by A. N. Wilson
Stead, and the sort of journalism which he pioneered, was to provide for the rising tide of lower-middle-class chapelgoers a marvellous substitute for the dramas of the Devil’s Theatre, the frivolous triumphs and disasters of the Devil’s Prayer Book. He was to redefine the world as a lurid back-drop for a new literary form, every bit as diverting as the three-decker novel from the Satanic circulating libraries.
Gladstone, who made such a powerful appeal to this class, was to learn by vertiginous experience its fondness for whipping itself up into frenzies of moral indignation: useful for the Grand Old Man in the case of the Bulgarian Atrocities, embarrassing in the case of Dilke’s adultery – and in the case of Parnell, politically calamitous.
Stead was twenty-two when he became editor of the Northern Echo, a daily paper published in Darlington, and he remained there until 1880. It was the articles he wrote on the Bulgarian Atrocities in 1876 which first brought him to notice, and which were crucial in demonstrating to Gladstone that there existed a ‘constituency’ who could be swayed on supra-political moral grounds. Stead had cheered when Gladstone promised to boot the Turks out of Bulgaria – ‘their Zaptieks and their Mudirs, and their Bimbashis and their Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province they have desecrated and profaned’. But Gladstone when swept to power in 1880 did nothing about renegotiating the terms of the Congress of Berlin which trisected Bulgaria and left two of the three sections under Turkish rule.7 Few of the subscribers to the Northern Echo would much care, because by then they had moved on to some other excitement.
In 1880 Stead became Morley’s deputy in London on the Pall Mall Gazette, becoming editor in August 1883.8 The type of journalism which he espoused and developed was to become an essential prism by which the modern world observed itself. It was based on a threefold alliance, between an eagerly opinionated public, a political class anxious to test and ride these opinions like surfers waiting for the next roller to bear them crashing to shore, and the conduit that brought these two together, the solicitors or procurers known as journalists. Of Stead it was observed, ‘Nothing has happened to Britain since 1880 which has not been influenced by the personality of this extraordinary fanatic, visionary and philanthropist.’9 The opinion was that of Reggie Brett (later Lord Esher), the private secretary of Lord Hartington. Brett had introduced Jackie Fisher to Stead – a meeting which led to the ‘Truth about the Navy’ articles.
In 1882–3 Brett’s mind had turned to Egypt and the Sudan. The Cabinet was, as on most issues, divided about Imperial affairs generally, Egypt in particular, with the secretary for India (Harrington), the president of the Board of Trade (Chamberlain) and the first lord of the Admiralty (Northbrook) taking a hawkish and interventionist view; John Bright (chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster) was the most extreme in the opposite direction, being a Quaker and a pacifist. Gladstone was chiefly worried by the possibility of spending public money, and still believed that the purchase of Suez Canal shares had been a risk not worth taking. But, as Frederic Harrison declared, ‘a hollow and ghostlike laugh of derision’ was to be heard from Disraeli’s burial-vault as the Gladstone government of 1880–5 responded to events in Egypt.
