s presently “lost”
screenplay are more or less readily available, however, and this is a
collection of them.
Tony Richardson, The
Long-Distance Runner: A Memoir:
The Charge of the Light
Brigade had been in the works for a long time. John Osborne had been as
passionate about the subject as I was, and we had worked together on the
script. One of the great problems was Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The
Reason Why. This brilliant piece of historical writing had been a
popular and critical success and had led to several film projects, none of
which had come to fruition. The rights had been passed from, among others,
Michael Balcon to the current owner, Laurence Harvey.
The original feature of Mrs.
Woodham-Smith’s concept and scholarship was the juxtaposition of the
careers of Lords Cardigan and Lucan from birth, showing how their
antagonisms led to their final confrontation over the disastrous orders and
misunderstandings that led to the destruction of the famous regiment. We
wanted to do something different, to concentrate on the charge itself, on
the mixture of heroism, romance, farce, and horror embodied in the actions
of a much more panoramic group of characters, using as our central figure the
enigmatic and dashing Captain Nolan, who alone foresaw the mistake that had
been made and who tried desperately to reverse the fatal decision to loose
the six hundred horsemen into the Russian gun batteries, only to be killed
at the last moment by a stray bullet. It was to be a film about the ironies
of war.
There have, of course,
been many other accounts of the famous charge (and an earlier film, a
Warner Brothers vehicle for Errol Flynn which, set in India or Afghanistan,
had nothing much to do with history). All these accounts are based, more or
less, on Alexander Kinglake’s Invasion of the Crimea, the
first masterpiece of historical journalism. For this reason we saw no
reason to burden the budget by negotiating the rights to a book whose
emphasis was on different aspects of the story. To protect ourselves
further we had set up a research department under John Mollo, a student of
military history, whose brief was to ensure that any incident John Osborne
employed in the screenplay would be amply documented elsewhere, to avoid
trespassing on the original digging Mrs. Woodham-Smith had done. Everything
was checked and rechecked, and we felt protected. We had also a great
responsibility to United Artists, which was financing the film, its
big-budget production for the year, and one of the biggest budgets of all
time (at that time) for a British movie.
Goff J., Harman
Pictures, N.V. v. Osborne [1967]:
Mr. Richardson in his
affidavit says that during the winter of 1961-62 he and the defendant John
Osborne discussed the possibility of making what he describes as another
historical film, which in its context postulates somewhat inaccurately that
"Tom Jones" was an historical film, but that is not of much
moment. What is important is that he says that he provided John Osborne
with Kinglake's Invasion of the Crimea, Hibbert's Destruction of Lord
Raglan and The Reason Why, and that some months later Osborne confirmed his
interest and singled out Captain Nolan as a fascinating character, and he
goes on: "On behalf of the defendant companies I commissioned him to
write a screenplay on 'the charge'" which appears therefore to have
been at the end of 1962 or early 1963. Mr. Richardson then says: "Also
on behalf of the defendant companies I commissioned, inter alia, John and
Andrew Mollo to carry out a programme of research," and they
"supplied information to Osborne and myself based on their
researches." John Mollo has made an affidavit himself confirming this
and giving somewhat extensive information about their work, but he says
they were instructed by Mr. Richardson in or about January, 1964, and he
does not say when they reported to him or to John Osborne.
Anne Sinai, Reach for
the Top: The Turbulent Life of Laurence Harvey:
He claimed that he owned
the rights to Cecil Woodham Smith's account of the Crimean War fought
between Britain and Turkey in the mid-nineteenth century. Harvey's script
bore the title, The Reason Why. It was widely reported that he had
sold it to Joseph E. Levine, but Harvey claimed that the deal with Levine
had never come through and that he intended to produce and star in it
himself. He insisted that he retained the film rights to this property and
had invested more than $200,000 in its acquisition and development.
Appearing on another BBC
talk show, as if to prove his rights to this property, he suddenly whipped
out a bugle and sounded a perfect charge. It turned out that this was the
very bugle that had been sounded in the Battle of Balaklava in 1854. Harvey
had found it in an antiques store and presented it to the Regimental
Museum. It then transpired that a very similar property was owned by
director Tony Richardson and the writer John Osborne. This script, The
Charge of the Light Brigade, was slated to be made in Turkey for United
Artists. Harvey sued.
