Battle of Gennis

Battle of Ginnis
Battle of Ginnis from The Illustrated London News
Date 30 December 1885 Location Sudan Result British victory
Belligerents
United Kingdom	Mahdist Sudan
Commanders and leaders
Francis Grenfell	unknown
Strength
3,500	6,000
Casualties and losses
10 killed & 41 wounded	400 killed & many more wounded

The Battle of Ginnis (also known as the Battle of Gennis) was a minor battle of the Mahdist War that was fought on December 30, 1885, between soldiers of the Anglo-Egyptian Army and Mahdist Sudanese warriors of the Dervish State. The battle was caused by the Mahdist blockade of the Ginnis-Kosha fort, which British commanders hoped to relieve. The fighting resulted in a British victory. It is principally remarkable as the last battle fought by the British Army in red coats (although a maxim battery from the Connaught Rangers is said to have fought in red at the Battle of Ferkeh in 1896).

In 1884, a Sudanese Islamic religious fanatic, Muhammad Ahmed, also known as "The Mahdi", planned and executed a series of attacks that left a British general, William Hicks, and thousands of ill-trained Egyptian soldiers dead at the hands of angry Arab rebels called Dervishes or (more accurately) Mahdists. The Sudan was controlled by an Anglo-Egyptian administration, and it was decided that something must be done. General Charles Gordon was sent by the British government to be the Egyptian Army's Governor-General there. General Gordon and his aide, Colonel John Donald Hamill Stewart, carried orders from both governments to evacuate the town from the Mahdi. Instead, Gordon built up the town's defenses and prepared for a siege. The British government sent two relief columns, the slow River Column and the mobile Desert Column, to rescue Gordon, Stewart, and the Egyptian garrison. After both columns won hard-fought battles, Kirbekan and Abu Klea, respectively, it was found that Stewart had been murdered by wandering Arabs north of Khartoum after his steamboat ran aground and that, through the treachery of an Egyptian deputy commander, Khartoum had fallen and Gordon was killed, the columns retreated, leaving behind a series of forts.

One of these forts was near the towns of Kosha and Ginnis, in northern Sudan, where a detachment of Cameron Highlanders and Egyptian-Sudanese troops from the Ninth Sudanese Battalion were stationed. Thousands of Mahdist warriors, led by their provincial Amirs, began raiding in the vicinity of Ginnis. They besieged the fort, and at one time the garrison's Gardner gun was dismounted by a Mahdist artillery barrage. General Evelyn Wood, the British commander in Egypt as well as the Sirdar (commander) of the Egyptian Army, became concerned about the siege and the raids and he ordered Major General Francis Grenfell with a force of two infantry brigades and a cavalry brigade to rid the area of Mahdists.

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