Charles Gordon(1833–1885)

Charles George Gordon was born at Woolwich on 28 January 1833 into a family of the Gordon name with a long line of soldiers behind it, his father an artillery officer. He was commissioned into the Royal Engineers in 1852, served in the trenches before Sebastopol in the Crimean War, and first showed there the cool indifference to danger and the restless energy that would mark his whole career. He was a deeply religious, ascetic, self-denying man who cared nothing for money or comfort and gave away most of what he earned.

His fame began in China. After the Taiping Rebellion had thrown the Chinese empire into a vast and bloody civil war, Gordon was given command in 1863 of a force of Chinese soldiers under European officers known as the Ever Victorious Army. In a campaign of barely eighteen months he lived up to its name: leading from the front, often armed with nothing but a cane, he won a string of actions, took the rebel-held cities one after another, and broke the back of the rising around Shanghai, restoring the region to the imperial government. He came home as Chinese Gordon, a national hero, and refused the rewards the grateful Chinese emperor pressed on him.

He went next to Africa, taking service with the ruler of Egypt as governor first of the province of Equatoria and then of the whole vast Sudan. There he turned his energy against the slave trade that was depopulating central Africa, mapping the upper Nile, suppressing the slave-raiders, and breaking up the routes along which tens of thousands of human beings were carried off each year. He governed a territory the size of a continent almost single-handed, riding enormous distances on camel-back, and won a reputation for incorruptible justice among peoples who had known little of it.

In 1884 the British government sent him back to the Sudan, now in the grip of a great religious rising under the Mahdi, to organise the withdrawal of the Egyptian garrisons. He reached Khartoum, but the rising closed in around the city and cut it off, and Gordon, refusing to abandon its people, chose to stay and hold it. For most of a year he defended Khartoum against the besieging army with a dwindling garrison and dwindling food, organising the defence, keeping up the spirits of the population, and waiting for the relief force that the government, slowly and reluctantly, at last sent up the Nile.

The relief steamers came in sight of Khartoum on 28 January 1885, two days after the city had fallen and Gordon had been killed on the steps of the governor's palace, on 26 January, holding his post to the end. The news of his death shook the empire and made him, on the instant, one of its most honoured figures. The Gordon name carries his memory as the engineer-general who won the war in China with a cane in his hand, broke the slave roads of the Sudan, and held Khartoum to the last day of his life.