In 1884, Townshend was part of the relief expedition to rescue the besieged army of General Charles Gordon, better known to the British public as "Chinese Gordon", at Khartoum. As a Royal Marine officer, he strictly speaking should not had been part of an Army expedition, but he wrote to General Garnet Wolseley asking if he could go, and his request was granted. The way that Gordon had defied the orders of the government to leave Khartoum, knowing full well that the government could not abandon a national hero like himself and would have to send out a relief expedition to save him made a great impression on Townshend. Even though Gordon had flagrantly and repeatedly ignored orders to evacuate Khartoum, the British press had generally portrayed "Chinese Gordon" as a Christian hero and martyr who had died heroically resisting the Islamic army of the Mahdi, and attacked the government of William Gladstone as abject cowards whose efforts to save Gordon were too little, too late. The power of the press and its ability to rouse public opinion in favour of heroic generals besieged by Islamic fanatics was noted by Townshend at the time. In January 1885, he fought at the Battle of Abu Klea, which was his first battle and the first time he killed a man. In 1886, he transferred from the Royal Marines to the British Army, largely because he felt it offered better prospects of promotion. The American historian John Semple Galbraith wrote that "Townshend was an inveterate self-advertiser, constantly and actively promoting his own brilliance in the hope of recognition by a grateful country, preferably in the form of a KCB."