ABSTRACT
The South African War captured the public’s imagination as no previous conflict had done. The rush of volunteers to the colours in the first few months of the war fuelled the public’s impatience for news from the frontline. As this chapter shows, in this on-going diet of war stories and reportage, organised games and athletic endeavour featured prominently. With Victorian society’s veneration of the cult of athleticism at its height, many journalists and authors chose to invest the army’s love of sport with a moral as well as practical worth. Yet, as the war dragged on and British counter-insurgency tactics grew ever more brutal, reservations began to be expressed, most famously by Rudyard Kipling in The Times, about the value of an ideology that equated proficiency on the rugby pitch or cricket square with strength of character and military capability. This chapter will, then, examine how far the war against the Boer Republics was a moment of transition for the role of sport in the British armed forces and the public’s acceptance of the British soldier as a sporting warrior.
