These days it is, of course, de rigueur to pretend that the British Empire was a ghastly endeavour, and something we should all be frightfully ashamed of. George Santayana, that celebrated Spanish / American man of letters, had a rather more...
In all the many times I have discussed the Boer War with people over the years, I struggle to remember many who have approached the subject with anything resembling an open mind: instead, entrenched dogma is the order of the day. As the saying...
Anyone who spends any time in South Africa will soon learn that the mere mention of the Boer War sparks normally rational people to spout all manner of exaggerated rubbish. One will be earnestly assured that it was the ‘most expensive war Britain...
A friend recently sent me a link to an article on YouTube about the Jameson Raid. The most interesting part was to read the truly madcap comments below it, one of which in particular caught my eye: ‘1890 – Can non property owning British...
‘By 2050 — earlier, probably — all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron — they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely...
I was recently sent this link to an article: https://www.lucilledavie.co.za/single-post/2020/01/15/Boers-thrash-Brits-in-Battle-of-Nooitgedacht With mind-numbing predictablity, the defeat – just like each and every other British reverse –...
Today marks the 120th anniversary of one of the bloodiest actions of the war – the Battle of Spion Kop. Churchill, who was there, declared the scene on top of the hill to have been ‘an acre of massacre’ and it would be hard to...
A knowledgeable enthusiast on the Boer War recently commented on one of my blog articles, a posting in which I mentioned the sheer lunacy of Kruger et al opting to attack the British Empire. His remarks basically suggested that, by my describing...
I was recently invited to this talk: As it was to be presented by one of the leading Defenders of the Myth™, I was far from enthusiastic to begin with, and even less so when I read the little write up above. If nothing else, however, this advert...
In a recent Quora answer, someone bizarrely announced that total Boer forces during the war were just 43,000. As this is utter rubbish, I responded, informing this person that the real figure was actually about double that. He then replied to me...
On 1 January 1900, and after six weeks of siege, the tiny desert outpost of Kuruman finally surrendered to the invading Boers. Needless to say, certain History Professors who like to pretend that the poor old Boers were ‘forced’ to invade British...
On the 30th of December 1865, Rudyard Kipling – probably the finest poet of the modern age – was born. A man inextricably linked with the British Empire, and especially to the Empire in Southern Africa, Kipling won the Nobel Prize for...
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