Charles George Gordon

Major General Charles George Gordon (known as Gordon of Khartoum) has a memorial in the north west tower chapel near the west entrance to Westminster Abbey. The mural monument of bronze is by Edward Onslow Ford and shows a bust of the General and inscribed ribbons below. The inscription reads:

In memory of Charles-George Gordon. Born 1833. Killed at Khartoum 1885. Erected by the Corps of Royal Engineers

And on the ribbons:

Mandarin of China, Major General of the British Army, Pasha of Egypt

The monument was erected in 1892. There is another memorial to him in St Paul's Cathedral in London.

His life

He was born on 28th January 1833 at Woolwich in south east London, one of many children of Lt. General Henry William Gordon (died 1865), and his wife Elizabeth (Enderby). The family followed their father on his various postings and the children were educated privately. He was very close to his sister Augusta. In 1840 Charles entered the Royal Military Academy in his home town, and later joined the Royal Engineers.

He landed at Balaklava in 1855 and fought in the siege of Sevastopol in the Crimean War. For his work in surveying the Russian/Turkish frontier and work in Armenia he was elected fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.  Promoted to Captain, he went to China to help in protecting it from insurgents and he crushed the Taiping rebellion. He received the Yellow Jacket and Peacock Feather, denoting a Mandarin of the first rank. In Britain he became known as "Chinese Gordon". His popularity was enhanced by the knowledge that he spent his pay on comforts for the troops. When he came back to England he helped the poor and the street urchins in the Gravesend area of Kent. 

After various postings he served under the Khedive of Egypt, as governor of a province in the Sudan. He mapped the area and set up various stations and suppressed slave trading.

Later he returned to England, was made a Major General and served in South Africa. Due to an uprising in the Sudan, led by the Mahdi, British troops were sent to support the Egyptian army and Gordon was posted to Khartoum in 1884. He had evacuated thousands of Egyptian civilians and soldiers from the city before it was encircled by enemy forces. Eventually, due to a popular outcry, an expedition to relieve Khartoum was sent from England.  After a long siege he was finally killed in the governor's palace on 26th January 1885, just a few days before the relief force arrived, and his body was never found. He was unmarried. Several memorials were erected to him and the Gordon Boys' Home, which later became Gordon's School, was opened.

Further reading

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2004

A statue stands in Victoria Embankment Gardens in London.