Photograph of two men standing and one sitting on rock, all wearing tropical field service dress and looking through binoculars; two horses behind. Taken at the beginning of the Battle of Omdurman, fought between Anglo-Egyptian forces under General Kitchener and Mahdist fighters under the leadership of Abdullah Ibn-Mohammed (also known as Abdullah al-Taaisha; Abdallahi Muhammad; The Khalifa).

The Battle of Omdurman on 2 September 1898 was the final battle in the Anglo-Egyptian reconquest of the Sudan (the Mahdist War). This photograph is one of a series charting moments during the day before and that of the battle itself, and its aftermath; some of these images document British atrocities and depict graphic violence. The term ‘dervish’ was used by the photographer in the contemporary captions he gave to some of his images. As used by the British in the context of the Mahdist War this was deliberately pejorative and intended to denigrate followers of Muḥammad Aḥmad, the self-styled Mahdī, whose preferred term for his followers was ‘anṣār’.

The album in which this photograph is mounted documents the final stages of the Mahdist War, or Sudan Campaign, in 1898. In 1881 a Mahdist state was proclaimed by Muhammad Ahmad, beginning a popular uprising against Egyptian rule in the Sudan and capturing Khartoum, the capital. The British, who took power in Egypt in 1882, sought to reconquer the Sudan and, after 1885, to avenge the death of General Charles Gordon in Khartoum. In September 1898 the Mahdist state was defeated by Anglo-Egyptian forces, led by Major General Sir Herbert Kitchener, Sirdar (Commander-in-Chief) of the Egyptian army, in the Battle of Omdurman. Sudan became an independent republic in 1956, and the Republic of South Sudan came into being in 2011.

Francis Gregson, who compiled the album and is thought to have taken many of the photographs mounted in it, accompanied the Sudan Campaign as a War Correspondent for the St James’s Gazette. He is not thought to have been commissioned to take these photographs, however, which were not made public at the time. He wrote to Sir Reginald Wingate, Director of Military Intelligence of the Egyptian Army, in November 1898 stating his intention to collate photographs he had taken during his time in Egypt and the Sudan in an album as a souvenir for Wingate. Gregson appears to have produced several copies of this album (a number of copies, thought to be identical to this as regards contents and binding, exist in UK public collections) and the captions given to each photograph are his. This copy was, according to Gregson, requested directly by Queen Victoria. See Michelle Gordon, ‘Viewing Violence in the British Empire: Images of Atrocity from the Battle of Omdurman, 1898’, Journal of Perpetrator Research, 2.2 (2019) pp 65-100.