‘Truest History, Struck Off at White Heat’: The Politics of Editing Gordon's Khartoum Journals

Abstract

The 317-day siege of Khartoum during 1884–85 was one of the most bitter in history, culminating in the deaths of thousands of inhabitants, members of the Egyptian occupying garrison and their commanding officer, Major-General Charles Gordon. Five months after his death, Gordon's surviving ‘Khartoum Journals’ were published, in carefully edited form. This article considers the highly politicised nature of the editing process, in which William Gladstone's cabinet agonised over suppressing the entire journal, censoring its contents or permitting the entire manuscript to be published, irrespective of the damage it might inflict on an already unpopular government. The article examines the nature of the elisions forced upon the editor of the journals, Egmont Hake. For the first time, it is also revealed how Hake's post-publication nationwide lecture tour, mounted amid the acrimonious 1885 election campaign, was in reality a systematic and effective Conservative Party initiative, funded by the son of Lord Salisbury, to exploit the name of Gordon to demonise and bring down the Gladstone ministry.

Notes

White, Hamo Thornycroft, 15.

Outside Britain, Australia was particularly smitten by Gordon, reflecting the role of Australian troops in Lord Wolseley's failed relief expedition of 1884–85. Geelong in Victoria opened its Gordon Memorial Technical College in 1887 and the University of New England at Arnidale in New South Wales installed a seven-panel Gordon Window in 1901. Melbourne has a replica of the pensive Thorneycroft statue, Brisbane has its own Gordon Park and Sydney a whole suburb named after the general.

Anon, Pictorial Records, 388–89.

Crosbie, Fall of Khartoum, 1–2.

Anon, Pictorial Records, 384–85.

Ibid., 386.

MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism, 62–63. Joy's painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1896 and hangs in the Leeds City Art Gallery.

Conan Doyle, ‘Adventure of the Cardboard Box’, 41. Holmes also describes a ‘short but interesting’ visit to Khartoum itself, the scene of Gordon's demise, in Conan Doyle, ‘Empty House’, 16. Both stories were originally published in The Strand Magazine, in 1892 and 1894 respectively.

This representation of the circumstances of Gordon's death was completely false and owed a great deal to propaganda created by Major F. W. Wingate of British Military Intelligence. Gordon was shot by mistake and against the specific orders of the Mahdi in the midst of a desperate struggle to hold the governor-general's mansion, in which he fought the invading Ansār (Mahdist soldiers) with sword and pistol. Johnson, ‘Death of Gordon’, 285–310.

Tidrick, Empire, 41–42.

Auchterlonie, ‘Eastern Question’, 5–24.

Porter, Absent-Minded Imperialists, 317.

A few are worth highlighting as a representative sample, illustrating not just the longevity of the brand but the variety of authorial theme: Macaulay, Gordon Anecdotes; Boulger, Life of Gordon; Butler, Charles George Gordon; Crabitès, The Sudan and Slavery; Buchan, Gordon at Khartoum; Beatty, His Country was the World; Elton, General Gordon; French, Gordon Pasha of the Sudan; Sparrow, Mandarin and Pasha; Nutting, Martyr and Misfit; Marlowe, Mission to Khartoum; Compton, Last Days; Chenevix Trench, Charley Gordon; MacGregor-Hastie, Never to be Taken Alive; Featherstone, Khartoum 1885; Pollock, Man behind the Legend.

Hill, ‘Review of Gerald Sparrow's Gordon: Mandarin and Pasha’, 210–12.

Butler, Charles George Gordon, 252, cited in Girouard, Return to Camelot, 229.

Blunt, Gordon at Khartoum, 159.

Churchill, General Gordon, 212.

One dissenter suggested that Gordon unfairly claimed credit for the tactical skill of his late superior: ‘An American by the name of Ward organised an army in China against the rebels there, and fought with great success and distinction. After his death Gordon commanded his force, and is represented [my italics] as having been very much distinguished in suppressing the Tae-Ping rebellion’. Loring, Confederate Soldier, 256.

Chenevix Trench, Charley Gordon, 179. See also the Army List, March 1882, 33, and Nov. 1882, 58.

Journal entry for 27 July 1884, quoted in McLynn, Stanley, vol. 2, 77.

Jeal, Stanley, 276–77, 313.

Gordon responded, tetchily and hypocritically, ‘I have never met a man so strong for his own opinion; you think your views are always right’. Flint, Cecil Rhodes, 56–57.

