Photograph of soldiers in tropical field service dress and kilts: in the foreground left, two men dig grave while on the right a group carry the corpse of a soldier [not visible] on a sheet, with crowds of Highlanders standing behind under tree.

The Battle of Atbara (fought during the Mahdist War) took place during the early morning of 8th April 1898. The Anglo-Egyptian force for the engagement consisted of approximately 14,000 men. The soldiers here are from the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders and the Seaforth Highlanders regiments. In a letter to Colonel Reginald Wingate, Director of Military Intelligence of the Egyptian Army, the compiler of this album Francis Gregson stated that 'Rhodes allowed [him] to pick out some [photographs] he took at Atbara fight, to make the series rather more complete', which is the basis of the attribution here (Francis Gregson to Colonel Reginald Wingate, 23 November 1898; Wingate Papers SAD.226/3/50-51, Sudan Archive, Durham University Library).

This photograph is mounted in an album which documents the final stages of the Mahdist War, or Sudan Campaign, in 1898. In 1881 a Mahdist state was proclaimed by Muhammad Ahmad (1845-1885), beginning a popular uprising against Egyptian rule in the Sudan and capturing Khartoum, the capital. The British, who took power in Egypt in 1882, sought to reconquer the Sudan and, after 1885, to avenge the death of General Charles Gordon in Khartoum. In September 1898 the Mahdist state was defeated by Anglo-Egyptian forces, led by Major General Sir Herbert Kitchener, Sirdar (Commander-in-Chief) of the Egyptian army, in the Battle of Omdurman. Sudan became an independent republic in 1956, and the Republic of South Sudan came into being in 2011.

Some of the photographs in this album document British atrocities in the aftermath of the Battle of Omdurman and depict graphic violence. Francis Gregson, who compiled the album and is thought to have taken many of the photographs mounted in it, accompanied the Sudan Campaign as a War Correspondent for the St James’s Gazette. He is not thought to have been commissioned to take these photographs, however, which were not made public at the time. He wrote to Wingate in November 1898 stating his intention to collate photographs he had taken during his time in Egypt and the Sudan in an album as a souvenir for Wingate. Gregson appears to have produced several copies of this album (a number of copies, thought to be identical to this as regards contents and binding, exist in UK public collections) and the captions given to each photograph are his. This copy was, according to Gregson, requested directly by Queen Victoria. See Michelle Gordon, ‘Viewing Violence in the British Empire: Images of Atrocity from the Battle of Omdurman, 1898’, Journal of Perpetrator Research, 2.2 (2019) pp 65-100.