“Robinson was the oldest correspondent who covered the entirety of the war, writing up to 2,000 words a day for The Times.”

By Joseph McAleer

HARRY PERRY ROBINSON was elderly and infirm at the outbreak of the First World War. But that didn’t stop the 54-year-old correspondent for The Times of London from covering the fighting on the Western Front.

A classic ‘Indiana Jones’-style adventurer with a bowler hat and a fountain pen, by 1914, Robinson had already enjoyed a distinguished career in Britain and the United States.

Born in India and educated at Oxford, he’d mined for gold on the American frontier, worked with railway barons and even helped William McKinley win the U.S. presidency.

But now with armies marching off to war in France and Belgium, there was no stopping him from crossing the English Channel and heading to the Western Front to bear witness to history as it was being made.

Robinson was, in fact, the oldest correspondent who covered the entirety of the war, writing up to 2,000 words a day for The Times, articles that were also syndicated in newspapers around the world. He was part of a coterie of correspondents at the front, including Philip Gibbs and William Beach Thomas. Robinson followed in the footsteps of his journalist brother, Philip Robinson, arrested as a spy in Cuba during the Spanish-American War.

As there were often long stretches between battles, correspondents searched for topics to write about to satisfy a public hungry for news. During lulls, Robinson, keenly interested in the natural world, turned his reporter’s eye to the war’s impact on flora and fauna.

“Strips of waste land by the roadside are ablaze with wildflowers, ragwort and milfoil and toadflax and evening primrose,” he once wrote. “A single chiffchaff – plucky little thruster that he is! – was singing impatiently not far behind the battle-line.”

He also wrote about a spirited stork in the garden of the Hotel du Rhin in Amiens which squawked loudly whenever the Boche – the pejorative for the German enemy – flew overhead.

Airplanes, in fact, were a particular fascination for Robinson. Invented just over a decade ago, they came into their own during the First World War. Robinson cited having the chance to fly above the battlefield as one of his main accomplishments as a war correspondent. It was his first time in an airplane and, giddy as a schoolboy, he wrote about the experience in The Times in August 1916, as the Battle of the Somme was under way.

“War nowadays, in most of its aspects, is a terrible, sordid thing,” he wrote. “But this fighting of the airmen is more than the warfare of any ancient heroes, and comes nearer to the battling of the old gods than anything men have done or dreamed.”

Robinson marvelled at the view as he flew over friendly territory, parallel to the German line.

“What surprised my inexperience most was the wonderful clean-cut neatness of the landscape, with its endless chessboard pattern, as if the whole earth had gone to bed in the sunlight under a glorious patchwork quilt,” he observed. “It is really a much more beautiful world as the birds and the angels see it.”

Robinson gained a new-found appreciation for the value of observation from the air, the ability to see the enemy position and progress; viewed from above, the ugly trench “looked as if it were made with a sharp penknife cutting into cardboard.” His giddiness over the “joy of flight” is apparent:

They told me that I should hate it when we banked, but they were wrong. It was merely strange and infinitely novel and delightful, while as for the landing, which they said was worst of all, there can be no more gloriously exhilarating thing in life than that steep glide, when the propeller drops its note to a gentle purring, and the machine sweeps, like some fairy motor-car, dropping, with the clutch out, on frictionless bearings down the face of a hill of oil, from cloud-level to tree-level, to grass-level, there to land, with hardly a jar, and bound again and rush across the open space of turf, swinging round in a gentle curve until she stops with her nose to her own hangar like a well-handled horse pulling up at his own doorstep.

In The Turning Point, his 1917 book on the Battle of the Somme, Robinson continued the story after his airplane landed:

I have said that the chance of encounter with an enemy machine behind our lines was small; but it happened that that was one of the rare days when the Germans plucked up courage enough to come and had luck and skill enough to avoid our patrols.

As we climbed out of our machine, an officer of the Royal Flying Corps strolled up, and – “See anything of the Boche?” he asked.

“No,” replied my pilot. “Is he around?”

“There are five machines reported over and coming this way.”

It was interesting to know that we had been so near to excitement, and I was entirely glad to have missed it. Nor was anything more heard of the enemy machines.

Amid his excitement, Robinson reminded readers that aerial combat was a deadly business. In April 1918 he wrote about an “extraordinary incident” involving a British airplane that made headlines around the world. The two-man craft engaged the enemy above Arras, then disappeared from view. The plane was found 20 miles away, crashed in friendly territory.

“The opinion of experts is that the machine had flown by itself for at least two hours with two dead men in it until the petrol was exhausted, having swung in a great circle over unknown lands and back to behind the starting-place, as boats have been known to sail with sheets made fast and a dead man’s hand on the tiller,” Robinson reported.

The New York Herald quoted a British flying officer on this so-called “death flight”: “This incident is quite authentic as mentioned by Perry Robinson . . . for upward of two hours the two dead men were in the air before the final crash to earth.”

Given a knighthood by King George V for his wartime services, Robinson did not slow down in his later years (although he stayed on terra firma). In fact, at age 63, he found himself in Egypt with the scoop of the century, reporting on the discovery of the tomb of the boy-king Tutankhamun in February 1923. Now “Sir” Harry was assigned by The Times to protect its exclusive and act as the press agent to the Earl of Carnarvon (best known today for his ancestral home, Highclere Castle, featured in Downton Abbey).

Carnarvon famously died two months after the tomb’s opening, some say the victim of the mummy’s “curse.” Fortunately, Robinson survived, to continue his adventures for another seven years.

Joseph McAleer is the author of the upcoming book Escape Artist: The Nine Lives of Harry Perry Robinson. A Connecticut Yankee with a doctorate from Oxford, McAleer has held a variety of interesting jobs, including college professor, administrator of the Hawthornden Castle Literary Institute, corporate PR head, spokesman for the Roman Catholic Church, publisher, and national film critic. His previous books include Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain, 1914-1950 (Oxford, 1992), which received the inaugural Longmans/History and Call of the Atlantic: Jack London’s Publishing Odyssey Overseas, 1902-1916 (Oxford, 2016).