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...
Any Quora discussion on the Boer War quickly degenerates into a few idiot True Believers screaming about ‘the camps!’, so it was a pleasant surprise to see an especially stupid one trying a different tactic. When someone pointed out...
Delighted to report that an Ash blog article has been included in the latest copy of the Battlefields region digital magazine, ‘Cannons and Cosmos’: Digital Magazine Here is the direct link to it...
When it comes to those who so passionately defend the Boer War myths, there is an obvious link between these True Believers and the extreme Right of Afrikanerdom. This is hardly surprising, as the myths these types so adore were enthusiastically...
One of the strangest things about True Believers is their inability to understand what the word ‘invasion’ means. For the sake of those who have an English-reading age of less than 5, here is a widely accepted Dictionary definition of the word...
One of the favourite squeals of True Believers is that the Boer War was so extraordinarily long, and so outrageously expensive, that it ‘almost bankrupted the British Empire’. Though shouting things like that makes a certain sort of...
Exactly 125 years ago today, the Boer War started with a republican invasion of the British territories of Natal and the Cape Colony. One is left to wonder if certain people will still be denying this inconvenient reality in another 125 years.
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