John Osborne, Almost a
Gentleman:
[1965, 12 JANUARY] 4.30,
WOODFALL OFFICES: The Charge of the Light Brigade. Cecil
Woodham-Smith, author of The Reason Why, has slapped an injunction
on us. Oscar Beuselinck is relishing it. How he hates people who create
things. He thinks everyone steals. I've plagiarized no one. Only
myself, in the style of G.F. Handel (never stopped, and who better to steal
from?). Beuselinck declares triumphantly that it's going to cost us £12,000
to buy off Laurence Harvey, who owns Woodham-Smith's rights. I hear T.R.
has already offered him 'my part' as the Russian prince.
[1965] 16 FEBRUARY,
WOODFALL: The Charge of the Light Brigade. T.R. is hell-bent on making
an anti-war film. Oscar Lewenstein looks as glum as he did in the Acapulco
brothel. I am losing heart. T.R. is tampering with history—all there
in Kinglake's classic account of the battle, minute by minute. I think they
should forget me and get in Charles Wood. He's not only a proper writer but
a professional soldier—Seventeenth/Twenty-First Lancers. War? Loves
it, abominates it.
Tony Richardson, The
Long-Distance Runner: A Memoir:
John produced his script.
It had many splendid and poetic things in it—especially in its
evocation of English society before the Crimean War—but it still
needed a lot of work, and finally Charles Wood, a brilliant and eccentric
comic writer with a passion for all things military, came in to rework it.
Charles stayed with us and contributed an extraordinary amount throughout
the shooting.
John Osborne, Almost a
Gentleman:
[1965] 13 OCTOBER,
HELLINGLY: The Charge of the Light Brigade. Finished. Hooray.
Letter from Tony
Richardson, in John Osborne, Almost a Gentleman:
Grand Hotel,
Ankara [1966]
My dear John,
I am sorry you feel so
bitter. I feel bitter in some ways too but they’re not the most
important ones.
The trouble is that you
have a one way morality as far as films are concerned. You don’t really
like writing them, you don’t give of your whole self and heart but
you expect other people to treat what you do as if it was one of your own
plays. You don’t really value the writing in the same way but you
can’t bear others not to.
I’m sure this probably
won’t help our relationship only exacerbate it because I feel
increasingly that what you want from a friendship is not real loyalty which
is based on truth or on knowing each other but sycophancy and adulation
which I can’t give, and despise anyway.
I hope your present
feelings will change soon. Whether they do or not they won’t change
mine. I love you.
Tony
Goff J., Harman
Pictures, N.V. v. Osborne [1967]:
The plaintiffs [on my
bare presumption, a partnership between Laurence Harvey and Wolf Mankowitz—ed.]
are a body incorporated and registered according to the law of the
Netherlands Antilles, and they are the owners of the copyright so far as
concerns reproduction in cinematograph film form of the well-known book The
Reason Why written by Mrs. Woodham-Smith dealing with the Charge of the
Light Brigade and the story which lay behind it. They produce and
distribute films in association with Mr. Laurence Harvey.
The defendant, John James
Osborne, is a well-known playwright and screen writer and is a director of
and shareholder in the two defendant companies both of which are English
companies. They produce and distribute films commonly known as Woodfall
Films.
In 1963, there were
discussions between Mr. Laurence Harvey and the late Mr. James Woolf on behalf
of the plaintiffs and a Mr. Robin Fox and Mr. Richardson, a director of
both the defendant companies, on their behalf as to the possibilities of
the defendant companies acquiring the plaintiffs' rights or concurring in a
joint production. In his affidavit Mr. Harvey says:
"The said Robin Fox
told me that he had read the said work with admiration and he further
stated that both John Osborne (the first defendant in this action) and the
said Richardson had also read the said work, and that John Osborne had
expressed enthusiasm for the treatment of the subject by the authoress and
the way she had arranged her material and that the said Richardson had
expressed a keen desire to produce a motion picture based on the said
work."
These negotiations came
to nothing and the defendant John Osborne has written the script for a
motion picture entitled "The Charge of the Light Brigade" which
the defendants are proposing to produce entirely on their own account.
Meanwhile the plaintiffs had been endeavouring to exploit their rights
elsewhere but their negotiations were frustrated by Press announcements of
the defendants' intended production.
In these circumstances
the plaintiffs have brought this action in which they claim:
"An injunction
restraining the defendants and each of them by themselves, their servants
or agents (a) from infringing or authorising the infringement of the
plaintiff company's said copyright, (b) from making or producing any film
of or based on the said screenplay, (c) from assigning or purporting to
assign the copyright or any part thereof in the said or any similar
screenplay or any part thereof or from granting or purporting to grant any
licence in respect of the said or any similar screenplay or from dealing
with or disposing or purporting to dispose of any interest in the said or
any similar screenplay or any copies thereof;"
damages, and
consequential relief.
