[ 2 November 1903 ] Following an attack by the Kotaibis on a British military outpost at Sulaik in Aden (today part of Yemen), an expedition composed of 600 soldiers of the Royal Hampshire Regiment and the 23rd Bombay Rifles under the command of General Maitland set off in to the hills on 30th October…
[ 29 November 1902 ] On 29 November 1902, a Reuters correspondent at Peshawar on India’s North West Frontier reported on ‘a punitive expedition’ against the Kabul Khels, a Waziri ethnic group, for previous raids into British held territory. He boasted that as a result of a four pronged invasion of the area by four columns of…
[ 17 May 1900 ] On 17 May 1900, a British army relieved the besieged city of Mafeking during the Second Boer War. It led to street celebrations across Britain and the commander of the besieged garrison, Colonel Robert Baden-Powell, became a national hero. B-P had ruthlessly maintained food stocks for British troops and European…
[ 30 December 1903 ] On 30 December 1903, a Liverpool Reuters correspondent telegraphed the news, arrived by ship from Nigeria, that ‘about fifteen towns and villages’ had been ‘destroyed’ during a two month long British punitive expedition in the south eastern Niger Delta region. The pretext had been the alleged ‘interference with peaceful trade by certain…
26 September 1918 Today in 1918, the British army began an offensive to break through the German ‘Hindenburg line’ in France, by firing 10,000 mustard gas shells at the enemy trenches. Another 22,000 gas shells exploded among the German lines over the next three days.1 Mustard gas was the most feared of the poison gasses…
[ 26 May 1902 ] On 26 May 1902, Reuters filed a report at Banjul on a British punitive expedition in the Gambia against the Jola, who were described as ‘a wild people in the neighbourhood of the French frontier’ (today marked by the country’s border with Senegal.) It appeared in British newspapers in mid-June under various…
[ 14 July 1900 ] British and Allied troops sent to crush an alliance of Boxer rebels and Chinese imperial forces, seized the northern port city of Tientsin (Tianjin) in the early hours of 14 July 1900. The Dundee Courier noted that ‘after the city was entered, there was at first indiscriminate slaughter, and it is alleged…
20 December 1900 On 20 December 1900, General Lord Kitchener issued a propaganda proclamation in which he promised South African Boer insurgents, who surrendered voluntarily, that they would be allowed to live in government run camps along with their families ‘until such time as the guerrilla warfare now being carried on will admit of their…
7 December 1908 On 7 December 1908, Colonel Seely, Under Secretary of State for the Colonies, was asked questions in the House of Commons about Hubert Silberrad, Deputy Commissioner at Nyeri in British East Africa (Kenya). Silberrad had been suspended for five months, three months on full pay and two months on three quarters. This…
9 November 1917 On 9 November 1917, The Times published a letter, now remembered as the Balfour Declaration, which Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour had written a week earlier to Lord Rothschild. In it, he promised to back, ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.’ Although it also stated that ‘nothing…
