The Honorable Edward Montagu-Stuart-Wortley, CB, CMG, DSO, MVO (31 July 1857 – 19 March 1934)

Although he received greater and more formal rewards for his services, perhaps he set as much store by a signed photograph of the old slaver, Zubeir Pasha, which was accompanied by the following address in Arabic: “This has been presented as a token of remembrance and regard by Zubeir Rahma Pasha, the Abbaside, to his honoured friend His Excellency the Mighty Officer Stuart-Wortley, who commanded the military division on the eastern bank which took part in the conquest of Omdurman, the rout of Abdullah el Taisha and the destruction of his armies with the help and by the powers of this zealous hero. Moreover, at this action there was in his company my son, Misara, to whom His Excellency vouchsafed high thanks and noble commendation.” Wortley personified all that was engagingly paraxodical about the late Victorian and Edwardian upper classes. Unhindered by complexes and accepting privilege as a right, he and his kind could “walk with kings nor lose the common touch”. He was as much at home around a camp fire with the Bedouin camel drivers as in a great society drawing-room; as Military Attaché in Paris, or on a diplomatic mission to the Grande Porte, he blended as easily with the rich and powerful, of whom he was one, as with the wild Jaalin irregulars before Omdurman. Resolute yet easily bored, reliable yet casual, brave to the point of recklessness yet shrewd and resourceful, he had more than his share of luck and in a lifetime of campaigning was never once wounded. Warfare to him was an attack on a zariba sword in hand, a charge of heavy cavalry or a night journey in a leaky rowing-boat with the enemy on both banks, not the organized slaughter of the Great War. His world perished on the fields of Flanders and the heights of Gallipoli. If he did not quite fulfil his early promise perhaps it was because he could not be bothered. He retired in 1919 as a Major-General and died in 1934. If he is in Paradise, how dull he must find it! Unless, of course, he is allowed an occasional donkey race along the corridors of some celestial Shepheard’s Hotel or a long camel ride across an ethereal desert with a few pint bottles of ‘fizz’ clinking in his saddle-bag.

— Henry Keown-Boyd, A Good Dusting: The Sudan Campaigns, 1883–1899, 1986

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