Bahlman, Sir Edward Walter Hamilton, vol. 2, 545 (23 Jan. 1884), 611 (6 June 1884).

Hollowell, Did the Gladstone Government Abandon General Gordon?, 1–2.

Coe, General Gordon in a New Light, 15.

Strachey, Eminent Victorians.

Fitzmaurice, Life of Granville, vol. 2, 381.

Cook, Life of Florence Nightingale, vol. 2, 328–29.

Letter written from Trentham, Stoke-on-Trent, British Library, Add. Ms. 52388, 135–37.

Hake, Journals. The original volumes are held in the collection of the British Library in London. BL, Add. Mss. 34474–79.

The journal describes the period from 10 September to 14 December 1884. The siege of Khartoum had already been in place since 13 March; by the time Khartoum fell on 26 January 1885, the siege had lasted 320 days. Nicoll, Mahdi of Sudan, 195.

A letter of the same date to Major Charles Watson, enclosed with the journal, has survived; Royal Engineers Museum (REM), Brompton Barracks, ‘Lady Watson's Scrapbook’, 4. At least one more letter, dated fifteen days later, was carried through the Mahdi's siege lines to General Wolseley but is no longer extant. Writing to Gordon's brother the following year, Wolseley refers to it explicitly and tantalisingly: ‘I enclose for you Charley's letter of 29-12-84 which I hope you will return to me as I value it naturally very highly. You ask me how I read it. I thought there had been some good turn in his favour that had caused him to change his mind from what he had previously thought as to the position of things in Khartoum. I confess it did not in the least relieve my mind of apprehension.’ REM, CHARE.4801.39.1, 1.

Buckle, Letters of Queen Victoria, vol. 3, 683.

Lt.-Col. Hamill-Stewart (conventionally shortened to ‘Stewart’) of the 11th Hussars was seconded to Gordon as an intelligence officer. Following a distinguished career as an intelligence agent in Syria and Anatolia, Stewart had produced an authoritative report on the state of Sudan as the Mahdi's uprising gathered momentum; Donald Stewart, Report on the Soudan, Egypt No. 11 (1883), Sudan Archive, Durham University (SAD) 218/4 and 896/6/1–19.

SAD, 896/7/1-104. The author is preparing a comprehensive annotated edition for publication.

The son of Lieutenant-General Henry Gordon of the Royal Artillery, Charles Gordon travelled with his family on overseas postings and was thus home-schooled by a governess; back in England from the age of 15, he attended a small private school run by the governess’ brother before entering the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich at 20.

References include vol. 1, 24–2, 65 (‘Certainly I would make “Plutarch's Lives” a hand book for our young officers, it is worth any number of “Arts of War” or “Minor tactics”.’), vol. 3, 58, vol. 5, 45.

Gordon refers to Spartan heroism again when he notes that the Greek consul in Khartoum ‘has behaved worthy of his ancestor of Thermopylae, on a small scale’ (vol. 1, 80). Gordon also dwells on the accounts of the twenty-nine-year siege of Azotus (Ashdod in modern Israel) in the seventh century bc (vol. 1, 23–24, vol. 3, 31) and the expedition of Cambyses against the Ethiopians, which he compares to the disastrous Hicks expedition (vol. 2, 11–13, vol. 3, 76).

References in vol. 1, 38, and vol. 2, 20, respectively.

Gordon arrived at Jaffa on 16 Jan. 1883 and departed from Palestine (heading for Brussels, with a view to taking up his Congo assignment on behalf of King Leopold) on 18 Dec. Chenevix Trench, Charley Gordon, 180–86.

Verses quoted or alluded to include Matthew 10:32–33 (vol. 1, 6), Jeremiah 17:5 and 17:7, Ezekiel 29:10–14 (10–11), Revelations 16:2 (12–13), Philippians 3:3–4 (13), Genesis 61:44 (14), Ezekiel 30 (24), 1 Corinthians 13 (32), Proverbs 30:17 (34), Matthew 6:34 (35), Genesis 1:20, Psalm 8 and Hebrews 2:8 (all in one rambling monologue on 49–51), Psalms 1:1 (60) and finally Esther 3:8–15 (62). Koranic references include Sūrat Āl ^cImrān (3/47) (f. 18), Sūrat Maryam (19/16–40) and Sūrat al-Nahl (16/106) (36).

Psalm 116:11 (vol. 2, 20), Matthew 27:34 and Mark 15:23 (vol. 3, 82), Philippians 4:11 (vol. 4, 15) and 2 Samuel 16:7 and 13 (vol. 6, 89).

