Echoes

 

The Lord Roberts, on Broad Street

The First Boer War – a relatively low-key affair compared to the Second – was fought between December 1880 and March 1881, and the Second Boer War was fought between October 1899 and May 1902.

Nottingham’s Boer War memorial - a pink granite obelisk on a square pedestal with plinth and inscription, currently sited near the south-west corner of the Forest Recreation Ground - commemorates men with local connections who died during the Second Boer War, or, as the memorial has it, the South African War.

The main part of the inscription reads, ‘To the Memory of Officers and Men of the City and County of Nottingham, who voluntarily and patriotically gave their services to the country during the South African War, 1899-1902, and who lost their lives while nobly performing their duty. The names of all are recorded hereon, with the Regiments to which they were attached.’

The memorial was originally located at the junction of King Street and Queen Street, very close to where the Brian Clough statue stands now. It was unveiled on 26 March 1903 by Lord Methuen, one of the British commanders in the war, having been donated to the City of Nottingham by Thomas Birkin, lace manufacturer, two of whose sons had served with Methuen’s division.

The memorial was moved to its present site in late 1927 to provide more room for trolley buses and other traffic, the installation of flag paving and railings being completed by January 1928. The memorial was listed at Grade II on 30 November 1995.

The first Europeans to settle in southern Africa were the Dutch. The Boers were farmer descendants of those original settlers. They came into conflict with the British – a later wave of settlers - in order to protect their way of life in the face of increasing British influence, control and – let's face it - raw greed (‘Gold and diamonds, you say?’) The majority black population, of course, had relatively little say in the matter. The Boers saw them as a lower class of human being and the British - even in victory - failed to adequately protect their interests.

The Second Boer War saw the extensive (albeit non-genocidal) use of concentration camps by the British, though such camps had first been introduced by Spain in Cuba in 1896.

The rise of popular printed media, higher literacy levels and new, faster forms of communication meant that the public were able to follow the progress of the Second Boer War as with no other previous conflict. As the British Empire and the jingoism associated with it were at their height during this period, public interest in imperial/colonial shenanigans was high.

Though immense British numerical superiority eventually prevailed*, at the time of the Second Boer War’s outbreak, British forces in the area (the theatre of operations was said to be the size of France) numbered around 14,000. The Boers aimed to gain the initiative while the British were building up to full strength, and early victories were aided by their superior knowledge and use of the terrain and ineptitude on the part of British commanders.

Famously, three towns of strategic importance – Kimberley, Mafeking and Ladysmith - were encircled and besieged by the Boers early on, and these sieges are commemorated in the names of three streets in Sneinton: Kimberley Street, Mafeking Street and Ladysmith Street.

Several other streets in the area have names relating to the Second Boer War – Lord Street and Roberts Street (Lord Roberts was Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in southern Africa between December 1899 and December 1900), Baden-Powell Road (yes, that Baden-Powell – he established the garrison at Mafeking) and Kingsley Road (Mary Kingsley was an explorer and ethnographer who died during the war while volunteering as a nurse).

These streets saw the arrival of their first residents between 1902 and 1907. A further Nottingham reminder of the war is the Lord Roberts pub on Broad Street, which was built c. 1936.

By the end of 1899, the Boer offensive had begun to lose momentum, with many men tied down at Kimberley, Mafeking and Ladysmith, though what became known as Black Week saw three major defeats for the British in the space of a few days in December. General Sir Redvers ‘Reverse’ Buller was replaced as Commander-in-Chief by Lord Roberts, and the Boers did not take the opportunity to resume the offensive.

The siege of Kimberley lasted from 12 October 1899 to 15 February 1900, the siege of Ladysmith from 29 October 1899 to 27 February 1900 and the siege of Mafeking, the last to be relieved, from 13 October 1899 to 16 May 1900.

Another location to gain cultural currency in the years after the war was Spion Kop. Spion Kop was/is a hill near Ladysmith, and the Battle of Spion Kop was a significant battle in the war. The hill gave its name in full or part to a number of stands and terraces in football grounds in Britain and elsewhere, our nearest example being the Spion Kop Stand (formerly Spion Kop) at Meadow Lane. The first recorded reference, in 1904, was in relation to Woolwich Arsenal’s Manor Ground. A news reporter compared the sight of silhouetted fans standing on the bank of earth to soldiers standing on the top of the hill at the battle.

The British captured Bloemfontein, Johannesburg and Pretoria in the first half of 1900 and the war entered a new phase – one of guerilla warfare on the part of the Boers, who, at that stage, still controlled large areas of territory.

In December 1900, Lord Roberts left for Britain to take up the role of Commander-in-Chief of the army, leaving the command of his forces in the hands of Major-General Lord Kitchener, who implemented a strategy involving the burning of all Boer farmsteads within reach of British forces, the relocation of civilians into concentration camps and the limiting of the movement of the Boer combatants.

Around 28,000 Boers died in the concentration camps, mainly due to disease and malnutrition, approximately 24,000 of whom were children under 16. Black Africans were interned separately, and it is thought that 14-20,000 of that group died.

The Boers surrendered on 31 May 1902.

War casualties for the British forces numbered a staggering 100,000, including 22,000 dead (6,000 of whom were killed in action, with the rest dying from their wounds or due to disease). 7,000 Boer combatants were killed, along with 28,000 civilians.

Self-rule for the Orange River Colony/Orange Free State and the Transvaal (the two formerly independent Boer republics) was initially not deemed by the British to be an option, but, following a Liberal victory in the 1905 General Election, it was granted in 1906 and 1907 respectively. With nationalism in the ascendancy, the Union of South Africa came into being in May 1910 as a self-governing dominion of the British Empire, with the completely independent Republic of South Africa being created in 1961.

One regrettable outcome of the war was that Britain did not secure suffrage for the black population, thus helping to perpetuate white supremacy in southern Africa, which eventually contributed to the introduction of Apartheid in 1948.

The war resulted in various reforms in the British armed forces, and lessons learned from the Boer conflict meant that, by the time of the First World War, the British Army was one of the finest in the world.

Memories of the Second Boer War were to be eclipsed by ‘the war to end all wars’ in just a few short years, but its legacy continues to echo through the ages.



* ‘Britain eventually required no fewer than 450,000 men to subdue an enemy that was never stronger than 60,000 men at any one time.’ (Essential Histories: The Boer War 1899-1902 by Gregory Fremont-Barnes – a splendid introduction to the conflict)