The South African War has spawned a substantial bibliography covering an extensive range of aspects and topics. In Britain, the historiography was reinvigorated in the late 1960s when the conflict was rediscovered after years of neglect in such works as T. C. Caldwell’s edited collection,The Anglo-Boer War: Why Was it Fought? Who Was Responsible?¹ A second significant landmark came in 1972 when Richard Price’sAn Imperial War and the British Working Class: Working-class Attitudes and Reactions to the Boer War, 1899–1902, was published.² This work was part of a new generation of histories which attempted to break away...

Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain was a society obsessed with social class and stratification, yet the war in South Africa had been a crucial evolutionary moment for the British middle and working classes. Emerging from the shadow of the aristocracy, the middle classes, and lower middle classes in particular, made up the majority of the initial volunteers for the army and thus often perceived themselves to be the instruments of victory. The war validated and confirmed their importance, status and respectability. Working-class volunteers had also come forward in large numbers, although historians debate the extent to which the motivation was...

The South African War was an important moment of transition in the nature and perception of the British army. A central element in this process of change was the growth of mass literacy. Almost every British soldier had at least basic literacy skills and could write about their experiences in letters to loved ones back home. Frequently such accounts were disseminated to a wider public through local newspapers, works journals and school magazines. The soldiers were also accompanied by journalists, artists, illustrators and cinematographers. Modern technology was then used to give a public educated in popular patriotism and imperialism an...

At the forefront of the communal commemoration of the South African War in Britain were educational institutions and in particular the great public schools. James Gildea, in his beautifully produced 1911 gazetteer of memorials, listed eighty-one schools that constructed memory sites in honour of old boys who died in the South African War.¹ That such a large number of schools chose to commemorate the sacrifices of their alumni in this way should come as no surprise when one considers the guiding principles at the heart of a late Victorian and Edwardian education. As J. A. Mangan has noted, with an...

Although the nineteenth century was a period of change in memorialisation practice with a move towards the democratisation of the process occurring, the celebration of the individual remained at the heart of commemorative activity throughout this period. Yet, with the volunteer movement of 1899–1902 playing such a prominent role in the public imagery of the army, the South African War was, undoubtedly, a crucial stimulus for civilian organisations to celebrate the contributions of their members to the collective war effort. Thus, at every level of society where people shared a common identity or could perceive a unifying bond, communities...

In the introduction to his magisterial 1979 overview of the Boer War, Thomas Pakenham noted that the history of the conflict for the past seventy years had been dominated by two contemporary works ;The Times History of the War in South Africa, edited by Leo Amery, and Sir Frederick Maurice’s (official)History of the War in South Africa.¹ Indeed, until Pakenham’s study, little serious research into the conflict had been undertaken. Although there had been brief revivals of interest in the 1930s, with Ian Hamilton’sAnti-Commandoand J. F. C. Fuller’sThe Last of the Gentlemen’s Wars, and in...

In her study of the presentation of the Great War in television documentaries, Emma Hanna notes that such histories serve much the same purpose as war memorials. Both, she argues, are carefully constructed representations of the past, artfully composed so that the story they portray ‘will be accepted in the moment of their creation and by the society for whom they are created’.¹ But here Hanna is ploughing a lone furrow. Invariably, the small screen, as distinct from cinema, is ignored by cultural historians, dismissed as nothing more than mere entertainment. Yet, the past enshrined in historical documentaries has an...

By the end of the nineteenth century, Britain was a nation fascinated by the military world. Although, for some of the working class, this fascination may have been darkened by a lingering sense of apprehension, for the vast majority of the population the army served as a symbol for national and imperial pride. In part, the roots of this burgeoning popularity can be found in the Victorian cult of personality. Already well established by the time of Gordon’s death in Khartoum in 1885, the focus on the individual hero reached new heights during the South African War as the new...