Home » The adventurous life of correspondents from abroad – David Randall

The adventurous life of correspondents from abroad – David Randall

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I don’t think there has ever been, in modern times, a longer period of time in which correspondents from abroad have been so irrelevant. Maybe you thought you knew all the symptoms of covid-19, but I can assure you that there is another one: it also causes mental closure. Today the dominant stories in the news media around the world are the number of cases, deaths, vaccinations, heroism, panic, scandals, setbacks, rumors, urban legends and recriminations about effects of the epidemic on our countries. Internal news is everything, and anyone who is a correspondent from abroad could easily do anything without being noticed.

I hope it is a temporary situation but, if it were not and correspondents from abroad were destined to end up like the dodo and the carrier pigeon, I would like to tell you about these very interesting types of journalists. And if there’s one trait they share, it’s not so much their (varying) professional skills as their often erratic private lives.

Living in foreign countries, with or without your family, allows you to have romantic relationships and spend the night in flexible ways, two opportunities that correspondents from abroad hardly give up. As a result, often many of the most pressing challenges they face are not uncovering stories and writing articles, but keeping their little adventures a secret.

Different ways
Nothing illustrates this concept better than a saga involving two British journalists: Harold Bower, 37, and Savile Morton, 41. The two were friends in Cambridge and both, after various experiences with activities that spared them the unpleasant task of actually earning money. live, they became journalists. Here the similarities end. Bower quietly pursued his career, married a pastor’s daughter, Frances, and had children. Morton took a more adventurous path, preferring to hang out with other men’s women. He moved from Cambridge to Rome, where he delighted as an artist, before starting a nomadic existence as a foreign correspondent, going to Constantinople, Madrid, Lisbon and other places.

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He knew Dickens and was a friend of the poet Lord Alfred Tennyson and the novelist William Thackeray. The latter considered him a pleasant, if fickle, company. “Morton,” he wrote, “is always embroiled in some female adventure. As soon as I hear that he is interested in a woman, I feel sorry for her. He longs for them, and then abandons them. His behavior with women is shocking ”.

One of his best-known seductions was that of the courtesan and dancer Lola Montez, already the lover of King Ludwig I of Bavaria (father of Ludwig II, who built fairytale castles with such opulence as to reduce him into bankruptcy). Morton challenged a French aristocrat, Count Roger de Beauvoir, to a duel for Lola, and fought to a duel with the indignant “protector” of one of his other friends. Thackeray wrote: “Morton is a genius at getting into trouble. The surprising thing is that he survived forty years without being killed ”.

His last duel took place in 1851 in Paris, where Morton was working as a correspondent for the London newspaper Morning Advertiser. His old friend Bower also lived in the city as a Paris correspondent for the Morning Post. Their relationship was apparently friendly, and when Bower occasionally needed to return to England, Morton always made sure to watch over Mrs. Bower. His family had known hers from childhood. I guess it was for this reason that Bower – himself no stranger to marital infidelity – felt he could trust a seasoned Don like Morton to watch over his wife during her absences. But his mistake unleashed fatal consequences.

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In September 1852 Frances Bower gave birth to a child in her home on the rue de Seine. The delivery was difficult and the woman suffered from fever and bouts of delirium in the following weeks. She demanded that Morton join her and hang out with her. This might have confirmed the suspicions Bower had belatedly begun to have about his friend and wife, but he did not. Then, on October 1, as Morton waited in an adjoining room, Frances Bower summoned her husband to his bedside and told him: “The baby is not yours, but Morton’s.”

Bower immediately rushed into the dining room where Morton was sitting. He grabbed a kitchen knife and pointed it at him. Morton fled, and Bower chased after him. His mother grabbed her son’s dress in an attempt to calm him down, but to no avail. The coat tore, the old lady fell to the ground, but Bower was barely slowed down in his angry attempt to catch Morton. She ran down the stairs that Morton had taken, caught up with him, and stuck the knife in his neck, behind his left ear. Morton fell to the ground with the carotid artery severed, and died within minutes. Bower went upstairs to his apartment, changed his clothes, took some money and, with the cook’s help, walked out the back door and fled to England. He remained in the country for only a short time, soon returning to Paris, where he was tried for murder.

But in France at the time, husbands who killed seducers (and occasionally the reverse) were viewed with a certain benevolence. Bower was thus exonerated and walked out of court free to resume his career. And so he did, with a surprising twist. A few weeks later the Morning Advertiser offered him what had been Morton’s job, making him one of the few killers in history to be rewarded with the victim’s job.

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Grief-stricken Frances Bower returned to England with her son and died just four years after her lover. Bower remained in Paris, where he worked for the newspaper until his death in 1884 at the age of 69. The child who triggered this series of events – named Charles – never married, and lived quietly on the family money until his death in 1918.

(Translation by Federico Ferrone)

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