Original Item. One-of-a-Kind. The Battle of Omdurman, September 2nd, 1898, also known as the Battle of Karary, was fought during the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of Sudan between a British–Egyptian expeditionary force commanded by British Commander-in-Chief (sirdar) major general Horatio Herbert Kitchener and a Sudanese army of the Mahdist State, led by Abdallahi ibn Muhammad (the Khalifa), the successor to the self-proclaimed Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad. This is a tremendous Mahdist helmet which was taken as a trophy by then Captain Nevill Maskelyne Smyth, who was awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions on September 2nd, his citation reading:

At the Battle of Khartum on 2 September 1898, Captain Smyth galloped forward and attacked an Arab who had run amok among some camp followers. Captain Smyth received the Arab's charge, and killed him, being wounded with a spear in the arm whilst in so doing. He thus saved the life of at least one of the Camp Followers.

Near to the end of the battle, a dervish tried to spear two war correspondents; Smyth galloped forward and, though severely speared through the arm, shot the man dead. This action is what earned him the Victoria Cross, and he likely took this helmet as a trophy either from the dervish who he saved those camp followers from, or from another soldier on the battlefield. For his courageous actions, he earned the nickname “The Sphinx”. The note on the back of the helmet reads:

Trophy of Omdurman
Taken by then Captain
N.M. Smyth, ….
Of Major General Sir Neville M. Smyth
V.C., K.C.B.

Neville was promoted to Major General in 1917, and was promoted Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in the 1919 King's Birthday Honours, so the note was written and pasted to the helmet sometime after 1919.

The helmet is constructed of a silver shell with an etched panel at the crown, with a nonagon (9-sided) tip. The long lobed nasal finial is intact, secured to the helmet by three rivets, and protruding 9¼” downward. The original quilted lining of the helmet is well-retained, although there is some heavy loss in spots. The red bordering at the front of the helmet is wearing away on one side, but it is in fair condition overall. The lining covers the majority of the head, with the original “chinstraps” still intact as well, knotted in several places. This helmet is exactly as you’d expect to find it for being a Battlefield pickup by a Victoria Cross recipient.

This is one of the most tremendous captured helmets we have ever offered, with a one-of-a-kind story attached. Don’t miss out, as we’ll never have another like it! Comes ready for further research and display.

“The Sphinx” Nevill Smyth

Major General Sir Nevill Maskelyne Smyth, VC, KCB (14 August 1868 – 21 July 1941) was a senior officer in the British Army and a recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces.

Why was Sir Nevill Smyth VC known as “The Sphinx”? General Sir Cyril Brudenell-White, who masterminded the First AIF’s brilliant withdrawal from Gallipoli, said it was because “He is so Sphinx-like, silent and imperturbable.” The Great War historian C.E.W. Bean described Smyth “directing reinforcements into the Lone Pine tunnels as quietly as a ticket collector passing passengers on to a platform”.

This extraordinarily modest military adventurer won his Victoria Cross at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, was mentioned in despatches for gallantry eleven times, saw further action and demonstrated great bravery in the Boer War, at Gallipoli and on the Western Front. He so respected the courage of the Australian soldiers he led and fought beside—“the finest troops with whom I have ever served”—that not long afterwards he migrated to Australia and became one. So why don’t Australians know his remarkable story?

Smyth had an impeccable pedigree. Born in 1868 into the family of Sir Warington Wilkinson Smyth, a noted geologist, his paternal grandfather was Admiral William Henry Smyth, his maternal great grandfather was Nevil Maskelyne, Astronomer Royal during the Napoleonic Wars, and his first cousin was Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout Movement.

Young Nevill attended the prestigious Westminster School in London, and graduated from Royal Military College, Sandhurst. His earliest posting was with the Queen’s Bays in India. It was there in 1894 that he first met Lieutenant Jack Antill, an Australian, who as a colonel at Gallipoli was dubbed “the Bull (Ant)” and gave the infamous order to “Push on!” that resulted in the wholesale slaughter of the 8th Light Horse Regiment at The Nek. Unfortunately, viewers of Peter Weir’s 1980 film Gallipoli could easily assume an English officer gave the order.

In 1894 Nevill and his brother, H. Warington Smyth, Commissioner of Mines to the King of Siam, captured 120 elephants, one of which went rogue. A peppering of small calibre bullets from a French hunter’s rifle must have left the elephant imagining “it was being stung by hornets”, until Nevill took it down with his .50 Magnum, an even more powerful handgun than the .44 Magnum used by the fictional Inspector “Dirty Harry” Callahan.

In H. Warington Smyth’s gold-leaf-embossed book of 1898, Five Years in Siam (with a drawing of an elephant on the cover), the characteristic modesty of the family ensured that the incident was not recorded. It was noted however that: “The elephant … can run down the best runner, and every year someone gets killed in this way. A little hesitation, a trip on the rough ground, a kick, and it is all over.”

In 1896 the Bays were sent to Egypt, where Smyth helped chart the Nile cataracts, in preparation for the River War. The “Sirdar” (Commander in Chief of the Egyptian Army), Major-General Sir Herbert Kitchener, was waging a creeping war on Sudan’s Khalifa Abdulla Allahi, who in June 1885 had been anointed by the Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad, as his successor. The Mahdi was dying of typhus and thus unable to fulfil the Islamist prophecy of coming to rule the world. There was also the matter of revenge for the brutal slaying of Major-General Charles George Gordon, a Christian fundamentalist, at the Siege of Khartoum in January. Gordon’s head was severed and strung between two poles to feed the birds.

It is 2,150 kilometres from Cairo to Omdurman, on the western bank of the Nile, opposite Khartoum at the junction of the White and Blue Nile. For Kitchener’s army, it was like starting in Melbourne to reach an enemy in Mount Isa. A new railway was built, and the charting of cataracts was required for the navigation of gunboats.

Travelling south from Cairo by train on March 24, 1896, Smyth noted in his diary that he was entering the “home of the Dervishes and land of fanaticism”. He was a good sketcher, and his work was used by artists in London for drawings that appeared the Graphic and the Illustrated London News.

After the Battle of Atbara on April 8, 1898, when 3,000 Dervishes were killed or wounded in under an hour for 500 British and Egyptian casualties, Smyth wrote in his diary: “Find a Jaali girl aged about 10 years, shot in thigh. She dies after amputation, going to sleep at night with eyes not quite closed.”

Smyth fetched “water and gave bags of nuts to two women who had been shot in the legs”, and shot “geese, guinea fowl, bustard, and plover to feed about thirty Dervishes”. When a wounded horse died, its legs were “grilled to help the sick, the starving and the injured in the devastated villages”, while Smyth and his men dressed and bathed their wounds.