Alfred Egmont Hake (1849–1916) was distantly related to the Gordon family: his paternal grandmother was General Gordon's aunt. Before his writings on Gordon made him a nationally known literary figure, his only publication had been a collection of vignettes on life in the French capital: Hake, Paris Originals.

West Sussex Record Office (WSRO), Chichester, Box 25; the ‘printed list’ has not survived. Blunt had been suggested to Hake by Wilfrid Meynell, editor of the Weekly Register.

Entry for 22 Oct. 1884. Hake, Journals, 217–18; BL, Add. Ms. 34478 (vol. 5), 10–11. This representation of Granville as vacillating and indecisive chimes with other accounts. Queen Victoria herself called him ‘a very weak reed to lean upon’. Buckle, Letters of Queen Victoria, vol. 3, 455. Sir Evelyn Baring in Cairo noted: ‘His power of eluding the main point at issue was quite extraordinary . … With a smile and a quick little epigrammatic phrase, Lord Granville would elude one's grasp and be off without giving any opinion at all’. Cromer, Modern Egypt, vol. 1, 392–93 n.

Butler, Charles George Gordon, 231.

Thomas Sanderson was a veteran Foreign Office civil servant and Granville's private secretary from 1880 to 1885.

Entry for 23 Sept. 1884, BL, Add. Ms. 34475 (vol. 2), 4.

Note dated 6 Nov. 1884 contained in the facsimile edition of volume 6, published on 19 Nov. 1885 as Gordon, General Gordon's Last Journal, 1. This introductory note has not survived in the manuscript of volume 6 itself (BL, Add. Ms. 34479). Five hundred copies of this facsimile edition were published at a price of £3.3s. (as compared to 32s. for the Hake edition); Sir Henry Gordon had himself requested that no more than 1,000 copies be printed. UCL, Contracts 142 (1874–1909) (G) and Kegan Paul Publication Accounts, Ledger 169. See also The Times, 20 Nov. 1885, 13.

Bass, ‘Madness and Empire’, 456.

Entry for 17 Sept. 1884. Hake, Journals, 45–46; BL, Add. Ms. 34474 (vol. 1), 45.

Bass, ‘Madness and Empire’, 462.

Pall Mall Gazette, 9 Jan. 1884, 11.

Zubeir had been the most powerful slave-trader in the Sudan territories, using his own private army to mount raids along the Bahr al-Ghazāl and into Equatoria. His invasion of Darfur and murder of the local Sultan made him de facto ruler of the territory but, when he travelled to Cairo in 1875 to lobby for the favour of the Khedive Ismā^cīl, he was detained and held in exile. As governor-general of Sudan in 1879, Gordon wrote a pamphlet denouncing Zubeir's activities, entitled ‘Account of the Actions of Zubeir Pasha’. National Records Office (NRO), Khartoum, INTEL 1/15/74.

For example, entries for 15 Sept. and 5 Oct. Hake, Journals, 37, 143; BL, Add. Mss. 34474 (vol. 1), 35 and 34476 (vol. 3), 32.

Letter dated ‘Kartoum 16 April’; REM, framed double-sided original letter (very damaged in central parts) with seal, recto.

Letter dated ‘15.4.84 Kartoum’; ibid., verso.

Original telegram dated 8 April 1884; REM, CHARE 4801.156. ‘Nizams’ were soldiers of the nizam-i cedid, the ‘new model army’ created by the reforms of Sultan Selim III in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Gladstone minute on ‘Cabinet meetings on the Soudan’, BL, Add. Ms. 56451, cited in Brooke and Sorensen, W. E. Gladstone, 65.

In 1876, Gladstone had denounced Turkish ‘atrocities’ in Bulgaria and denounced the Turks as ‘the one great ant-human species of humanity’. Gladstone, Bulgarian Horrors. See also Matthew, Gladstone Diaries, vol. 11, 150–53.

Bahlman, Sir Edward Walter Hamilton, vol. 2, 613.

Matthew, Gladstone Diaries, vol. 11, 304–05.

Entry for 3 Dec. 1884, BL, Add. 34479 (vol. 6), 93; Hake, Journals, 379–80, omits Baring's name.