Having spent the Midlothian campaign denouncing ‘Beaconsfieldism’ and opposing British involvement in Egypt, Gladstone had to recognize that the United Kingdom’s commercial interests were intimately bound up with Egypt and the Suez Canal. Forty-four per cent of Egyptian imports came from the UK, and 80 per cent of Egyptian exports came to Britain. The canal was a vital route to India, for both commercial and military reasons. The political situation was, to put it mildly, unstable and the system of Dual Control – by which the khedive governed with the cooperation of Franco-British advisers – did not work well. For reasons which had more to do with French domestic politics than with Egypt itself, the French did not have the concerted will to persist with a policy of European intervention when the situation became complicated. The mutiny of the Egyptian army in 1879 had been followed by the uprising of Colonel Arabi Pasha in 1881 – which many French liberals saw as a legitimate nationalist aspiration. The French fleet which together with the British had been patrolling the waters of Alexandria harbour was withdrawn, leaving the British fleet alone. Alexandria saw riots during the summer of 1882, with 50 Europeans killed and 60 wounded on 11 June. Gladstone with great reluctance sent in the army, under Sir Garnet Wolseley. It was a highly popular campaign with the public, the more so since Wolseley gave Arthur, Duke of Connaught (1850–1942), command of the 1st Guards Brigade. ‘When I read that my darling precious Arthur was really to go, I quite broke down,’ the Queen told her journal. ‘It seemed like a dreadful dream.’10
But it turned out to be a triumph, one of the most successful small campaigns of the Queen’s reign. The general took with him a group of brilliant soldiers known as ‘the Wolseley gang’ who had proved themselves in the Ashanti War of 1873–4 – Redvers Buller, who interrupted his honeymoon to take part, William Butler, Hugh McCalmont and others. The Cardwell reforms of the army bore fruit: 17,401 British troops with 61 guns and supplies were successfully shipped to Alexandria – which the navy bombarded. Bright resigned from the Cabinet – no one much minded. Wolseley marched westward across the desert and engaged Arabi’s forces about 16 miles east of Zagazig at a village on the Sweetwater Canal, and beside the railway line, called Tel-el-Kebir. The Egyptian fortifications would, Wolseley saw, be a ‘tough nut to crack’, but it was a perfectly managed operation. The ‘butcher’s bill’ for the battle was 57 British killed, 382 wounded and 30 missing, half the casualties being Highland Scots.11 On 18 September Wolseley reached Cairo and found a letter from the Queen – ‘as cold-blooded effusion as you have ever read’.
Gladstone’s Cabinet intended to withdraw the troops as soon as possible. This, however, was one of the classic examples in history of how easy it is for a Western power to intervene in apparently anarchic situations abroad, and how difficult it is to withdraw. Over the next forty years sixty-six promises were made by British governments or their consuls announcing their firm intention of leaving Egypt. Somehow the moment was never quite right, and there was in fact a permanent presence of British troops on Egyptian soil until President Nasser drove them out in 1956.12
In September 1883 Major Evelyn Baring, who had been in India as a finance member of the viceroy’s council for three years, was recalled to London, knighted, and sent to Egypt as British agent and consul-general. He would hold the post for the next twenty-three years.13 Gladstone, of all unlikely people, had annexed Egypt, but he was not happy as a colonialist, still less as an imperialist. He quite failed to understand or to capture the mood described by Dilke at this time – ‘our side in the Commons is very jingo about Egypt. They badly want to kill somebody. They don’t know who.’14
Baring had set out for Egypt with the doubtless admirable intention of ‘leading the Egyptian people from bankruptcy to solvency, and then onward to affluence, from Khedival monstrosities to British justice, and from Oriental methods veneered with a spurious European civilization towards the true civilization of the West based on the principles of the Christian moral code’.15 Alas, this good Liberal banker was immediately faced with a danger which was not obviously soluble by reasonable means. An Egyptian government official, a former slave-trader called Mohammed Ahmed, declared himself to be the Mahdi (‘one who offers divine guidance in the right way’). He raised a rebellion in the Sudanese province of Kordofan. The khedive dispatched 10,000 troops under the command of General William Hicks: a good soldier, but one who was in an impossible position. The 10,000 Egyptians under him had not been paid, their morale was poor, their willingness to fight low. The Mahdi was established in the capital of Kordofan, El Obeid, a fortified city of 100,000 inhabitants, and though many of them were armed with nothing but sticks16 they fought as those who had God on their side. By a series of clever ambushes, and the use of treacherous guides who l
ured Hicks Pasha’s men into wooded ravines, the Dervishes were able to massacre all 10,000 of the Hicks army.
This was the situation facing Baring when he arrived as consul in Cairo.
General Charles George Gordon (1833–85) – from the British point of view, destined to be the tragic hero of the unfolding drama in the Sudan – was in Jerusalem when El Obeid surrendered to the Mahdi. When the news came of the Hicks disaster, he had been in Palestine ten months, basing himself in a house at Ain Karim, a village three miles west of the city. By the simple method of walking about Jerusalem with a bible in his hand, this devout Christian soldier managed to persuade himself that he had identified the actual Place of the Skull at which the crucifixion of Christ occurred, and the very ‘Garden Tomb’ which was the scene of the Resurrection. Since it looks so much more like the watercolour illustration of the Garden in a Victorian children’s bible than does the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, encrusted with centuries of ecclesiastical piety, it is not hard to see why Gordon’s ‘Garden Tomb’ appeals to Protestant pilgrims to this day.
