Britain Abroad

_{US President James Garfiled was shot in Washington D.C after just four months in office. © Getty Images}

The international scene was dominated by assassinations in 1881 with the killing of both American and Russian heads of state.

Tsar Alexander II was killed by a bomb in St Petersburg on 13 March. His assassins, called The People’s Will, was an organisation that grew out of groups making moderate demands for universal suffrage and free speech in Russia. Unable to make headway peaceably, they moved toward revolutionary measures.

Jews were blamed for the assassination (though only one of the assassins was Jewish, the rest were Christian) and thousands of Jewish homes and businesses were destroyed in government-sponsored pogroms mainly in south-west Russia. The persecution began a major emigration over the next three decades. Many Jews passed through British ports on their way to the United States, helped by Jewish aid agencies. Some settled in England, forming major communities in London’s East End, Manchester and Salford.

In America on 2 July the new president James A Garfield, in office for just four months, was shot in a Washington railway station by a disturbed man. The killer was apparently an embittered attorney seeking office and acting alone.

British public opinion was shocked by these dramatic events, but the political elite showed less alarm than those of other nations, Britain did not feel threatened by extremism. Oppressive regimes in other lands had brought many refugees to Britain, the most important was the great theorist of communism Karl Marx who in 1881 was living in Kentish Town.

By unofficial agreement with the authorities, the refugees could talk as much revolution as they wished, so long as they did not turn their words into actions. Thus London openly hosted the International Anarchist Congress in 1881, at a pub in Kings Cross, under the watchful, but not admonitory eye of the police.

Danger existed on the edges of the empire. The British Army suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Boer farmers who refused to accept British hegemony in their region of South Africa and in December 1880 had proclaimed their independence. In a bloody battle at Majuba Hill in the Transvaal on 27 February 1881more than 300 British soldiers were killed including their general, Sir George Colley, who was shot through the forehead. This chapter of bitterness between the British and the Boers was finally brought to a close by the Convention of Pretoria in August that recognised internal self-government for the Transvaal – foreign affairs were to stay under British control. This became known as the first of the Boer Wars.

In another portent of trouble to come, in the dusty reaches of the Sudan a leader emerged. Mohammed Ahmed ibn Abdallah proclaimed himself the Mahdi – the guide whose arrival was foretold by some Muslim traditions. The Mahdi was dedicated to his own narrow interpretation of Islam and opposition to Egyptian rule which was felt to be corrupt. Militant ‘Mahdists’ were also offended by the Egyptians’ appointment of an English Christian, Charles George Gordon, as governor-general of the Sudan. They swore to reconquer the country for their faith.

Jad Adams