The Secret Service Major and the Invasion of Egypt

‘We have today to make a somewhat startling announcement,’ began The Times in its Friday, November 26th, 1875, lead. ‘The British Government has bought from the KHEDIVE shares of the Suez Canal to the amount of £4,000,000 sterling, and the Egyptian Government is entitled to draw on Messr. ROTHSCHILD at sight for the amount.’ The paper continued: ‘The nation awakes this morning to find that it has acquired a heavy stake in the security and well-being of another distant country, and it will be held by all the world to have entered upon a new phase of Eastern policy.’

In public, the British government gave every support to Egypt’s ruler the Khedive Ismail as he struggled to cope with financial collapse and humiliating defeat in a war with Abyssinia. In private, and within weeks of the share purchase, it activated the Army’s recently formed Intelligence Branch (IB) to spy out the land. The head of the IB, Major-General Sir Patrick MacDougall, a frail-looking intellectual sort of soldier, was more the student of war than the hero of the battlefield and, accompanied by two brother officers – a colonel and a major – made his way to Egypt via Marseille ‘for his health’. Thirty years later one of those officers, Major Alexander Bruce Tulloch, would write about the trip in his memoirs, Recollections of Forty Years’ Service (1903). The three officers disguised neither their presence nor their identities and though they were not entirely honest about their motives, nor were the Egyptians so naïve as to believe their visit was entirely innocent.

MacDougall wrote up the visit in a confidential report, noting with Victorian understatement that, ‘arriving in Cairo as I did shortly after the purchase of the Suez Canal shares, I was led to conclude from the markedly polite but at the same time reserved manner of the Egyptian military authorities that the presence in Egypt of one of the principal officers of the English Head Quarters Staff was regarded with suspicion.’

Later his colleague would write, perhaps disingenuously, ‘Little did we think on steaming past the Alexandrian forts that in less than seven years’ time, a British fleet would be obliged to destroy them.’

Just before his death in 1848, Egypt’s ruler, a wily old Balkan-born soldier of fortune by the name of Muhammed Ali, had given his family a stern warning: ‘If you make the canal from Suez to the Mediterranean, you will bring the English into Egypt.’ His family ignored him. Urged on by Ferdinand de Lesseps, Muhammed Ali’s descendants cut the channel across the isthmus, embarked on the country’s modernization and virtually bankrupted it in the process.

Britain had initially opposed the building of the Canal but after its opening in 1869 British shipping consistently accounted for more than 90 per cent of all tonnage and it was quickly grasped in Whitehall that Suez was now the key to the defence of the British Empire in India. 

When Ismail appeared unable – or unwilling – to solve his country’s problems to their satisfaction, Britain, France and the other European powers persuaded the Ottoman ruler in Constantinople to replace his nominal vassal with a less independently-minded son, Tewfiq. But after Ismail’s deposition in June 1879 the situation continued to deteriorate. The demands of European creditors and the employment of European officials caused much local resentment. Egyptian army officers, playing to nationalist and religious feeling, at first demanded a greater say in government then staged a bloodless coup, forcing Tewfiq to retire to his palace. The leader of the revolt – or movement – was Ahmed Urabi Pasha, a colonel of fellaheen origin, an Arabic-speaking son of the soil rather than a Turkish or Circassian ‘import’, and later seen as the forerunner of Nasser.

At the beginning of 1882, the author of Recollections (and still a major) offered his services to Lieutenant-General Sir Garnet Wolseley, the man who would later that year lead the invasion. The Major reminded Wolseley of the plan of attack he had contributed to the 1876 Report on Egypt and volunteered to ‘combine business and pleasure’ in a snipe-shooting holiday to Egypt. His offer was accepted and he was told to report to Adair House, the IB’s HQ, before sailing.

In his Soldier’s Pocket-Book, Wolseley had stressed the necessity of intelligence operations and described his ideal agent: ‘whoever conducts the work should be of middle age, have a clear insight into human nature, with a logical turn of mind, nothing sanguine about him but of a generally calm and distrustful disposition.’

The forty-four-year-old Major Tulloch matched the description perfectly. The mission was politically delicate since Gladstone, Liberal prime minister since 1880, had set himself firmly against intervention in Egypt but Wolseley was determined the army should be ready for all eventualities including war.

Tulloch has been strangely neglected yet his papers in Gwent County Archives, in the basement of County Hall in Cwmbran, have never previously been accessed by historians – though deposited with the public archives in 1964. They are stored alongside the papers of his uncle, the confusingly similar Major-General Sir Alexander Murray Tulloch (1802-1864) who was one of the army’s leading reformers in the post-Crimean years. Their original classification as private correspondence appears unsound since they contain top secret reports of a clandestine mission written by a Special Service officer and addressed to a Colonel East at the IB. (One is addressed to ‘Sir Garnet’.)

These signed handwritten letters are possibly a unique primary source for the working methods of a professional intelligence officer of the period. Their authenticity seems to be confirmed by the likeness of their handwriting to the signature of Alex B. Tulloch which appears beneath the author’s photograph in the 1905 Times Book Club edition of Recollections. From them we learn how Tulloch investigates the coastal defences at Alexandria and Damietta, gathers information on the Suez Canal, Egyptian army and its supply base, and reconnoitres the ground at Tel El Kebir in the desert east of Cairo where the decisive battle of the Egyptian Campaign was fought.

Tulloch is also full of recommendations as to how to make quick work of things in the event of hostilities. Both sabotage and special operations are considered. ‘It is said that it would take no great amount of Bucksheesh [sic] to have the principal magazine, that at Tourra, exploded,’ he writes coolly to Colonel East on February 17th from Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo. From Alexandria, in a letter dated March 5th, he describes in detail the state of the coastal defences. For the destruction of one of the batteries, Fort Meiks, he suggests, ‘a boat landing might be effected just west of the fort within 100 yds and the assailants might scramble in to the place on the flank where the wall has fallen down.’

Appropriately enough, Tulloch himself would lead the successful landing party following the bombardment of Alexandria on July 11th. As a result of the action, he was promoted Lieutenant-Colonel and recommended for the Victoria Cross.

Wolseley himself never wrote about the Egypt Campaign but Tulloch implied that his own memoirs were published with his chief’s encouragement. When they appeared first in 1903, however, they sparked immediate controversy. The Times Literary Supplement reviewer strongly criticized its author: ‘future agents of the department will not find their work any easier if their predecessors are not habitually reticent to the last degree as to every detail of their employment.’

Tulloch had unquestionably broken the Code of Silence, a founding tenet of the IB’s charter when it was set up on April 1st, 1873. His chapters on the Egypt Campaign relate in the kind of detail entirely absent from other contemporary memoirs the undercover missions behind enemy lines, counter-espionage operations, press disinformation techniques, and the use of bribery and spies that made up the work of the Special Service officers. He gleefully tells the reader how over lunch he personally hoodwinked de Lesseps himself as to British intentions regarding the Canal’s neutrality.

Yet it was Tulloch’s own Report on Egypt, printed and distributed to the French and British cabinets soon after the anti-European riots in Alexandria in June 1882, that perhaps had the greatest impact. The file in Gwent contains a manuscript of this until-now lost report. With precision he dissects Egypt’s defence establishment and predicts a swift occupation with the minimum of casualties. Undoubtedly his confidence helped ministers to convince Gladstone to execute one of the great U-turns of nineteenth-century politics, and created the opportunity for what one military historian, Byron Farwell (1973), has called ‘the most brilliantly devised and executed campaign of the century’.

James Exelby is a freelance writer currently researching the British invasion and occupation of Egypt.