Photograph showing the raising of the British and Egyptian flags were raised, in the ruins of General Gordon's house. There is a crowd of soldiers (in tropical field service dress) and a plumed officer, saluting as flags are raised. Standing on the wall of the ruined Government House, Youlashi Mohaned el Badr (or Bahr), the Sirdar's Egyptian ADC and Major Bertram Reveley Mitford (1863-1936) raise the Egyptian flag; Lieutenant Cecil Staveley (1874-1934) and Captain James Kiero Watson (1865-1942) salute the Union flag. This took place at the Memorial Service to General Gordon who died in 1885, two days after the Battle of Omdurman.

General Charles Gordon (1833-1885) was a national hero owing to his ill-fated defence of Khartoum against the army of Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi, which besieged the city in March 1884. Gordon had been sent to Khartoum by the British government to organise the evacuation of the defending Egyptian forces. The rebels eventually broke into the city, killing Gordon and the other defenders on 26th January 1885. The British relief force arrived two days later. The British public reacted to his death by blaming the government for incompetence and acclaiming ‘Gordon of Khartoum’ a martyred warrior-saint.

The Mahdi’s army was finally defeated by an Anglo-Egyptian army, led by Lord Kitchener, at the Battle of Omdurman on 2nd September 1898. Two days later (Sunday, 4 September 1898) a memorial service was held at 10am on the banks of the Nile in front of the ruined Government House, in which Gordon made his last stand.

This photograph is mounted in an album which documents the final stages of the Mahdist War, or Sudan Campaign, in 1898. In 1881 a Mahdist state was proclaimed by Muhammad Ahmad (1845-1885), beginning a popular uprising against Egyptian rule in the Sudan and capturing the capital of Khartoum. 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 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.

Some of the photographs in this album document British atrocities in the aftermath of the Battle of Omdurman and depict graphic violence. 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.