BY ALL ACCOUNTS, Charles Gordon was a bit of an oddball. He was a Christian fundamentalist, whose faith sat in stern condemnation of his own homosexuality. Frequently writing and opining that he wished he had been born a eunuch, this internal strife likely lay at the core of his well-acknowledged death wish. While still aged twenty-two in 1855 he was detailed to the war against Russia being fought on the Crimean peninsula and so wrote to his sister, Augusta, that he was off to Balaklava, ‘hoping, without having a hand in it, to be killed’. After rising meteorically through the ranks, Gordon would later be lionized by the British public for his suppression of the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64), a civil war that tore through China as the nationalistic Taipings, their name translating rather ironically as great peace, sought to bring down the ruling Manchu dynasty and replace it with what they called the Heavenly Kingdom. Hailed at home as ‘Chinese’ Gordon, he was not, understandably, held in such high regard in China, where he is still depicted as little more than an imperialist bully boy.
Returned from China, Gordon became morose and something of a recluse, with some suspicious of his motives for devoting so much of his time and money to running schools for homeless boys plucked from the London slums.
Gordon’s self-imposed hermitage, however, was not destined to endure. Come 1883, Muhammad Ahmad, the self-proclaimed Mahdi (a sort of Islamic Messiah), had brought the Sudan to the brink of internecine conflict and the British public began calling for ‘Chinese’ Gordon to sort it all out. By January 1884, the Gladstone government had given in to this public demand and dispatched Gordon to Africa with strict orders to organize the evacuation of Khartoum but not to tarry a moment longer than was absolutely necessary. But the thing Gladstone feared most came to pass, with Gordon becoming entrenched and unable to leave the city.
Gladstone was unaware that Gordon had already resolved that he would never leave Khartoum; he had decided that the city would serve as the venue for his much-desired martyrdom. It has been suggested that Gordon, morose and introspective from his formative years, was afflicted by Asperger’s syndrome; he was most certainly prone to protracted bouts of depressive self-examination during which he read nothing but the Bible. Sir Evelyn Baring, the British Consul-General of Egypt, reported back to Westminster that as Gordon seemed to take his instructions directly from the prophets of the Old Testament he would be unlikely in the extreme to follow the dictates of any mortal – and it seems Baring was right. As Gordon approached Khartoum he became increasingly messianic, proclaiming he would ‘cast down the Mahdi’ and his ‘rabble of feeble stinking Dervishes’, and sent telegrams to the city pronouncing ‘Be not afraid. Ye are men, not women. I, Gordon, am coming.’ And then, to make sure his own fate was sealed, having crossed the border into Sudan, Gordon held a meeting in the town of Berber, in northern Sudan, with local tribal leaders. He revealed to them the details of his secret orders to evacuate all British personnel from Khartoum as the Egyptians, who already had troops on Sudanese soil, had announced their impending withdrawal in the face of the Mahdi’s escalating activity. In view of the fact that Gordon had already expressed the opinion that ‘The moment it is known that we have given up the game every man will go over to the Mahdi’, this move cannot be seen in any other light than a form of suicide.
Once ensconced in the city, Gordon made public his intention to hold out against the Mahdi before organizing the evacuation of nearly 3,000 non-combatants, which left him with about 8,000 well-armed troops, a massive stockpile of ammunition and adequate artillery. But it was only a matter of time; the Mahdi laid siege to the city in March 1884 and, by the close of that year, the population was starved close to death. Gordon wrote to his sister that he hoped it would be God’s will for him to die there as ‘Earth’s joys grow very dim; its glories have faded.’ He was incessantly chain-smoking and, when not attacking his servants during his increasingly violent mood swings, he spent more time discussing God’s mighty plans with the mouse that had taken up residence in his office than he did orchestrating the city’s defences. Back in the UK, the public, unaware of Gordon’s state of mind, attacked Gladstone for not sending a relief column to save its hero. Eventually, after Queen Victoria herself also demanded he did so, the prime minster had to relent and in August 1884 he appointed Field Marshal Sir Garnet Wolseley to lead the Nile Expedition, ordering him to make ready to march on Khartoum with all possible haste – and this is where Thomas Cook Travel came into the picture.
Born in Derbyshire in 1808, Thomas Cook was a dedicated temperance preacher organizing meetings and taking his congregation, as well as others, to listen to preachers at temperance rallies around the country. His first venture was a package deal with Midland Railways to round-trip 500 passengers to such a rally in Loughborough on 5 July 1841 at a shilling a head. By 1870 he was advertising round-the-world trips, which inspired Jules Verne to pen Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). He was also running archaeological trips up the Nile in agreement with various tribal leaders and local warlords along its banks to ensure free passage. Aware of Thomas Cook’s corporate expertise in the movement of large numbers of people in foreign climes and anxious to move the Nile Expedition relief column as swiftly as possible, Gladstone hired Thomas Cook to handle the logistics, which must make Wolseley’s army the first to have set out to war on a package holiday deal. Despite Cook’s efficiency, the relief arrived just two days too late.
THE MAHDI
Within six months of his victory over Gordon at Khartoum, the Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad was himself dead from typhus. But the war he had started continued until Lord Kitchener arrived in the Sudan to conduct a vengeful campaign of such brutality that one of his young lieutenants, Winston Churchill, wrote an open condemnation of his ‘kill-them-all’ policy.
The only ammunition Kitchener took to the Sudan was the later-banned dum-dum round, a hollow-point bullet that ‘mushroomed’ on impact; he also had several of the Mahdi’s sons and other relatives shot out of hand.
The Mahdi’s surviving son, Sayidd al-Mahdi, born the year of his father’s death, was later seen by the British as a moderate with whom they could do business. A measured and temperate man, he had meetings with King Farouk of Egypt, later opening up talks in the 1950s with British Foreign Secretary Sir Anthony Eden and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. A skilled negotiator, Sayidd al-Mahdi secured Sudanese independence from the Egyptian–British alliance on 1 January 1956.
Overrun by the Mahdi’s forces, almost everyone in the city had been slaughtered, including Gordon, whom survivors stated to have died ranting biblical passages and firing his revolver until cut down. His head was cut off and paraded in front of the victors on a pike before being jammed into the fork of a tree for the crows to pick at. The rest of his body was hacked up and thrown down a well. Naturally this was not something that Gladstone thought would go down well at home so a myth was circulated that Gordon had walked out unarmed to meet his death in full uniform, with the very sight of his serene calm causing the invading horde to fall back in awe – until one coward threw a spear at him. The artist George William Joy was commissioned to run up a canvas depicting this version of events, a propaganda coup that worked so well that this is still how most remember Gordon’s death. Such was the public outpouring of grief over his passing that when a written rebuke from Queen Victoria, blaming Gladstone for Gordon’s death, was made public, he was kicked out of office.