At dawn on 13 September 1882 a British army under Sir Garnet Wolseley, after marching through the night across the desert west of the Suez Canal, stormed the entrenched lines of the Egyptian army of Ahmad Urabi at Tel el-Kebir. The battle was over in about an hour. The next day British cavalry rode into Cairo, Urabi surrendered, and Egypt passed under British control.
Debt, revolt and the bombardment of Alexandria
By the 1870s Egypt had been bankrupted by its foreign loans, and Britain and France had placed its government under their joint financial supervision. In 1881 a group of army officers led by Colonel Ahmad Urabi, known to the British as Arabi, pushed the khedive aside and took control of the country. After riots in Alexandria, a British fleet bombarded the city on 11 July 1882, and Urabi, now commander in chief, declared the khedive a traitor and organized resistance.1
Britain sent an expeditionary force under Wolseley, which Neil Faulkner of Military History Matters puts at 21,000 men. Instead of fighting its way up from Alexandria, the army was shipped through the Suez Canal and landed at Ismailia, on the canal, to advance on Cairo from the east. Across its path, at Tel el-Kebir, Urabi had dug a long line of earthworks.2
The night march
The Egyptian position held about 20,000 regular troops; Faulkner gives them 75 guns, BritishBattles.com about 60. Wolseley could put some 11,000 infantry and 2,000 cavalry into the line, with 60 field guns by Faulkner's count and 45 by BritishBattles.com's. Rather than attack in daylight across open desert, he chose to march by night and strike at first light.3
Faulkner writes that the orders were issued at 3 p.m. on 12 September and that the advance began at 1:30 a.m., timed to reach the enemy lines at dawn. The columns kept their direction surprisingly well, though they drifted to the right, and they were seen only at the last moment: Faulkner dates the first Egyptian shots to 4:55 a.m., and BritishBattles.com says the Highland Brigade was within 150 yards of the line when heavy fire broke out.4
An hour's battle
The Egyptian line broke under the assault. According to Faulkner the battle proper was over in barely an hour, though the killing of fleeing men went on longer, and the fighting had ended by about 7 a.m.. Both sources put the Egyptian dead at about 2,000, with an unknown number wounded, and BritishBattles.com says 66 guns were taken. British losses were 57 killed; Faulkner gives 412 wounded, BritishBattles.com 380 wounded and 22 missing.5
On 14 September the British cavalry reached Cairo, where Urabi surrendered. Britannica writes that he was court-martialed and sentenced to death, that the sentence was changed to exile in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) after British intervention, and that he was allowed home in 1901. Faulkner sums up the result: the khedive was restored, and Egypt became a British colony in all but name. Britannica adds that Urabi died in obscurity in 1911, but that his memory was revived in the 1950s by Gamal Abdel Nasser. A later chapter of the same story, in the Sudan, is on our page on the fall of Khartoum.6
