Black Week: The British Army and Defeat in the Anglo-Boer War 1899-1900

In 1899, Britain faced unexpected defeats in the Second Boer War, challenging their confidence and prompting a major military reassessment.

In 1899 few readers of Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘The Absent Minded Beggar,’ in which he wrote of ‘Fifty thousand horse and foot going to Table Bay,’ could have supposed that this army faced any serious risk of defeat from a handful of Boer farmers. Great Britain was going to war with the Boer Republics in order to assert her supremacy over South Africa, an...