ABSTRACT
The above quote illustrates the incredible impact of post-Boer War rugby tours of Britain by colonial teams. The 1905 New Zealand All Blacks, 1906 and 1912 South African Springboks and, to a lesser degree, the 1908 Australians beat nearly all the teams they played, and displayed vigorous and innovative styles of play previously unseen in Britain. These tours occurred in the wake of the Boer or South African War of 1899-1902 in which over 450,000 British and imperial troops took two and a half years to subdue 40,000 Afrikaners in the fight for supremacy in southern Africa. Observers attributed British ineptitude in the war to the paltry state of most of the working-class men who formed the bulk of the British fighting force. Many recruits were rejected outright because of their poor health and many others accepted were below the minimum standard previously set by the army. As a result, prior claims about the physical deterioration of the British race gained a renewed saliency and an unprecedented urgency as British supremacy came under increasing threat from Germany and other world powers.
