Sorry, somehow I just didn't manage to get my act together yesterday morning. Tuesday’s cartoon was published on September 27th 1899, just a matter of days before the outbreak of the Boer War.
The title is “All a Toss Up” and the scene is an aging
matador facing nervously up to a huge, angry bull with a human face. The
matador is president of the Transvaal Paul Kruger – you can see the word
Transvaal written on the cloak he is waving in the bull’s face. The bull itself
is a visual pun, for it has the face of John Bull, the allegorical
personification of Middle England. The title, all a toss up, strikes me as a
little bit of a pun too. We know that the phrase has the colloquial meaning of
something that could go either way. However, I think it also has the idea
behind it that if the matador puts a foot wrong, he will end up being tossed up
into the air on the bull’s horns.
In the events behind the cartoon, Kruger was as sure footed
as anyone could have been in his manoeuvring and negotiations with the British
over Uitlanders rights, until given no choice, really. So, if Tenniel was
suggesting that war might have been avoided he was either ignoring or severely
underestimating the intransigence of the British.
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