General Charles George Gordon (1833-1885)
General Charles George Gordon (1833-1885)
Introduction:
Born near London on Jan. 28, 1833, Gordon was commissioned in the British Army in 1852 and fought in the Crimean War (1853-56). In 1860, during the Second Opium War, he joined the British forces in China, capturing Beijing (Peking). The Chinese government later (1863) made him commander of the peasant force known as the Ever-Victorious Army, which helped to suppress the Taiping Rebellion.
He returned (1865) to London a famous figure, popularly known as "Chinese Gordon", and spent six years working with boys in the London slums. In 1873, Gordon joined the service of the Egyptian khedive as governor of the province of Equatoria, on the upper Nile. From 1877 to 1880 he was also governor-general of the Sudan and was extremely active in suppressing the slave trade.
Four years later he was sent back to the Sudan to evacuate Egyptian forces from Khartoum, then threatened by the Mahdi's army. Gordon defended the city against siege from March 1884 until Jan. 26, 1885, when the rebels broke through and massacred the entire garrison. Two days later a British relief force reached the city.
-- see also: Waller, John, 'Gordon of Khartoum' (1988).
Evidence:
from: Hyam, Ronald. Empire and Sexuality - the British experience. Manchester University Press. Manchester and New York, 1990.
"Gordon, hero of campaigns in China and the Sudan, never showed the remotest interest in women, but spent six years of his life (1865-71) trying to create in London his own little land where the child might be prince, housing and improving ragged urchins (turning 'scuttlers' into 'kings'), until they were packed off to sea with the onset of puberty. 'How far better', he wrote, 'to be allowed to be kind to a little scrub than to govern the greatest kingdoms.' Whilst in Basutoland, he confessed to a sympathetic missionary that his one real desire in life was to retire into a Mount Carmel monastery and establish there a small refuge for poor Syrian boys, to whom he would teach the Christian faith and 'something useful to them in the world'."
[Page 38]
"General Gordon was quite happy provided he could give the occasional bath to a dirty urchin and talk to him of God. But Gordon was probably unsuited to high responsibilities by the very fact of his not really caring about anything in life except his 'Gravesend laddies' or 'kings' as he repeatedly called them'."
[Page 14]
For more information on the London 'boy-welfare' movement and its Christian boy-lovers - who Koven (1992) suggests later went on to lay the foundations of the modern British welfare state - see:
Hilliard, David. (1982)
UnEnglish and UnManly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality.
VICTORIAN STUDIES, Vol. 25, No. 2, Winter 1982.Mangan, J.A. and Walvin, James. (Eds.) Manliness and Morality - middle class masculinity in Britain and America, 1800-1940. New York. St. Martin's Press, 1987. (Some material on Scouts, and adjunct material to Koven)
Parker, A. (Ed.) Nationalisms and Sexualities. London, Routledge, 1992. (Chapter 20 - Koven, Seth. 'From Rough Lads to Hooligans - boy-life, national culture and social reform'. pp. 365-401.)
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