Reporting the horror of war

[dante]

Single 1914/15 Star to William Henry George Werndel
Reuters War Correspondent in Salonika with the British Army and Reuters Correspondent Greco-Turkish war.

William H G Werndel died on the 7th of March 1945 at the age of 88, He joined Reuters news agency in Constantinople in 1883. For nearly 40 years he was Reuters principal representative in the near east, he spoke Turkish, Greek and Bulgarian almost as fluently as German French and his Native English.

During the Great War he was Reuters War correspondence in Salonika. In 1922 he was appointed as Chief correspondent to the League of Nations.

" September 1918, Werndel, who had stayed with the Serbian army until its crushing by typhus and the combined armies of Austria and Bulgaria, and J. W. Calvert of The Times were the only British correspondents left in distant Macedonia to witness the beginning of the final Allied offensive 
from Salonika.

Werndel's reports described the break-through of the Serbians, the frantic Bulgarian retreat to their frontier, and finally the arrival of Bulgarian emissaries bearing a white flag. On September 29th, almost three years to the day since he had reported Ferdinand's secret pact with Germany, Werndel sent a message telling of Bulgaria's unconditional surrender to the Allied Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Franchet"

From Reuters; In 1883, he began to train a new assistant correspondent, W. H. G. Werndel, to take his place. He trained him well. For twenty-five years "Werndel was to be Reuters' chief correspondent in Turkey; by the end of that time he had become one of the best-known British foreign correspondents in the Balkans; and after the, First World War he was Reuters' natural choice as permanent correspondent to the League of Nations at Geneva. When Englander finally left Constantinople for the more congenial buzz of news-agency politics in Paris, Werndel was joined, at the end of 1888, by another young man whose long career in Reuters was strangely like his own. Fergus Ferguson also stayed mainly in the Balkans until the First World War ; both Werndel and he had distinguished records as war correspondents in Macedonia and Palestine, and Ferguson succeeded Werndel as correspondent to the League of Nations in 1932. Both were Reuters correspondents for very nearly fifty years.

For the next twenty-five years, these two, as Reuters correspondents in the Balkans, worked right at the centre of the most fateful events in Europe. They reported the terrors of the Armenian massacres of 1895 and 1896, Germany's growing influence in Turkey, the Kaiser's visit to the Sultan, the movement of the Young Turks, the two Balkan Wars. It was a long and intricate history which led up to 1914. During this uneasy period Reuters' foreign correspondents were first allowed to add political comments (if clearly shown as such) to their political news. It was due to the intelligence, initiative and political tact of such reporters as Werndel and Ferguson that the Press soon accepted, and often relied upon, Reuters' development into a 'vicarious newspaper'.

My view is he must have been given a string of awards for various countries, but my research had thrown up nothing

Sadly even Reuters do not have a photograph of him....