24 October 1865 Today at sunset in 1865, Paul Bogle, a Baptist deacon and the leader of a workers revolt in Jamaica known as the Morant Bay Rebellion, was hung by the British. He had been arrested only a few hours earlier when his hiding place, a thicket where he was found reading a hymn…
[ 18 February 1897 ] The Benin Punitive Expedition On 18 February 1897, a punitive expedition of 1,200 Royal Marines, bluejackets and African troops, under the command of Rear Admiral Harry Rawson, seized the ancient city of Benin. Situated amid dense rain forest some 200 miles east of Lagos, it was the capital of the…
6 February 1874 By the autumn of 1873, Britain was becoming increasingly exasperated by ongoing resistance to its colonisation of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and, in December, Prime Minister William Gladstone authorised the dispatch of 2,500 redcoats, as well as thousands of West Indian troops, to the coastal town of Cape Coast. From there,…
29 March 1879 On 29 March 1879, British cavalry and troops massacred hundreds of fleeing and wounded Zulu warriors after the Battle of Kambula, after an officer reminded his troops – ‘No Quarter Boys !’ A soldier from Devon confessed in a letter – ‘I can tell you some murdering went on,’ while a Liverpool…
23 JANUARY 1879 On 23 January 1879 hundreds of Zulu warriors, injured during the battle at Rorke’s Drift the previous day, were murdered by British troops. RORKE’S DRIFT – THE BATTLE Almost everyone has heard of the heroic defence of the missionary outpost the previous day, made famous by the 1964 film Zulu starring Michael Caine which…
8 APRIL 1898 THE BATTLE OF ATBARA – A HIGHLY ASYMETRICAL CONTEST Few people In Britain today have heard of the Battle of Atbara fought on 8 April 1898, amid the arid brushland surrounding the River Atbara, a tributary of the Nile in Sudan, some 200 miles north east of Khartoum. As the sun rose,…
[ 27 March 1884 ] In February 1884, General Sir Gerald Graham led an army of over 3,000 troops into north eastern Sudan to crush an anti-British Islamist uprising led by Osman Digna. According to an Associated Press report, on 27 March, after defeating a rebel force several days earlier, the British burned ‘Osman Digna’s villages without…
[ 9 March 1894 ] At 8 am, Rear Admiral Bedford ordered four British warships to commence the shelling of the coastal stockade and defences in the bush outside the Gambian coastal town of Gunjur, while it was attacked from the land by the First Battalion of the West India Regiment, commanded by Major Madden….
[ 11 July 1882 ] On 11 July 1882, shortly after sunrise, a British fleet of fourteen warships began a deafening bombardment of Alexandria’s coastal defences and harbour area. It followed Egypt’s refusal to accept Britain’s supposed right to oversee and manage the country’s budget, which included huge payments in interest to the Suez Canal…
14 December 1873 On 14 December 1873, John Colenso, the Bishop of Natal, wrote a letter to Frederick Chesson, the secretary of the London Aborigines Protection Society. He informed him that colonial troops had killed ‘hundreds of (Hlubi) men’ and that ‘hundreds of women and children’ had been taken prisoner, adding that a proclamation had…