The general election followed the defeat of the Gladstone government on 8 June 1885 in a vote on the budget, specifically on an amendment proposal to increase tax on beer. The margin of defeat was small (264 to 252) but Gladstone, who had anticipated defeat, rightly thought it ‘a considerable event’; Matthew, Gladstone Diaries, vol. 11, 353. Following a cabinet meeting on 9 June, Gladstone confirmed in the House of Commons on 12 June that the resignation of his ministry had been accepted by the Queen. Hansard, vol. 298, 1528–30. The election itself took place between 24 Nov. and 18 Dec. 1885, following both an extension of the franchise and a redistribution of seats. Gladstone's Liberal Party won the most seats (319), ahead of Lord Salisbury's Conservative Party (247) and Charles Stewart Parnell's Irish Nationalists (86); a splinter group called the Liberal Unionists, led by Lord Hartington (Gladstone's erstwhile Secretary of War) won eleven, with the remaining seven seats divided between smaller parties. With Gladstone losing his majority and the Irish Nationalists holding the balance of power, Liberal divisions over Home Rule in Ireland came to the fore, triggering another election the following year, between 1 and 27 July 1886. This time, an alliance between the Conservatives (316 seats) and the Liberal Unionists (77) achieved a comfortable parliamentary majority over the Liberals (reduced to 192) and the Irish Nationalists (85).

Letter dated 5 March 1885; REM, 4801.39.1, 3–4.

Fenwick, Civil Liberties, 336–37.

Note dated 19 March 1885, BL, Add. Ms. 56451, 176.

Hamilton's hand-written summary of correspondence between 18 March and 18 April 1885, BL, Add. Ms. 44148, 34–35. In his diary entry for 20 March, Hamilton himself called the question of ownership ‘a very nice and difficult one’. Bahlman, Sir Edward Walter Hamilton, vol. 2, 817. The facsimile of Volume 6 was a photograph of the original. Hake would later make only minimal cuts to this volume, so the public saw almost exactly what Sir Henry saw.

Sir Henry Gordon to Edward Hamilton, 20 March 1886, BL, Add. Ms. 56451, 174. The journals were first discussed by the full cabinet on 20 March, with Gladstone commenting that Sir Henry had ‘brought to me his wrath’. BL, Add. Ms., 44646, 62–64. After the meeting, Gladstone wrote a mollifying letter to Sir Henry, noting delicately that other political issues had left him ‘in ignorance of some particulars as to General Gordon's Journal’. Matthew, Gladstone Diaries, vol. 11, 309–10. Augusta Gordon, the spinster sister who received letters of condolence from Queen Victoria herself, wrote later, on publication of the journals: ‘I cannot read them. The whole past is so dreadful, without adding to the pain by knowing what he went through’. Undated letter to Frank Power's mother, BL, Add. Ms. 58070, 29–30.

Letter dated 22 March. Matthew, Gladstone Diaries, vol. 11, 311.

Entry for 21 March 1885. Bahlman, Sir Edward Walter Hamilton, vol. 2, 818.

Entry for 22 March 1885. Ibid., 820. Joseph Chamberlain was president of the Board of Trade and an influential radical.

Hamilton's summary, BL, Add. Ms. 44148, 34.

Ibid., 35.

Hartington to Hamilton, ibid., 30–32.

Hake, Story of Chinese Gordon. A second volume followed in 1885. In a rather desperate attempt to cash in on Gordon's Sudan adventure, a sparse selection from his diary of the years in China was published in July 1885, heavily ‘amplified’ by the former editor of the North China Herald and accompanied by ‘some interesting facsimiles of plans of battle drawn by the General’. Mossman, General Gordon's Private Diary, reviewed in the Pall Mall Gazette (26 June 1885) and the Derby Mercury (22 July 1885).

Correspondence with Lord Cranborne, son of the Conservative leader Lord Salisbury; Hatfield House, S (4) 2/84. In 1886, Hake edited The State, a short-lived Conservative weekly journal.

Blunt, Gordon at Khartoum, 439.

In all other respects, Sir Henry gave Hake carte blanche with the manuscript material, as was noted by John Bull's ‘Literary and Other Notes’ columnist on 9 May 1885: ‘The whole of General Gordon's journals are in the press, and will be published intact, with the exception of one or two passages which are of interest to the family. Mr Egmont Hake…has free access to all family papers and memoranda, Sir Henry Gordon giving him every facility.’ John Bull (3,364/1885), 303.

The contract was dated 7 May 1885. Sir Henry was paid 5,000 guineas, an astronomical sum, against an anticipated first edition print run of 13,000 copies. Hake was paid £500, while the anonymous translator of the Arabic documents received £155. University College London (UCL), Special Collections, Contracts 142 (1874–1909) and Kegan Paul Publication Accounts, Ledger 169.

