Bonny Lunch with Dr Peter Shipley
Thursday 4th September at 12.30 for 13:00 | Pall Mall | £75.00
Our speaker at the next Bonny Lunch on Thursday 4th September at 12:30 is Dr Peter Shipley. Peter’s talk recalls a famous episode in Britian’s imperial history which unfolded in the Sudan towards the end of the nineteenth century. It outlines the reasons for Britian’s involvement in the region before focusing on the sequence of events in which Generals Charles George Gordon and Horatio Herbert Kitchener played a central part. The heart of the story opens in 1884 when Gordon was despatched by Mr Gladstone’s government to Khartoum, where he was besieged and killed by the forces of the Islamic rebel leader, the Mahdi, and ends in 1898 with the reconquest of the Sudan by an Anglo-Egyptian army under Kitchener and the final defeat of the Mahdist movement.
As a result of those events Gordon and Kitchener became great popular heroes, idolised in the press and by the public but they were difficult, singular men who often had prickly relationships with their superiors and divided opinion. They drew much criticism in their lifetimes, and while that has continued, has been subject to some reassessment.
Although unfashionable today, it’s also a story that is highly relevant in the modern world, on issues such as Islamic fundamentalism, the role of foreign powers in Africa and the Arab world and the security of global shipping.
Peter Shipley is a graduate in history of the University of York and holds a doctorate from the University of Leicester, where he was an Honorary Visiting Fellow. He is also an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and since 2011 has been a contributor to the official History of Parliament for the nineteenth century.
Earlier, Peter began his career as a journalist, before joining the civil service and working for many years in public affairs and information. He was a member of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit at No. 10 and for five years the national press spokesman on policing policy for the country’s chief constables as well as the director of a public affairs consultancy.