Extended length: 15.5cm (6in)
Silver and brass. A silver propelling pencil sleeved in a Woolwich Arsenal .303 hollow point Mark IV Ball brass rifle cartridge. The case inscribed ‘Omdurman’ and ‘Remember Gordon’. Fitted with watch chain loop. Retailed by Mappin Brothers, 220 Regent Street, London, and probably made by Sampson Mordan & Company.
‘Remember Gordon’ pencils, so called from the general order issued to the rank and file before Omdurman, were made from spent cartridge cases collected from the battlefield, and were pitched to the public in an advertisement placed in ‘The Illustrated London News’ at Christmas 1899 with ten percent of the sales proceeds being donated to the Gordon Memorial College of Khartoum.
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On 2 September 1898, the Khalifa’s forces issued forth from Khartoum and launched a mass assault over open ground towards the well-positioned ranks of Sir Herbert Kitchener’s Anglo-Egyptian Army at Omdurman. Kitchener’s infantry were armed with the new eight-shot Lee-Metford rifle, lighter and with greater range than its Snider and Martini-Henry predecessors. Each infantryman carried 100 rounds of Mark IV ammunition that was specially filed by the troops to make Dum-Dums that caused massive internal injuries wherever they struck. Named for the Arsenal in West Bengal where Captain Neville Bertie-Clay developed the expanding bullet, the Dum-Dum provided the British Tommy with a round of immense stopping power that had been wholly lacking in the the .303 calibre Mark II bullet it replaced. Hitherto in the face of fanatical and ferocious tribesmen the Mark II tended to pass right through the body of the attacker without immediate effect unless bone or vital organs were hit. Eyewitness Winston Churchill described the modified Mark IV’s effect with evident horror.
‘Battalion by battalion ... the British division began to fire ... until by 6.45 more than 12,000 infantry were engaged in that mechanical scattering of death which the polite nations of the earth have brought to such monstrous perfection. …The rifles grew hot – so hot that they had to be changed for those of the reserve companies. The Maxim guns exhausted all the water in their jackets, and several had to be refreshed from the water-bottles of the Cameron Highlanders before they could go on with their deadly work. The empty cartridge-cases, tinkling to the ground, formed small but growing heaps beside each man … And all the time out on the plain on the other side bullets were shearing through flesh, smashing and splintering bone; blood spouted from terrible wounds; valiant men were struggling on through a hell of whistling metal, exploding shells, and spurting dust – suffering, despairing, dying. … The terrible machinery of scientific war had done its work’.
In Britain, Omdurman was celebrated as payback for the death of General Gordon thirteen years earlier. At the Hague, Declaration III of the 1899 Convention banned the use of .303 Mark IV Dum-Dum bullets and its use by the British Army was discontinued.