Tony Richardson, The
Long-Distance Runner: A Memoir:
Then a bombshell broke. Laurence
Harvey, who was naturally miffed that his own project had never got off the
ground, had obtained a copy of John’s script and was suing him for
plagiarism. I thought he had no case. We engaged top counsel. A week or two
later the experienced QC we’d hired asked to see me urgently. He and
his people had been analyzing the script and had come to the conclusion
that John was clearly in the wrong. It wasn’t that he had used any
scene or incident that wasn’t either invented or documented elsewhere,
but he had helped himself liberally to stylistic phrases and descriptions
in The Reason Why. The list of incidences was very long and
devastating. When confronted, John murmured something about Brecht helping
himself to Shakespeare, but the situation was disastrous.
In February 1967 there
was a preliminary judicial hearing which went absolutely against us. John
could in fact be liable to criminal prosecution. He had used the book; he
was in breach of his writing contract with Woodfall; and Woodfall, of which
he was a director, was clearly in breach of its contract with United
Artists. A lot of money had already been spent, and the lives of many
people would have been disrupted if the production were canceled now. Some
kind of deal had to be struck to acquire The Reason Why. United
Artists was forgiving and understanding. It agreed that if the film made
money the rights could go on the budget; if not, it would offset the
expense against other Woodfall projects. Laurence Harvey—to his
credit—behaved as fairly as he could, when he could have asked for
much more as blackmail. Laurence Harvey’s lawyer, Lord Goodman
(the-then Mr. Fix-it of Harold Wilson’s Labour government, which was
afraid of the film’s collapse and its repercussions on the industry),
met with me and, in a series of meetings that took place in London and, for
some reason, late at night in Paris, we arranged terms.
Goff J., Harman
Pictures, N.V. v. Osborne [1967]:
But there is a
distinction between ideas (which are not copyright) and situations and
incidents which may be: see per Swinfen Eady L.J. in Rees v.
Melville:
"In order to
constitute an infringement it was not necessary that the words of the
dialogue should be the same, the situations and incidents, the mode in
which the ideas were worked out and presented might constitute a material
portion of the whole play, and the court must have regard to the dramatic
value and importance of what if anything was taken, even although the
portion might in fact be small and the actual language not copied. On the
other hand, the fundamental idea of two plays might be the same, but if
worked out separately and on independent lines they might be so different
as to bear no real resemblance to one another."
Anne Sinai, Reach for
the Top: The Turbulent Life of Laurence Harvey:
He won a settlement
upholding his charge that he owned the film rights to the story and the
claim that the Richardson-Osborne script was, in effect, based on his own
property. Richardson rewrote his own script. As a friendly gesture and in
order to keep him associated with the film, John Osborne was offered and
accepted the part of Prince Radziwill. However, the terms of the settlement
of Harvey's lawsuit required that Richardson agree to give Harvey a part in
the film at a fee of £60,000 plus a percentage of the profits.
Goff J., Harman
Pictures, N.V. v. Osborne [1967]:
Mr. Arnold [John Arnold
Q.C., counsel for the defendants] has pointed out that there is evidence of
independent research in the work of the Mollos', and internal evidence in
the script that John Osborne made use of it, e.g., in the quotation from
Xenophon in scene 6. On the other hand it appears from the passages in the
evidence to which I have just referred that John Osborne may have been
engaged on the work for something like a year before the Mollo brothers
were even instructed, and one does not know how far the screenplay had
taken shape or what use he had made of The Reason Why before the Mollos
came on the scene. In this connection it is interesting to observe that
whilst the book, the script and Kinglake all refer to two flags flying at
Canroberts Hill as the signal that the enemy was approaching, the Mollos'
note does not.
Further, Mr. Arnold has
drawn my attention forcefully to the following significant considerations.
