Avenging General Gordon

The New South Wales Contingent to Sudan provides insights into colonial Australian society in the 1880s.

“Good-bye, my son; I look upon you as going to your grave.” With these words David Weir farewelled his son Robert in early 1885. Private Robert Weir, a volunteer in the local militia, had volunteered for service in the force that the colony of New South Wales was preparing to send to Sudan. His father’s prescience was accurate: Private Weir died of dysentery at the Sudanese port of Suakin in May.

The Sudan Contingent is usually only a footnote in Australian military histories, but the historical records surrounding it offer insights into contemporary colonial thought on patriotism, Imperial unity, and the future of the Australian colonies.

A Rebellion in Africa

In 1882, with the end of the Anglo–Egyptian War, Egypt became a de facto protectorate of the British Empire. At this time nominally claimed by the Ottoman Empire, Egypt itself claimed suzerainty of the vast territory to its south known as Sudan. A rebellion had broken out in Sudan under the leadership of Muhammad Ahmad, a revered Islamic scholar. Claiming to be the Mahdi, the prophesied “Rightly Guided One”, he implored his followers to reclaim the territory of Sudan, removing all Egyptian, Ottoman, and European imperial powers. Egypt sent an army south to crush the revolt, but it was soundly defeated by the Mahdist forces.

In May 1884, British Prime Minister William Gladstone told Parliament that he wanted to avoid “a war of conquest against a people struggling to be free”. When honourable members objected to his phrasing, he made his position clear: “Yes; these are people struggling to be free, and they are struggling rightly to be free.” Those words would come back to haunt him.

Britain could not ignore the rebellion. Two separate Egyptian forces led by British officers in Sudan had been defeated by Mahdists. The British now sought to evacuate the Egyptian army garrisons that were in Mahdist territory, particularly in Khartoum, at the confluence of the Blue and White Nile rivers. General Sir Charles Gordon was given this task. Gordon had made his name as the commander of the Ever Victorious Army, the small European- and American-trained Chinese force that had quashed the Taiping Rebellion in the early 1860s in China. He had been an administrator in Sudan in the 1870s, and had gained further fame through his attempts to end slavery and the slave trade there. By this stage of his life, he saw part of his mission as bringing the light of Christianity to the world.

A British martyr

Gordon was ordered to evacuate the garrison at Khartoum, but when he arrived there, he instead chose to fortify the position. Mahdist forces besieged the city for about ten months. During this ever-worsening siege, Gladstone’s government was finally persuaded to send an expeditionary force south along the Nile to relieve the city. This force took a long time to leave Cairo, and it was harassed by Mahdist forces once it began to move south.

Gordon received at least three letters from the Mahdi during the siege, the text interwoven with numerous Quranic references. The Mahdi enjoined him to surrender and convert to Islam, promising Gordon safe passage to England if he did so. In August 1884, the Mahdi wrote to Gordon:

“Verily God does not injure man in anything, but man injures himself. So beware lest you injure yourself and repent when repentance avails not. Happy is the man who is warned by another and hastens to his own good. So come to salvation before your wings are clipped. Peace be upon him who follows the right guidance.”

Gordon, the epitome of the Christian soldier, was not swayed. On 14 December 1884, he wrote the final entry in his journal:

“Now MARK THIS, if the Expeditionary Force, and I ask for no more than two hundred men, does not come in ten days, the town may fall; and I have done my best for the honour of our country. Good bye.”

On 26 January 1885, Mahdist forces broke into Khartoum and killed  almost the entire Egyptian garrison and Gordon. The expeditionary force arrived within sight of Khartoum on 28 January, which would have been Gordon’s fifty-second birthday.

The Contingent

Gordon’s death electrified the British Empire. The historian Ken Inglis observed that “Gordon was mourned more intensely than any other Englishman in the whole of the nineteenth century.” Britons wanted action taken against the Mahdi. Those people ‘struggling rightly to be free’ now had to be chastened for their impudence.

On 12 February 1885, the Sydney Morning Herald printed a letter from Major-General Edward Strickland, who had served in the British army all over the Empire and had retired to Manly. This prominent officer suggested an “Australian” contingent be offered to Britain, either to fight in Africa or to be posted to England to free up British regulars. Strickland’s letter reminded readers of Gordon’s exemplary militant Christianity. “Every Christian-born subject feels to-day that he has lost a friend in Gordon,” he wrote, “therefore all Christendom will ring with praises of the gallantry of Australia” if New South Wales were to offer troops. Reviving the medieval opponents of Christian crusaders, Strickland referred to the Mahdi’s followers as Saracens, “fighting under all the savage influences of fanaticism”.

