20 APRIL 1930 At 1000 hours on 20 April 1930, HMS Lupin and HMS Cyclamen, two British Arabis class warships opened fire on the town of Khasab, situated on the mountainous coast of Oman’s Musandam Peninsula which juts out into the Straits of Hormuz. The bombardment was focused on a central area of the town…
[ 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…
[ 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…
[ 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…
20 October 1952 Today in 1952, Kenya’s governor, Evelyn Baring, signed a state of emergency. In the early hours of the following morning, in an operation code-named Jock Scott, 106 Kenyan civil rights leaders and individuals suspected of being overly sympathetic to an anti-British rebellion, known as the Mau Mau uprising, were arrested. Most of…