Captain Nolan is the principal character in the film but not in the book,
although of course he figures largely in it, and moreover, a considerable
number of matters attributed to Captain Nolan in the film are in fact in
the book, having been transposed in the film from other officers to whom
they really related. Further, Mrs. Woodham-Smith, even if she knew it, did
not bring out that he was an Indian officer, whereas the film emphasises
that fact in a fictitious posting scene in which on that very score Lord Cardigan
registers instant hostility towards Captain Nolan. Indeed this is, I think,
one of the strongest points in the defendants' argument, as the book says
that Cardigan was anxious to have Nolan on his staff, which is a very
different treatment. Again there are a number of passages in which the
script is identical with the common sources whilst the book is not, or
where the script is nearer to the original, notably for example, at the
death of Captain Nolan, where in the book his horse carries his body back
through the wrong regiment, whilst the script has it correctly. Then the
book gives the title of one of Captain Nolan's books as Nolan's System for
Training Cavalry Horses, whereas it is really, as stated in the script, The
Training of Cavalry Remount Horses.
Mr. Arnold also relied on
the fact that in scene 108 the name of the transport ship is given as the Shooting
Star, which is the name given in Mrs. Duberly's Diary at page 54,
whereas the book has Southern Star: see p. 214, but this may not
have been the same ship, for at page 156 of the book the transport is named
Shooting Star. Perhaps more significantly, there is at least one
example where it is clear that the book comes from one source and the
script from another. I refer to the retreat of the Turks where the book
reports them as saying "Ship, ship, ship," which comes from
Kinglake, and in the script it is "Ship, Johnny," which comes
from Mrs. Duberly's Diary. Again it is said that the defendants have used
the Cavalry Journal extensively although it is not one of the works
specified in Mrs. Woodham-Smith's bibliography. Mr. Arnold has also relied
in many instances on small points of detail being common to the sources and
the script, e.g., again, at Canroberts Hill, Kinglake refers to the two flags
as the "arranged signal" whereas the book says "the
signal." Then, for the opening of the Battle of Balaclava, the book
says that the guns in the redoubt fired, whereas Kinglake says the fort
opened fire from one of its 12-pounder guns and the scenic direction in
scene 237 is "Fire from one of the 12-pounder guns from the Number One
Redoubt." Again the book says at page 246 that at the guns Captain
Morris engaged the Russian officer in command, whereas the script in scene
364 reads "Morris drives his horse full at a tall Russian who seems to
be a squadron leader," which is what is stated in Kinglake at page
253.
But I have read the whole
of the script very carefully and compared it with the book, and I find many
similarities of detail there also. Thus, the descriptive direction in scene
106 gives: "hogging the stage in the foreground the officers with
their mothers, wives, and even young brides," whilst the book has at
page 142: "Officers took their wives with them, some took their
mothers, there were several young brides." In
scene 118 "Nolan encourages the soldiers and sailors who are
struggling with the terrified creatures." The book tells us at page
144 that "our men worked well and were ably seconded by some of the
sailors." Then there is scene 136 in which Lord Lucan says:
"Above my head sir," and the book states that Cardigan went over
Lucan's head, and the unusual expression in scene 214 that the cavalry had
been "so low in the brushwood," which is the precise expression
in the book at page 200. Again it is prima facie not without significance
that apart from the burial of Captain Nolan the play ends with the very
quotation which Mrs. Woodham-Smith used to end her description of the
battle.
Tony Richardson, The
Long-Distance Runner: A Memoir:
There was one sticking
point: Laurence Harvey, convinced that the movie
couldn’t be a financial success without his name on the marquee (in
this he may have been proved to be right!), insisted he must be given a
little role. There was nothing for him, but then I thought of a one-day
scene—an incident among incidents before the charge, when Prince
Radziwill, a peacock-uniformed Polish dandy attached to the French and
British forces, is surrounded by a group of wild Cossacks but by his dash
escapes them. Originally John himself was to have played the role, but
replacing him seemed a small price to pay to avoid the threatened
prosecution. Not to John. He accused me of complete betrayal, and it led to
a total breach between us. Except for past projects, we split all the
Woodfall companies, and never collaborated again. And it took many years to
mend our friendship—which, I’m glad to say, out of old
association, affection, and real admiration, we have now revived.
Anne Sinai, Reach for
the Top: The Turbulent Life of Laurence Harvey:
Harvey had his own
version of what happened. In order to show that he had no "hard cash
feelings," he announced, he offered to appear in a cameo role in the
Richardson-Osborne film. The only part available was that of Prince
Radziwill. Osborne was asked to give up the part, which he did. Harvey
showed up in Turkey in due course, played the cameo part in one day of
shooting in dashing style, looking resplendent in his uniform.
