ABSTRACT
Lord Cromer was the last of the Victorian authors to use Gordon for political purposes but he was the first of the twentieth-century authors to retain the official account despite the contrary evidence. P. Wingate rejected a list of names of alleged murderers of Gordon and their motives provided by other Mandist informants, and concluded. that ‘the evidence in confirmation of emir Medawi’s statement is over-whelming’. ‘Karl Neufeld’s claims could have been dismissed had it not been for the supporting evidence he provided with the verbatim account of Khalil Agha Orphali, Gordon’s personal attendant who claimed to have been severely wounded at Gordon’s side when he met his death. Gordon was a legend before he returned to the Sudan in 1884. Gordon’s failure was not attributed to Gordon himself, though his own evaluation of the situation in the Sudan proved so disastrously inaccurate.
