On 3 April, 1900, General Cronjé of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek / Transvaal, and around 1000 other Boer POWs departed Cape Town, bound for captivity on St Helena. After his unsuccessful attempt to take Kimberley, and having been completely...
I was recently made aware of a typically self-pitying and ill-researched article which appeared in an Afrikaans newspaper way back in 1999. Written by the spectacularly ignorant (and now departed) Leopold Scholtz – a typically blinkered Defender...
I was recently made aware of a self-pitying piece of drivel posted on one of the more low-brow Boer War Facebook sites. These places seem to be overwhelmingly inhabited by the lunatic fringe of the AWB: sad, lonely old men who love to swap...
When it comes to reading about the Boer War, a useful rule-of-thumb is that any article which quotes Fransjohan Pretorius as an authoritative reference will be devoid of any semblance of historical reality. This was reconfirmed to me recently...
The god-awful Guardian newspaper is at the forefront of the current ‘woke’ and self-loathing obsession with running down every aspect of British history. It was therefore rather entertaining to read this article by Zoe Strimpel in the...
It has been obvious to me for a long time that the attitudes of some towards the British Empire in general, and the Boer War in particular, have nothing to do with historical reality – ie. what actually happened – and everything to do...
I was recently made aware of an online discussion featuring one of the more blinkered and ignorant of the True Believers. A character called Pieter Cloete was endeavouring to promote a book he had written – a work so poorly researched[1] that it...
An especially unpleasant and thick-headed True Believer recently posted a long and rambling antisemitic post on social media, basically blaming the Boer War on Jewish capitalists. I shall dismantle his nonsense in another blog article, but...
Every time I am sure I must have encountered the most blinkered and ignorant True Believer of them all, yet another pops up, desperate to claim the title as his own. A fellow going by the name of ‘Melville Lotter’ is the latest in this long and...
They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest,Uncoffined – just as found,His landmark is a kopje-crest,That breaks the veldt around,And foreign constellations west,Each night above his mound. Young Hodge the Drummer never knew –Fresh from his Wessex home...
Things have been quiet on Quora for a bit, so I was pleased when a fellow popped up to entertain me the other day. He seemingly took exception to this response I posted a couple of weeks hence: Mr Curran (who appears to be some sort of...
It was with interest that I read an article in the Sunday Telegraph, in which various loud-mouths, morons and keyboard warriors are making a fuss about the potential wearing of the Cullinan Diamonds[i] by the Queen Consort on an upcoming State...
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