I recently came across a remarkable claim in Ben Viljoen’s ‘Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War’ – a book not short on remarkable claims. Viljoen states that, shortly after the Battle of Vaal Krantz, his men captured a 50-strong troop of the 17th...
One will often hear that it took ‘half a million’ British troops to beat the Boers, but I recently read an even more far-fetched and ridiculous claim in a book called ‘The Road to Infamy’, by Owen Coetzer: It is interesting that Coetzer didn’t...
The British army’s complete lack of preparation for the Boer War is contrary to the myths which like to pretend it was a vast, behemoth of the thing, poised and ready on the borders of the republics, eager to invade. In reality, the army...
Throughout the decades of National Party rule, the myths of the Boer War went largely unchallenged in South Africa – but the times, they are a-changing, and the Apartheid-era fairy tales are finally being exposed as the rubbish they are. Seeing...
A very interesting myth-busting article in today’s Sunday Telegraph by Robert Tombs: If Oxfam is right about Empire, then where is my $1 million? Don’t trust the latest report about how the West is to blame for all the world’s ills. It...
Though nothing was officially announced, it would seem some sort of World Championship to find the most fanatical True Believer of them all is underway. The ‘arena’ for this much-anticipated title clash is – of course – Facebook, and the last 48...
We are all used to hearing the same old Boer War myths spewing out of Pretoria University, and being faithfully regurgitated by unreconstructed National Party zealots, and other knuckle-draggers of the Afrikaans Far-Right. It was thus an...
‘If he could have recovered the doctors say he would have been paralysed or would have lost his memory. He was the best type of Englishman’. After their first attempt to storm Ladysmith on 9 November 1899 was defeated, the invading Boers lingered...
True Believers love to claim that the Boers ‘taught’ the British army pretty much everything, including the wearing of khaki, rather than red. Like pretty much everything else they say, this is nonsense: not only did the Boers...
Ultimately, seven VCs were awarded for heroism at Colenso, all in recognition of extreme valour connected to the attempts to recover the guns of the 14th and 66th Batteries. The citation of Captain Reed (Later, Major General Hamilton Lyster Reed...
125 years ago today, Buller attempted to break through the Boer positions at Colenso, and raise the Siege of Ladysmith. Pretty much everything that could go wrong, did go wrong, and Buller called off the attempt after just a few hours. Most...
Even the man who started Wiki now accepts it is hopelessly biased[i], but it is still amusing to see just how abysmal it has become. For example, I found this section on the page about the Siege of Mafeking: ‘For Baden-Powell, and in the British...
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