Winston Churchill, the Morning Post and the End of the Imperial Romance

Abstract

Winston Spencer Churchill wrote the above lament for a passing age on 12 September 1898, ten days after participating in the battle of Omdurman as both cavalry officer and Morning Post special correspondent. The idea that imperialism provided entertaining spectacle in the hands of enterprising journalists is conveyed with unusual directness. Both Churchill and his newspaper considered the reconquest of the Sudan to be an element of a long-running romantic narrative. His employers at the Morning Post were explicit on this point: an anonymous article of 5 September 1898, printed while news of the victory at Omdurman was still filtering out, was entitled ‘The Romance of Khartoum’.² Churchill called Kitchener’s campaign ‘the last Act in the great Drama of Khartoum’.³ A rival correspondent, George Warrington Steevens of the Daily Mail, wrote of the ‘romance of the Sudan’.⁴ This was a long running theme. After all, when General Gordon was sent on his ill-fated mission to Khartoum in 1884, the Illustrated London News had proudly informed its readers that his achievements to date had been ‘more wonderful than are to be found in the wildest Oriental romance’.⁵ However, the sense that Kitchener’s campaign was the concluding chapter of the imperial romance was also strong. ‘The Romance of Khartoum’ included the following passage: ‘But it has ceased.

Perhaps the time will come when the supply will be exhausted and there will be no more royal freaks to conquer. In that gloomy period there will be no more of these nice little expeditions […] no more medals for the soldiers, no more peerages for the generals, no more copy for the journalists. The good times will have passed away, and the most cynical philosopher will be forced to admit that though the world may not be much more prosperous it can scarcely be so merry.¹