Dates

• Existence: 28 January 1833 - 26 January 1885

Biography

Charles George Gordon CB was born on 28 January 1833 in London to Major General Henry William Gordon (1786–1865) and Elizabeth Gordon (1792–1873). The Gordon family had a long history of serving as officers in the British Army and strongly encouraged Charles to following this tradition.

Charles became an army cadet in his teens and became a Royal Engineer where he achieved the rank of lieutenant in 1854.

Gordon served in the Crimean War and later in China, where he made his military reputation in command of the ‘Ever Victorious Army’, a force of Chinese soldiers led by European officers. In the early 1860s, they were instrumental in defeating the Taiping Rebellion, for which Gordon was given honours from the Emperor of China and the British government and was nicknamed ‘Chinese Gordon’.

In 1873, backed by the British Government, Gordon entered the service of the Khedive of Egypt and later became the Governor General of the Sudan. Here he worked to exhaustion trying to suppress revolts and fighting the local slave trade until 1880 when he returned to the UK.

In 1884 Gordon was sent to Khartoum to evacuate soldiers and civilians under siege from Muhammad Ahmad’s army. After the en masse evacuation of around 2,500 civilians, he stayed in Khartoum to fight Ahma, against the wishes of the British government. He resisted Ahmad’s attacks for a year, which gained him the admiration of the British public, before being killed, two days after relief British forces arrived to help on 26 January 1885.

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