Mysterious are the ways of Providence – in which Gordon, Gladstone and the Mahdi all fervently believed. While in Jerusalem, Gordon read of the unfolding events in the Sudan and favoured granting it independence under native rulers. ‘He rules there and is working out His Will and I like to think, as I verily believe, the end of it will be the end of slavery.’17 What neither Gordon nor Gladstone knew was that the Mahdi was to die of natural causes by the middle of 1885 and that the entire crisis occasioned by his uprising would thereby have been averted.
Gordon appeared to be destined for quite another sphere of glory, since while he was in Jerusalem the king of the Belgians offered him the governorship of the Congo. He was admirably qualified, having been in his time governor of the Sudan – he administered the place in happier pre-Mahdian times with almost no European troops – and the successful victor over the ‘Celestial King’ who had tried to raise the Taiping rebellion in China (hence his nickname – ‘Chinese Gordon’). The very man to exercise a kindly Christian influence over the Congolese.
But pressure was mounting on the Gladstone government to do something about the situation in the Sudan. The British generals in Cairo advising Baring – General Stephenson, Sir Evelyn Wood and General Baker – were all of the view that the Egyptian government could not hold on to the Sudan, and it was essential to withdraw the garrisons.18 It was a formidable, if not impossible operation. The combined number of Egyptians and British, civilian and military, at risk from the Mahdi in Khartoum was 6,000. How were they to be transported to safety? The prospect of thousands of men, women and children making their way across waterless deserts, at the mercy of fanatical Dervishes, was too horrible to contemplate. The government which was swept to power on a wave of horror at the Bulgarian atrocities could not overlook this.
When the news of the Hicks disaster reached England, a colonel in the Royal Engineers living at Folkestone remembered twenty years before seeing another fanatical horde in China collapse before the genius and skill of a young British officer. Colonel Edwards wrote to the inspector general of fortifications, General Sir Andrew Clarke RE, ‘There is one man who is competent to deal with the question – Charlie Gordon.’19 Clarke told his friend the chancellor of the Exchequer, who in turn told the foreign secretary, Lord Granville. On Sunday 1 December, Gladstone wired to Baring in Cairo, ‘If General Charles Gordon were willing to go to Egypt, would he be of any use to you or to the Egyptian Government, and if so, in what capacity?’
The idea that ‘Chinese Gordon’ would save the day gathered force. It was once believed20 that the Harrington ‘party’ within the Cabinet deliberately set up a meeting between Gordon and W.T. Stead, engineered by Reggie Brett, who had such belief in Stead’s powers. The truth is, there was more chance, or Providence, at work than conspiracy. Gordon had accepted governorship of the Congo. Harrington and Granville were in correspondence about whether a commissioned British officer could legally accept such a post without resigning his commission and his pension.21 Harrington would scarcely have been writing in confidence to a Cabinet colleague about Gordon’s departure for the Congo if he seriously entertained hopes of nobbling him for the Sudan. Later, when Gordon was sent to the Sudan, Harrington was a supporter – but that was after two changes of mind.
Gordon went to Brussels, accepted governorship of the Congo from King Leopold and wrote resigning his commission in the British army. The next day, 8 January 1884, Gordon was staying with his sister in Southampton. An old friend, Captain Brocklehurst of the Horse Guards, was with him when a short bearded man presented himself at the door.
‘Can I see General Gordon?’ – ‘I am General Gordon’ – was the exchange which took place on the doorstep – itself a token of Gordon’s eccentricity. How many other generals of this date would open the front door rather than wait for a servant to do it for them? For both men, it was a religious moment. Stead ‘knew he was in the presence of one of God’s doughiest champions’. Gordon at first declined to speak of the Sudan, but once he started on the subject, it was difficult to stop him. The government policy of evacuation could not work, and he explained to Stead why. ‘You must either surrender absolutely to the Mahdi or defend Khartoum at all hazards.’22
Before Stead left, Gordon presented him with a copy of The Imitation of Christ. The next day the Pall Mall Gazette had the headline Chinese Gordon for the Sudan:
We cannot send a regiment to Khartoum, but we can send a man who on more than one occasion has proved himself more valuable in similar circumstances than an entire army. Why not send Chinese Gordon with full powers to Khartoum, to assume absolute control of the territory, to treat with the Mahdi, to relieve the garrisons, and to do what he can to save what can be saved from the wreck in the Sudan?