Lane-Poole, Watson Pasha, 167.

Entry for 6 December 1884, BL, Add. Ms. 34479 (vol. 6), 98.

BL, Add. Ms. 34474 (vol. 1), 42.

Entry for 18 November 1884, BL, Add. Ms. 34479 (vol. 6), 58.

Ibid., 4.

Ibid., 91.

BL, Add. Ms. 34474 (vol. 1), 22.

BL, Add. Ms. 34475 (vol. 2), 41. Henry Oppenheim was a good friend of Edward Hamilton, who dined frequently at his London home.

Ibid., 32.

Cromer, Modern Egypt, vol. 1, 432.

Letter from Colonel Louis Gordon (son of Sir Henry) in Blunt, Gordon at Khartoum, 538.

Ibid., 475. Robert Cecil, 3rd Marquis of Salisbury, became prime minister briefly from 23 June 1885 to 28 Jan. 1886, then again from 25 July 1886 to 11 Aug. 1892 and from 25 June 1895 to 11 July 1902.

James (‘Jem’) Gascoyne-Cecil, later 4th Marquis of Salisbury, was a successful soldier and politician whose title came from Cranborne Manor in Dorset, home of the eldest son of the incumbent Marquis of Salisbury.

Gascoyne-Cecil, A Memory, 10. Hake himself wrote to Cranborne on 17 Oct. and 9 Dec. 1885 to update him on ‘the expenses of the venture’, although details have not survived. Hatfield House Archive, S (4) 1/26 and 37.

Hatfield, S (4) 1/37 and 2/84.

Captain Richard Middleton (Chief Agent from 1885 to 1902) to Cranborne, Hatfield, S (4) 1/19.

Letter dated 10 Sept. 1885, Hatfield, S (4) 1/20.

17 Oct., Hatfield, S (4) 1/25.

Glasgow Herald, 3 Oct. 1885, 4.

The Hull Packet and East Riding Times, 13 Nov. 1884. On an even more explicitly partisan note, Hake responded to the overwhelming applause by asking rhetorically: ‘The lecturer, who was cheered again and again, returned thanks, and said he was forced to ask with regard to the Government which made these promises to Gordon and broke them—Was it not to be expected that the promises made to the country they would equally fail to keep? (cheers).’

Tidrick, Empire, 3–4.

Patterson, Imâm Mahdi, 5–6; in this short work on the ‘pseudo Mahdi’ of Sudan, Patterson quotes extensively from the Qur^cān and the Hadīth to refute the ‘pretensions’ of Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi.

Ibid., 6. The same argument was made almost verbatim by Sir Richard Temple, former lieutenant-governor of the Bombay Presidency in India (and future Conservative MP). Richard Temple, ‘The Mahdi and British India’, The Contemporary Review (March 1885), 306. Gladstone read both works at the end of Feb. 1885, as the Sudan crisis peaked. Matthew, Gladstone Diaries, vol. 11, 303–04. Sir Evelyn Baring, however, disagreed, arguing in a later essay (originally published in The Spectator on 23 Aug. 1913) that such a thesis was ‘manifestly one which cannot be admitted without very great and important qualifications… [as] the tie of a common creed… has been supplanted almost everywhere by the bond of nationality’. Cromer, Political and Literary Essays, vol. 1, 12.

Brown, ‘Sudanese Mahdiya’, 145.

Price, ‘Bernard Porter's Absent-Minded Imperialists’.

Harcourt, ‘Gladstone, Monarchism and the New Imperialism’, 38–41. Other spikes included the uprising against East India Company rule in British India in 1857–58, the second punitive expedition against the Ashanti on the Gold Coast in 1873, the Transvaal War of 1880–81, the occupation of Egypt from 1882, the Sudan campaigns of 1884–85, the invasion by Kitchener's army in 1896–98 and the Second Boer War of 1899–1902.

Maria Trench, writing in The Monthly Packet (56/1885), 182.

The most trenchant criticisms of Porter's thesis have come in peer reviews and other academic articles. Burton, ‘Review’, 626–28; MacKenzie, ‘Review’; Thackeray, ‘Review’, 1–4; David Cannadine in The Times, 14 Nov. 2004. Porter's attempt to rebut some of the most serious criticism was published as ‘Further Thoughts on Imperial Absent-Mindedness’, 101–17, to which MacKenzie riposted with ‘“Comfort” and Conviction: A Response to Bernard Porter’, 659–68.

Elton, General Gordon's Khartoum Journal.