John Osborne, Almost a
Gentleman:
Tony and I had gone to Rottingdean
to persuade Brenda de Banzie to repeat her stage performance [in The
Entertainer]. Her put-upon husband, employed as one of Binkie's [Hugh
‘Binkie’ Beaumont] stage-managers, and her aspiring-pop-singer
son listened obediently as minuscule drinks were poured and she made her
demands. Her Gilda-like 'suggestions' centred on the importance of
'developing' the part of Phoebe. We readily agreed. Tony shot most of her
embellishments with a camera empty of film. He later played the same costly
trick with Laurence Harvey in The Charge of the Light Brigade.
Anne Sinai, Reach for
the Top: The Turbulent Life of Laurence Harvey:
He had just twenty words
to say. Richardson repaid him by totally slicing his cameo appearance out
of the film, making Harvey's face the most expensive one ever to fall on
the cutting room floor.
Goff J., Harman
Pictures, N.V. v. Osborne [1967]:
Mr. Arnold has made a
very exhaustive examination of one section of the script showing that there
are many incidents recorded in the book which find no counterpart in the
script, some of which are of considerable dramatic promise and which one
would expect to find reproduced if copying were afoot, e.g., the Russian
cavalry jeering at the inactivity of the British cavalry, and in particular
the fatal fourth order being first entrusted to another officer and Captain
Nolan claiming the right to bear it. As Sir Andrew Clark [Q.C., counsel for
the plaintiffs] points out, some of these might well be accounted for as
being similar to other events already in the script, and in any event
abridgment was necessary, but that may not be a complete answer.
Mr. Arnold has also
analysed the quotations which are common to both works and the number of
incidents and situations which occur in the script only, and statistically
these analyses favour him, but on comparing the book and the script I was,
and remain, impressed by the marked similarity of the choice of incidents,
and the relative importance of those which are common and those in the
script only and by the juxtaposition of ideas, for example the incident of
the issue of unwanted stable jackets is followed in the script by this line
in the narrative. General Airey says to Cardigan and Lockwood, "A
triumph my Lord," whilst in the book the same incident is followed by
"the review was a triumph for the lieutenant-colonel." Captain
Richard Reynolds, represented in the play by Captain Williams, was
cashiered in 1840 for inciting Lord Cardigan to a duel, and the incidents
of Lord Cardigan arranging to have his officers spied upon and the issue of
the unwanted stable jackets both occurred in 1833. In the script, though
not in the book, they appear after the cashiering, but it is interesting to
observe that they both still appear together and in the same order as in
the book. Again, in the scene describing the assault on the farmer I find
in both book and script the use of the expressions "snooks" and
"guffaw" in close proximity. Moreover, as Sir Andrew Clark has
pointed out, there are a number of descriptive phrases in the book which
find their way either from the book or otherwise into the script, e.g.,
"Divine Right Tory" and "beautiful Golden Head," and
the fact that Nolan was a Captain without purchase and the reference to
Hugert de Burgh as a squire.
Tony Richardson, The
Long-Distance Runner: A Memoir:
I didn’t have much
time to dwell on all this, because the exigencies of the
production—much vaster than anything I’d previously
undertaken—were acute and overwhelming. The most important problem of
all had always been obtaining the necessary cavalry. We had in fact no
options: Turkey was the only country we could work in that had a sufficient
number of horsemen still in service. The only reason they still existed was
that the Russians also still kept...
Charles Wood, “Into
the Valley”, Sight and Sound, May 1992:
The problem about writing
about writing the screenplay of The Charge of the Light Brigade is
that I can hardly remember doing it. I don’t have much recall for anything
beyond the day before yesterday except insults—and the film was made
in 1967. I do remember that after a meeting with Lindsay Anderson, who had
originally wanted to do The Knack, I wrote a silly letter to Oscar
Lewenstein of Woodfall Films to say that I didn’t; nor did I want to
be considered for Light Brigade. My arrogance had to do with the
fact that I knew very little about anything. I didn’t know, for
instance, that Lindsay Anderson was Lindsay Anderson, or that John Osborne
was already writing Light Brigade. On the other hand, I now remember
that I was particularly proud of a phrase in the letter saying
categorically that I would not “...hold a lance for Osborne”
(whatever that meant), so I must have known he was doing it. I had an agent
in those days who was not one to let my silliness get in the way of
something she thought I ought to be glad to be offered. She worked on
Oscar. I did eventually write the screenplay of The Knack, and my
letter wasn’t held against me when John Osborne asked me to take up
the lance he was being forced by circumstances to drop—perhaps Oscar
hadn’t shown it to him.