Gladstone’s government worked on this advice. It was the most disastrous political mistake of Gladstone’s career, and it was based on two fundamental errors. First, he could not decide – as Gordon earnestly desired him to do – whether Gordon in Khartoum was being sent as an adviser, or as an alternative executive. And secondly, he would not commit the government, until it was too late, to sending troops as a reinforcement for Gordon’s mission. These two mistakes were compounded by dithering. After Gordon had set out for Khartoum, the government changed its policy. In January, Gladstone’s son Herbert had made a categorical assurance that the British would not hand over responsibility for the crisis to anyone else. On 19 February Hartington shamelessly changed gear with: ‘I contend that we are not responsible for the rescue or relief of the garrisons either in the Western or the Southern or the Eastern Sudan.’23
The Cabinet dithered about whether to send a relieving force to Gordon in Khartoum. When General Sir Garnet Wolseley was at length dispatched with the Wolseley gang, they had on their hands a much more difficult campaign than their victory over Arabi at Tel-el-Kebir. In January 1885 10,000 Dervishes struck a column led by Sir Herbert Stewart at Abu Klea, 45 miles from Korti – ‘the most savage and bloody action,’ according to Winston Churchill, ‘ever fought in the Soudan by British troops’. Colonel Burnaby was killed, with 8 other officers and 65 other ranks. Stewart was mortally wounded. Khartoum was by now besieged, when Sir Charles Wilson, an experienced staff officer but no commander, received the fateful message by Nile steamer from Gordon that men and women were dying in the streets and relief was desperately needed. Wilson delayed for three days – the most fateful three days of Gordon’s life.
Two days before his fifty-second birthday, at 3.30 a.m., General Gordon lit a cigarette and sent that message to Wilson. By 5 a.m. he was dressed in his white uniform and his sword and holding his revolver. The noise of the Dervishes in the streets had been echoing all night. He walked to the top of the stairs which led to the palace council chamber. A throng of Dervishes stood at the foot of the stairs brandishing spears. Their leader, a warrior called Shahin, advanced with his spear. Gordon shrugged before Shahin’s spear hit hi
m. As he spun round, another spear hit his back. He fell on his face and the other Dervishes attacked him. It was 5.30 on the morning of 26 January 1885.fn1
The scene has been painted by G.W. Joy and now hangs in the City Art Gallery, Leeds. Reproductions of it are legion. I must belong to the last generation of Englishmen whose first history lessons took place in a schoolroom where Gordon’s Last Stand hung on the walls. It is an icon of Christian civilization, stoical in the face of anarchic savagery. It is also, paradoxically, an image of white supremacy and power, even though it is a picture of one quite small white man about to be speared by a gang of black men. Partly, the message of supremacy is reinforced by the fact that Gordon stands at the top of the steps while his assailants come up from below. But more than that, he stands as the emblem of what is necessary in the face of such murderous anarchy: calm discipline, goodness such as only the English can bring to the world. This is the message of this powerful picture: it justifies a British presence, not only in the Sudan, but anywhere else in the world where the indigenous population lack the self-discipline or restraint to conduct themselves according to the mores of North-West Europe.
Nor, when contemplating this icon which still possesses a power to move, should one overlook the very considerable charisma of Gordon himself. He was not the sort of general whom every officer would like. (Some good men were killed in the march to relieve Khartoum, including the popular General Earle, and it was understandable that Redvers Buller was dismissive of Gordon – ‘the man was not worth the camels’.)25 But one has to remember that when he arrived in Khartoum Gordon was greeted by thousands of inhabitants as ‘Father’ and ‘Sultan’. ‘I come,’ he told them, ‘without soldiers but with God on my side, to redress the evils of the Sudan. I will not fight with any weapons but justice.’ Cynicism does not tell the whole truth. Nevertheless, Lytton Strachey looked ahead to the ‘glorious slaughter of twenty thousand Arabs, a vast addition to the British Empire, and a step in the Peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring’26 when General Kitchener conquered the Dervishes at Omdurman. These horrors are not to be denied, and we can see they were a combined consequence of the new generation’s imperial ruthlessness, and the old generation’s vagueness about intervening.
