THE SUDAN CAMPAIGN 1896-1908
Delays were mainly due to faulty machinery and inexperienced drivers who played havoc with elderly engines in desert conditions. A major problem occurred when a leading train had a broken axle and blocked the line, causing a rail-gang to be marooned without water. Lieutenant Newcombe, R.E., who had a reputation as a remover of wreckage, completed a diversion within 24 hours bringing the much needed water. Canvas towns housed the men, and the small wayside stations, where trains drew coal and water, were stored under an Egyptian corporal's guard.
The gangs in the desert would see each morning the small shimmering dot of the material train on the horizon, gradually coming ever nearer tooting its whistle, arriving with its own water, water for the men, two thousand yards of rails, sleepers and accessories. At noon the next supply train would arrive with water, food, letters, newspapers, sausages and jam, whisky, soda-water and the "cigaretter", which, as Churchill noted "enabled the Briton to conquer the world without discomfort."
Up to three miles of track a day was now being laid and on 7 August 1897, when Abu Hamed was captured, 100 miles of line had been completed. Kitchener, the man in a hurry, put the pressure on to complete the 120 miles to Abu Hamed quickly, and this was done by the end of October. Established at Abu Hamed, the force learned of the unexpected evacuation of Berber by the Dervishes. Kitchener was now temporarily halted, having only enough material to go another seventeen miles and the force now remained stationary until January 1898. Kitchener, in the meantime, obtained the final sanction to advance on Khartoum, and Girouard ordered more material to be rushed from Britain.
On 8 April 1898, the Battle of Atbara was fought and by then the line was only 25 miles from Berber and 48 miles from the Atbara battlefield itself. Girouard completed the line to the railhead at Atbara by 3 July having laid 385 miles from Wadi Haifa.
Apart from supplying itself, the railway had brought the army, supplies, horses and three new gunboats in sections - the Melik, Sultan and Sheikh. Those who travelled in comparative comfort by rail must have reflected on the suffering of the Gordon Relief Expedition that had toiled across the Bayuda desert in 1885. Girouard's rapid construction across the impossible was an engineering record of modern times and had confounded the critics. The railway had brought Kitchener to the heart of the Sudan and the inevitable was about to begin.’
Girouard’s railway skills were so highly regarded that with the outbreak of the South African War in 1899 he became director of South African Railways, charged with making maximum use of the railways in waging war against the Boers. He wrote an account of this in his History of the Railways during the War in South Africa, 1899–1902 published in 1903. He was appointed K.C.M.G. in 1900, and at the end of the war took charge of reconstructing the railways of Transvaal and Orange River Colony, a position he resigned in 1904 after prompting from Lord Milner, who was responding to Afrikaner hostility against Girouard.
In 1903 Girouard married Mary Gwendolen, only daughter of Sir Richard Solomon, agent-general in London for the Transvaal Colony. They had one son. The marriage was dissolved in 1915. Returning to England to serve in regular army posts, first as a staff officer at Chatham, and then in 1906 as assistant quartermaster-general, western command, in Chester, Girouard soon found his railway skills again placed him in demand in Africa. In 1907 he accepted an offer from the Colonial Office to become the high commissioner (governor from 1908) of Northern Nigeria, succeeding Sir Frederick Lugard. His task was to carry construction of the railway, already built from Lagos to the Niger, into the north and up to Kano. This he planned and began, though the line reached Kano only in 1911 under his successor.
In 1909 Girouard accepted the governorship of the British East Africa Protectorate. The Colonial Office was much concerned at the military costs and violence of ‘pacification’, an inevitable consequence of policies favouring white settlers in the protectorate. Girouard's Nigerian experience was thought to be a reassuring check on such activities. But even more it was his reputation as a railway administrator that once again won him the job, for east Africa was burdened by the large capital costs of the railway from the coast at Mombasa, completed in 1901. This was constructed largely for military motives to bind landlocked Uganda to the British empire. The railway's costs far exceeded receipts, however, and the search to solve this problem had already led to the somewhat desperate remedy of settling white men with capital in the Kenya highlands in the hope that they would develop agricultural crops for export and import goods from Europe, which might make the railway solvent. Girouard, whatever his ideas in Nigeria, became convinced that in east Africa increased white settlement was the only solution to make the railway pay, and the protectorate's finances viable. At the same time he wanted to develop African traditional institutions towards some kind of ‘indirect rule’, and to prune those officials whom he regarded as dead wood. He thus won considerable settler support, unlike most of his predecessors. When Girouard initiated a mass removal of Maasai herdsmen there was missionary opposition, and opposition in Britain from humanitarian lobbies fed with information by disgruntled local officials. Girouard proved stubborn when the Colonial Office attempted to rein in his pro-settler actions. Finally, in 1912, the Colonial Office, convinced that Girouard had misled them about promises of Maasai land to white settlers, forced his resignation.
This was the end of Girouard's career as an imperial pro-consul. He joined the board of directors of the armaments firm Armstrong- Vickers. In 1915 he took a government post as director-general of munitions supply, with a brief period in Belgium on munitions procurement and railway organization, but he resigned in 1917 to return to Armstrong-Vickers, resigning from that, too, into retirement from public life in 1919. Girouard died at 2 Beaumont Street, Marylebone, London, on 26 September 1932.
Sold with a large quantity of research material including Railways in Egypt, Sudan and S. Africa 1895-99, an unpublished 91pp autobiography; The Girouard Story, by Major G. G. M. Carr-Harris, an 11pp biography; and several other books and articles relating to Girouard.
www.dnw.co.uk
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138