Later that same day, acting premier of New South Wales William Bede Dalley offered one battalion of infantry and two batteries of artillery to the British government by telegraph, having first met with his cabinet and the colony’s military officers. After some debate, the relevant British secretaries of state accepted the offer of the infantry and one artillery battery. Other colonies seized the opportunity to ask the British government what further forces it wanted, but these offers were politely declined, probably because only New South Wales had made a concrete offer – and at its own cost. In any case, for British politicians in London, thinking of a New South Wales contingent as an Australian contingent was an easy elision to make.

The Contingent that sailed on 3 March 1885 consisted of a battalion of infantry, a battery of artillery, and a small ambulance corps, amounting to about 770 men. Colonel John Soame Richardson had been commandant of the New South Wales military forces since 1871, and he took command of the Contingent. Formerly a British regular army officer, Richardson had seen active service in the Crimean War and the Taranaki and Waikato campaigns of the New Zealand Wars.

Lord Loftus, Governor of New South Wales, addressed the troops before their departure. He drew attention to the fact that this was the first time that a self-governing British colony had sent its own forces overseas in support of the British Empire. The governor linked the British military’s aims to stamping out slavery and the slave trade in Sudan. The Contingent would “assist the imperial forces in a bitter struggle for the suppression of unspeakable cruelty, and for the establishment of order and justice in a misgoverned country.” The soldiers would also “show to the world the unity of the mighty and invincible empire of which you are members.”

On campaign

The men of the Contingent steamed from Sydney on the troopships Iberia and Australasian, outfitted in scarlet jackets, dark blue trousers and white helmets. The British uniform was changing, though, and when the men arrived in Sudan, they received the khaki uniforms favoured by the British in their colonial wars. By the end of the century, the whole British army would be dressed in khaki. The Australian War Memorial recently acquired one of these khaki uniforms.

On arrival at the Red Sea port of Suakin in Sudan, the infantry battalion of the Contingent marched to join the main force of British regular and Indian Army troops. Private Frank Walters wrote, “With our valises and all our harness on, we had to trudge about two miles through heavy sand over our boot tops, and in the blazing sun.” When the colonials arrived in camp, General Sir Gerald Graham, commanding, addressed the men:

“The eyes of all English-speaking races, and indeed those of the whole civilised world, are upon you, and I am certain that you will uphold the honour of the Empire. I feel proud to command such a force, and am sure it will do the greatest credit to New South Wales and to the race of which you are an important part.”

The New South Wales infantry joined Graham’s force of 10,000 men. In a hollow square formation, this force marched to the village of Tamai, where Osman Digna, an ally of the Mahdi, was said to be amassing a force. However, when they arrived, the Mahdist forces retreated after a short skirmish, so the British troops captured and burned down the village.

The remainder of the brief deployment in Sudan was spent in desultory activity. New South Wales men were among those who participated in an abortive attempt to build a railway from Suakin to the inland town of Berber to aid British logistics. It was abandoned as far too expensive, and the rails and rolling stock could not be defended outside Suakin city limits. Some Contingent men volunteered to join a British camel corps. The artillery component of the Contingent remained in Suakin and drilled, then moved to the nearby village of Handoub and continued drilling.

After a war scare between Britain and Russia, there was talk of redeploying the Contingent to India, but it came to nought. Sending colonial troops overseas in support of a specific campaign was one thing, but the colonial press and public were not ready to supply colonial troops to the general garrisoning roster of the Empire. The New South Wales Contingent left the port of Suakin in mid-May 1885, returning to Sydney in mid-June. The main British force left too, and only a small garrison remained at the port. Inland, the Mahdists consolidated their conquest. British forces returned to Sudan in the 1890s and finally defeated the Mahdist forces in September 1898 at the Battle of Omdurman.

The Contingent’s welcome to Sydney was a cold and wet June day. The khaki-clad soldiers marched through the rain and stood at attention while the governor, and representatives from each of the colonies (including New Zealand) gave speeches. The men struggled to hear the speeches and were very quickly soaked to the bone.Of the Contingent’s activities in the Sudan, its commander Colonel Richardson said: “We regret much that we did not see more fighting; indeed as far as actual fighting is concerned we consider that it was nil, but we are glad to know that what we did met with approval.” Richardson was promoted to the rank of major general and created a Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB) for his services.

Deaths and their commemoration

Nine men of the Contingent died as a result of service, all of whom died of illness. Three men died in Suakin; three in Colombo during a stopover on the way home; one at sea; and two died in Sydney after returning. The commemoration of these deaths sheds light on how contemporary colonial society understood the significance of the Contingent.

