2 September 1892 On 2 September 1892, the army of the Mahdi, a Sudanese religious leader, was massacred by a British force, under General Kitchener, at the so called battle of Omdurman. About sixteen thousand Dervishes were killed for the loss of just 48 of Kitchener’s men. British soldiers were then ordered to shoot the…
21 June 1900 On 21 June 1900, opposition was voiced by a minister in Cabinet to General’s kitchener’s ruthless war against Boer insurgents in South Africa, including the destruction of entire villages and the shooting of prisoners on sight. It was not on a point of principle but rather over concern as to how public…
14 June 1953 At around 6 pm on 14 June 1953, Captain Gerald Griffiths began to interrogate two forestry workers suspected of taking up arms against British rule in Kenya. Earlier that day, as Griffiths had been leading a company of the King’s African Rifles into the Chuka region of Kenya to flush out Mau…
10 June 1893 Tora prison, on the southern edge of Cairo, is notorious for housing thousands of Egyptian political prisoners in dire conditions. As a former inmate, I can assure anyone that there are few, if any, prisons anywhere in the world which are more feared. It had a similarly unenviable reputation under British rule….
3 May 1863 On 3 May 1863, Chinese imperial troops, under the command of Major Charles Gordon, who was later to become legendary as General Gordon of Khartoum, killed hundreds of civilians and prisoners after they seized control of the city of Taitsan. Neither Gordon nor the British troops under his command did anything to…
10 March 1906 On 10 March 1906, soldiers of the West African Frontier Force, led by Major R. H. Goodwin of the Royal Artillery, opened fire on a large gathering of peasants and fugitive slaves armed with hoes, hatches and other agricultural implements outside the village of Sitaru in north western Nigeria. The inhabitants had…
3 March 1959 On 3 March 1959, prison guards at Hola, a remote mosquito infested prison in Kenya, were ordered to beat a group of 85 political detainees who had dared to complain that their forced labour assignment was an impossible task. At the blow of a British officer’s whistle, five hundred askaris, armed with heavy batons,…
26 February 1900 On 26 February 1900, the Irish nationalist MP, John Dillon, read out a letter in parliament that he had received from a British officer who was engaged in a campaign of virtual genocide against the Boer population of South Africa. ‘The orders in this district from Lord Kitchener ( commanding British forces…
21 February 1849 On 21 February 1849, during the Second Anglo-Sikh War, British troops under the command of Lieutenant General Sir Hugh Gough gave no quarter to Sikh soldiers fleeing the battlefield of Gujrat. An officer of the Ninth Lancers recalled: ‘We overtook numbers of their infantry who were running for their lives – every…
14 January 1915 During the First World War, British troops were deployed to Mesopotamia (now Iraq) to force back Turkish forces and secure a post-war territorial stake in the crumbling Ottoman Empire. After landing on the Persian Gulf coast, one of their first tasks was to search Arab villages, which had been deemed potentially ‘unfriendly.’…
