Captain Gill’s Walking Stick: The True Story of the Sinai Murders

ISBN-13: 9781784533410 / Angielski / Twarda / 2019 / 280 str.

Saul Kelly

Opis

The sale at auction in Edinburgh in 2010 of an old walking stick belonging to a British officer, Captain Gill, shed new light on one of the mysterious crimes of the Victorian era.

Captain William Gill and his companions, the noted Arabist Professor Edward Palmer of Cambridge University and a young naval lieutenant, Harold Charrington, were killed in an ambush by Bedouin Arabs in the Sinai Desert in 1883. The trio had been tasked with informal diplomacy in the region, specifically to prevent the Arab sheikhs from joining the Egyptian rebels and to secure their non-interference with the Suez Canal. The gruesome murders shocked late-Victorian Britain, and led to pressure from the Queen, Parliament, and the Press for the British government to launch a manhunt for the killers in a vast desert area, with mountainous terrain.

Captain Gill's Walking Stick traces the story behind the murder of the three men, uncovering the real reason for their journey to the desert, the story of the murder itself, as well as the backlash back home in England. It shines light on a fascinating, forgotten crime, as well as on the risks and strategies of early intelligence operations in the Middle East.

O autorze

Saul Kelly is Reader in International History in the Defence Studies Department, King's College London at the Joint Services Command and Staff College, Shrivenham, and also a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He is the author of The Hunt for Zerzura: The Lost Oasis and the Desert War; Cold War in the Desert: Britain, the United States and the Italian Colonies, 1945-52 and Whitehall and the Suez Crisis.