Reginald Wingate

Wingate from "The River War" by Winston Churchill

Wingate as Governor General and Sirdar (1900)

Wingate with the captured Mahmud Ahmad after the battle of Atbara

Wingate (far left) with George V and Abbas II (1911)

Sir Francis Reginald Wingate, 1st Baronet GCB GCVO GBE KCMG DSO TD (born June 25, 1861 in Broadfield , Renfrewshire , † January 29, 1953 in Dunbar , East Lothian ) was a British General , Governor General of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and High Commissioner in Egypt .

Childhood and first assignments in the Orient

Francis Reginald Wingate was born the son of a Scottish textile merchant. A year after Wingate's birth, his father's business collapsed, he died and his mother moved to Jersey with the children . He graduated from the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich and became a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery in 1880 . He served in India and Aden .

During the occupation of Egypt in 1882, the Egyptian army was crushed at the Battle of Tel-el-Kebir . It was then rebuilt under the command of a British commander in chief , the Sirdar . Wingate was the adjutant of the first Sirdar Evelyn Wood .

Mahdi uprising

1884 took Wingate on the Nile Expedition in Sudan to rescue Gordon Pasha and to the relief of Khartoum in the Mahdi uprising in part. The British reached Khartoum on January 28, 1885, two days after it fell and Gordon was killed.

From 1886 Wingate worked in the intelligence service of the Egyptian army, of which he became chief in 1892. In 1889 he took part in the Battle of Toski . As head of the intelligence service, he played a part in Rudolf Slatin's escape . With this he worked together in the following years. His good knowledge of the country and the language helped him in his work. He wrote the book Mahdiism and the Egyptian Sudan . He also translated the books by Slatin and Father Josef Ohrwalder . The public sentiment in Britain turned against the Caliphate by these reports led the British government to decide in 1896 to take action against the Mahdists.

In 1896 the Anglo-Egyptian Nile Expeditionary Force under the new Sirdar Horatio Herbert Kitchener was set on the march to occupy northern Sudan. Major Wingate took part in the so-called Dongola campaign as head of the intelligence service. On March 22, 1896, Kitchener, Slatin and Wingate traveled to the front, to Wadi Halfa . After the capture of Dongola , Wingate was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1896 . From March to June 1897 he took part in an expedition to Abyssinia . After the problem of long supply routes had been solved by building a railway line in the great arc of the Nile, the Anglo-Egyptian army was able to advance further in 1897 and defeat the Mahdists at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 . In October 1899, Kitchener dispatched 8,000 soldiers under Wingates' command to destroy the Mahdist leader, Abdallahi ibn Muhammad . In the battle of Umm Diwaykarat in Kordofan Province, Wingate was victorious and Abdallahi ibn Muhammad was killed.

Governor General and High Commissioner

After Kitchener had become Chief of Staff to Lord Roberts in the Boer War in December 1899 , Wingate took over the role of Governor General of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and the Sirdar. Wingate worked from 1899 to 1916 to overcome the economic aftermath of the Mahdi uprising in Sudan. In 1903 he was appointed major general and in 1908 promoted to lieutenant general. He also received the rank of pasha . During the First World War , the Sultan of the Sultanate of Darfur , Ali Dinar, opposed British rule. Wingate then put together a force of around 2,000 men. This defeated the Fur Army in the Anglo-Egyptian Darfur expedition .

On January 1, 1917, Wingate succeeded Henry McMahon as British High Commissioner for Egypt . On October 7, 1919 he was replaced by Edmund Allenby, 1st Viscount Allenby . In 1920 he was promoted to Baronet , of Dunbar in the County of Haddington and of Port Sudan . On February 1, 1922 he resigned from the army, but remained Colonel Commandant, Royal Artillery and Colonel of Honor of the 6th / 7th. Battalion of the Manchester Regiment.

Major General Orde Wingate is his second nephew.

literature

• Gordon Brook-Shepherd : Slatin Pasha. An adventurous life. Molden, Vienna 1972, ISBN 3-217-00317-9 .
• Hartwig A. Vogelsberger: Slatin Pascha. Between desert sand and royal crowns . Verlag Styria, Graz 1992, ISBN 3-222-12113-3 .
• Wingate, Sir Francis Reginald . In: Encyclopædia Britannica . 11th edition. tape 28 : Vetch - Zymotic Diseases . London 1911, p. 729 (English, full text [ Wikisource ]).

Web links

Commons : Reginald Wingate  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

predecessor	Office	successor
Horatio Herbert Kitchener	Sirdar of the Egyptian Army 1899–1916	Sir Lee Oliver Fitzmaurice Stack
Horatio Herbert Kitchener	Governor General of Sudan 1899–1916	Sir Lee Oliver Fitzmaurice Stack
Henry McMahon	High Commissioner for Egypt 1917–1919	Edmund Allenby, 1st Viscount Allenby
New title created	Baronet, of Dunbar and of Port Sudan 1920-1953	Ronald Wingate