Private Weir died of dysentery on 1 May 1885 aboard the hospital ship Ganges, and was buried in Suakin. It is not clear when he first became sick, but it seems likely that he was not on the march to Tamai. A year after his death, a memorial was erected near Kiama to commemorate him in his local community. A local politician delivered an address, stating that Weir’s “death, sorrowful though it were to his parents, was a national gain, and for all time to come his noble and heroic example would stimulate us to do our duty.” Calling Weir “our first patriot”, the speaker felt that if Weir had fought the enemy, “he would have displayed the courage of the old Briton – English, Irish, and Scotch, with the enthusiasm of the Australian superadded.” Despite the patriotic rhetoric, the speaker noted that he himself had “conscientiously opposed” the sending of the Contingent overseas.

In February 1888, the then Major General Richardson, CB, unveiled a plaque in St Andrew’s Cathedral, Sydney, to the memory of the four artillerymen of the Contingent who had died on active service. The cathedral service commenced with the hymn, “Onward Christian Soldiers”, after which the Anglican Archbishop, Alfred Barry, delivered an address. Barry remembered “an all but unanimous enthusiasm” for the Contingent in Sydney in 1885 that supported “loyal service to our common country in what seemed an hour of need”. He described the plaque as “a memorial of a national unity, binding together all the new Englands on this side of the world with the great old England which we always call ‘home’.” The British Empire had “a Divine mission”, Barry declared, and he continued:

“Without one touch of conceit, pride, and presumptuous self-exaltation, it is impossible to survey England’s world-wide commerce, colonisation, empire … and not to understand that a splendid and arduous mission is laid upon our race, and that it is for us everywhere to live up to it and fulfil it.”

General Gordon himself would have agreed. In this view, the purpose of the British Empire was not about expanding commerce or gaining territory, but about spreading Christianity.
 

Mockers

Archbishop Barry warned his congregation not to listen to “those who delight to belittle everything”, and indeed, the Contingent was a favourite target for colonial detractors. The satirical newspaper Melbourne Punch reported in October 1885: “The burst of patriotism in New South Wales is over, and now the cost has to be counted – not the pecuniary cost, mark you, but the cost in revulsion of feeling about the whole affair. After historians will have a pitiful tale to record.” It was not only intercolonial rivalry that inspired such belittling. Sydney’s Bulletin was likewise scathing of the whole affair. In March 1889 it labelled William Bede Dalley a “tenth-rate Caesar who dispatched a clumsy band of apprentice butchers to chase goats in the Soudan”. Its editor lambasted Melbourne’s new statue of General Gordon, or as the Bulletin called him, “the raving crank of Khartoum” and “a bloodthirsty fanatic”. The paper predicted that in the future, statues of notables such as Gordon and Queen Victoria would be “melted down to be made into nails and forks and agricultural implements”.

The funeral of Private Martin Guest

In amongst the rhetoric, either grandiose or sarcastic, it can be possible to forget the human toll. The sad circumstances of Private Martin Guest’s funeral remind us that even small military commitments have long-lasting effects on family at home. Guest had been healthy throughout the campaign and on the voyage home. It was said that he became sick at the welcome parade, standing for hours in the pouring rain. He died soon after returning, at the end of June 1885, and his remains were buried with a military funeral at Rookwood Cemetery. Sydney’s Evening News reported the words of his wife, who said that Martin came home “chattering, blue with cold, his poor fingers, unable to grasp the hands of his own child.”

William Bede Dalley and a number of his ministers attended Guest’s funeral, which included a firing party made up of men of the Contingent. The politicians then left in horse-drawn cabs. The article in the usually staid Evening News had a quietly damning conclusion: “But although this public parade took place, the fact was ascertained from the family of the deceased that no offers, no inquiries had been made by departmental authorities, or by the Patriotic Fund Committee.”

These comments anticipate the questions asked three decades later about how Australia should take care of large numbers of returning soldiers and the families of soldiers that do not return.

The Sudan Contingent returned to New South Wales devoid of the military glory it had sought. Contemporary colonial expressions of pride, patriotism, or parody, however, underline the important message that the Australian colonies had sent to London. Australians would continue to send men, money, and materiel to the wars of the British Empire until the middle of the next century.

About the author

Dr Thomas J. Rogers is a historian in the Military History Section at the Memorial. He is the author of The Civilisation of Port Phillip: Settler Ideology, Violence, and Rhetorical Possession (2018).