At this stage of his career Kitchener actively courted the press to build his reputation, and his relationship with G. Among the British troops was a young Winston Churchill. General Kitchener would eventually defeat the successor to the Madi, Abdullah al-Taashi, in the battle of Omdurman in 1898. Reluctantly, the British sent a relief force that arrived two days too late to keep Gordon’s head from being hung in a tree. This made matters even worse for Charles Gordon, Aka “Chinese Gordon” Aka “Gordon of Khartoum”, when he was besieged by the Mahdi’s Forces some time later. Instead, he and almost his entire command got wiped out, and now the Mahdi’s rebels had a whole bunch of these Remingtons. Colonel Hicks would have done better spending his retirement growing roses. The first shipments were diverted for the Franco-Prussian war, but by 1875 the Egyptians were receiving large quantities of the rolling block.Įgyptian rolling blocks saw quite a bit of action, but the most well-known may be in the Sudan, where a retired British Colonel named Hicks lead an Egyptian Army of about 11,000 soldiers against the rebel forces of Mohammed Ahmed, the self-proclaimed “Mahdi” (prophesied redeemer of Islam). The Khedive was so impressed that he not only ordered the rifle for his army, but gave Remington a plot of land in Cairo where he built a small palace. At the exhibition, Sam Remington was invited by emissaries of the Khedive, Ismael Pasha of Cairo, to come to Egypt to show his new rifle.
It was too late for the American Civil War, but it made a huge hit at the 1867 Paris Exhibition, resulting in numerous orders from governments around the world. 1 Military Rifle”), was a single shot black powder cartridge firearm featuring a “rolling” breach block. The Remington Rolling Block (In this case the “Remington No. I thought this firearm might make a good transition piece between my recent posts of guns related to the British Empire and some future posts of American guns.