Boer War

Bulldog - re Churchill's photographs - you could suggest to your fiancee that Churchill was so keen to be seen that his valet Thomas Walden (on loan from his mother) was probably whirling around him like a dervish with a camera. His photograph also appears in the Durban Club.

Re the concentration camps: Various versions of concentration camps had been in use for years. In 1898 they had been used by Spain in the Cuban uprising. Since about 1894 Germany had been using concentration camps in German South West Africa, in the full meaning of these words, with inhuman flogging (the stomach and between the thighs - as reported by Chief Nama) and accusations of other torture too terrible to mention. The measles epidemic that swept through the South African camps was horrifying because the children were from isolated communities and had no resistance to the disease. Measles had been noted by an Australian nurse who said some New Zealand soldiers were arriving sick with measles. However during the Boer War measles never went out of control as the soldiery had no doubt built up resistance. World wide, measles epidemics have killed tens of thousands (haven't seen the stats but this could be as high as hundreds of thousands and are still occuring today.) The women in the camps must have built up some resistance because typhoid caused most of their deaths; it was the scourge of the war and killed far more than bullets. The British had horrifying typhoid statistics in the Siege of Ladysmith and the better known epidemic at Bloemfontein. Complaints about the food in the camps were often justified, but what wasn't realised, was that the Boer commandoes, so anxious to disrupt British organisation, often disrupted the very food chain intended for the camps.

At one point the disease was so bad there weren't enough soldiers to man the defences. Baden-Powell came up with a solution of putting dummies on the ramparts and using boys behind the lines so more soldiers could be sent to the front. His experiences in the Boer War led to him inventing the Boy Scout movement

Baden-Powell was actually inspired to establish the Boy Scouts by the American explorer and frontiersman, Frederick Burnham. The two served together in the Matabele War and Burnham sparked an interest in survival and tracking etc in BP. The modern view is that BP was 'wrong' to be so ruthless in his defence of Mafeking, but he did what he could to prevent the town being captured. He was saddled with large numbers of 'useless mouths' and took the tough decision of forcing them to leave - the alternative would have been the loss of Mafeking. Surely the besieging Boers - who were the ones who tried first to starve the blacks to death and then, when they were forced to leave Mafeking, shot them - should bear more than a little responsibilty?

Edited by Bulldog69 - 20-Oct-2011 at 02:21

JAJ

Wasn't Churchill born a "gentleman"? I thought he was descended from the Duke of Marlborough. It was only the middle-class nouveau-rich who cared about pretentious manners and gestures to set themselves apart from the workers

Bulldog mentioned that General Joubert had lost control of the Boer forces surrounding Ladysmith, which explains a lot. Joubert would not have given permission for the British hospital at the Ladysmith Town Hall, clearly flying a huge Red Cross flag, to be bombarded for several days, causing death and devastation, which clearly defied the Hague Convention. There was a skilled artillery team in the Boer forces in the surrounding hills, German trained and German led; could they have been the culprits? After some hesitation, Perhaps because of the transgression, Joubert allowed a hospital to be established three miles out of town. The catch was, that it was placed directly underneath the Long Tom at the top of Umbulwana, a precarious position. If the return fire of the British naval guns fell short of their Long Tom target, they fell into the hospital. It was called Intombi, after the small nearby stream and became infamous for the typhoid epedemic that went out of control; a train arrived daily from Ladysmith with scores of new patients from town. It was here that great heroism was displayed by both doctors and nurses, almost all of whom suffered from the disease and all of whom were on starvation diets. There were two graphic accounts - one was by a Greys trained (Pietermaritzburg) nurse, Kate Driver, who recorded the horrors, another was by an Australian nurse, Rose Shapphere.

I heard some funny stores when I was researching in Ladysmith once. One story concerned the Australian 'Karri' Davies, one of the founders of the ILH regiment raised from Uitlanders. In the long siege his uniform became faded and he tried to dye it khaki with Condes Crystals. It turned pink unfortunately. He may have been in his pink uniform at the battle of Platrand, when he had a strange claim to fame. He said he was the only man in the world who had four bullet holes from one bullet. He was a tubby lad and apparently his buttocks stuck up from the rock he was crouched behind. A Boer bullet went in and out of both cheeks!

Before the siege, the Boer farmers around Ladysmith challenged some officers of the British garrison to a test of their shooting skills. The Boers tethered ten goats and took shots from far away. When they walked up they discovered every goat was dead. They tethered another ten for the British. After the dust cleared they walked up and discovered eleven live goats. One of the nannies had birthed in fright.

The last story involves a British officer who was determined to enjoy a cup of tea on the verandah despite a Boer barrage during the siege. As he lifted the cup to his lips a bullet shot the cup away. He looked at the handle, laid it down in the saucer and went in to clean up, all without a word.

Not the most 'PC' of anecdotes, but interesting nonetheless:

 

‘Among the marvelous escapes recorded, and these were not a few, was one of a negro who was shot through the brain by a bullet. The projectile passed through one temple and lodged into the other, yet the man still survived, and showed a decided intention to recover. There is an old story of a Jamaica negro who fell from a tree without injury, and when asked how he had escaped, he explained his good fortune by saying: ‘Tank God, me fall on me head!’. The invulnerability of the nigger cranium has its advantages’
South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol.3, p.19

While accurate, the newly adopted, smaller .303 (or roughly equivilant 7mm round for the Mauser) rounds travelled much faster than those fired by the Martini-Henry style weapons the Lee Metfords and Mausers replaced and thus generally didn't tumble on impact. If these smaller round didn't strike bone, therefore, the bullet usually passed straight through the victim's body without doing too much harm. There are numerous remarkable takes of Tommies getting riddled with bullets but emerging relatively unscathed.

It is also noteworthy that Buller's field hospital contained an X-Ray unit which undoubtedly helped a great many wounded soldiers.

Edited by Bulldog69 - 25-Oct-2011 at 07:18

Another interesting modern 'myth' is the PC-inspired push to claim that the Boer War was not the 'white man's war' that everyone at the time accepted it was.

Edited by Bulldog69 - 15-Nov-2011 at 04:35

Have commented on the Voortrekker thread.