Friday Boer War Cartoon

I confess that I’m running out of Tenniel cartoons about the Boer War to copy, and so this is another Linley Sambourne cartoon, that appeared in Punch on December 13^th 1899.

The title is Disillusioned!. The cartoon is split in two parts by an uneven vertical line. On the left-hand side of the line, which is captioned What they thought Tommy was – it depicts disorganised British soldiers falling around and panicking when an artillery shell bursts overhead. On the right-hand side of the line we see a much larger, more close up British soldier scaling a near vertical cliff face, undaunted by the slumped figure of a comrade to the right.

The message is that, in the view of Linley Sambourne at least, the Boers expected the British army would be easily beaten, especially following what had happened in the first Boer War, but that they soon found out that the British soldiers were a lot tougher and more determined than they expected.

The unintentional irony of the cartoon is that when the cartoon appeared, the British and Empire forces had suffered by far the worst of the fighting thus far, so much so that the same week in which this cartoon was published was nicknamed 'Black Week' after the reverses that they suffered.