I was handed the job on a
plate by John, who had already done all the real work, and by Tony
Richardson, who I think needed me for reasons, as ever, devious. Woodfall
Films had found itself in a lawsuit to do with Laurence Harvey and his
owning the rights to The Reason Why—a brilliant, wonderfully
readable, very successful speculation on the reason for the Charge of the
Light Brigade by Cecil Woodham-Smith. I shall never know what was going on,
but it is possible that had I been a more ‘professional’
screenwriter, established, capable of producing a standard comprehensible
screenplay, I would not have been approached by Tony, who I am sure wanted
from me a first draft document he could use to bewilder the chaps in wigs.
This I duly produced, three hundred pages or so of it, wildly surreal,
anachronistic, savage, overwritten, pornographic, crammed with art student
polemic, optimistically ironic, bitter about class and privilege;
everything I felt about the British Empire, the British army, England under
Queen Victoria and the first of the modern wars, inspired by and based on
Stephen Vincent Benet’s ‘John Brown’s Body’,
Eisenstein’s published screenplay of Ivan the Terrible and
John Osborne’s Tom Jones.
Goff J., Harman
Pictures, N.V. v. Osborne [1967]:
I think, however, that is
really true of the present case, since distribution of a film so like The
Reason Why, as is the defendants' script, would render it quite impossible
for the plaintiffs to exploit their copyright.
Charles Wood, “Into
the Valley”, Sight and Sound, May 1992:
“All gets pissed
Balaclava day”… So did we when I
delivered the script to 11a Curzon Street, the offices of Woodfall, or
rather, when I came up from Bristol to be told what Tony might think of it.
“It’s very good, have you had breakfast? Would you like some
bacon or something? Why not? Aren’t you hungry? It’s very good,
I laughed a lot, I think you ought to be given a medal...”
He presented me with a
yellow and blue ribboned silver medal for the Crimea somebody had probably
given him. He was wearing it pinned by a safety pin to his shirt: bars for
the battle of Alma, Inkerman, Sebastopol.
“...But I think
it’s too long, and I don’t think we can have Queen Victoria
fucked by a bear, not even a very funny Russian bear, do you?” So we
didn’t.
“I think we ought
to have a lot more of Clarissa and more women. Valerie (Newman), you can
write a part for Valerie if you like.” So I did.
The first draft, ready to
be shown in court as evidence that Tony Richardson had lost his marbles and
was certainly not intending to make a film based on The Reason Why,
or for that matter on anything else approaching sanity or accessibility,
might have helped to have the injunction lifted, if any of the wigs read
more than half a dozen pages without getting a headache.
Harvey settled out of
court for much more money than anyone got to write the script or appear in
the film, and a part: John Osborne’s promised part. I don’t
know, I don’t know, I didn’t know anything that was going on, I
was full of Dom Perignon and wearing a medal and writing reams.
Most of the Clarissa
(Vanessa Redgrave) stuff I lifted from John’s script, and the
research had all been done by the meticulous John Mollo, every button,
every detail of the battle, including something I had thought to be
regimental folklore: the butchers of the 17th Lancers hurrying
up fresh from the shambles desperate not to be left out of their ride into
another mess of entrails, horse and human.
Hugh Small, “Florence Nightingale’s 20th Century
Biographers”, Paper originally presented to the Friends of the Florence
Nightingale Museum, London, 7th September, 2000:
Earlier I referred to two other claimed inaccuracies in
Woodham-Smith’s book [on Florence Nightingale] that do throw a
worse light on the authorities. I had the idea to see whether she might
have copied them from somewhere else, and sure enough I find that both of
them come from the neglected but well-researched biography by
O’Malley. It was O’Malley who said that Lord Cardigan had
stated that the doctors were frightened of their chief, Dr. Hall, and it
was O’Malley who said that Dr. Hall had stated that there was nothing
lacking at the Scutari hospital (ref. 6). The article by Greenleaf more or
less accused Woodham-Smith of making these facts up, but a comparison of
her wording with O’Malley’s shows Woodham-Smith merely copied
them and spruced them up a bit to make it look as though she was quoting
original sources, and in so doing she distorted them. (This copying from
O’Malley, previously unnoticed I think, is
the only really new fact I am telling you today). Greenleaf must have been
unaware of the O’Malley book, because Greenleaf says that one of
Woodham-Smith’s few original revelations was the name of
Florence’s male admirer Richard Monckton Milnes, who had been
anonymous in Cook’s account. But O’Malley had already revealed
Milnes’s name 20 years before Woodham-Smith.
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