Wednesday Boer War Cartoon

Today’s cartoon is a very interesting one. It was drawn by Bernard Partridge and it was published in Punch on May 15^th 1901.

Bernard Partridge was the artist who became the chief cartoonist in Punch after Edward Linley Sambourne in 1909. He had trained as an architect and then gone on to design stained glass windows for churches, having also acted on stage under the name Bernard Gould. Partridge joined the staff of Punch in 1891, so worked for the magazine at the same time as Tenniel and Linley Sambourne. Partridge, like Tenniel before him, would produce work for Punch for over 50 years, continuing right up until his death in 1945. He’s probably better known for his work during world war I than he Boer War, when he did design posters for the Government as well, and again, like Tenniel before him, he would receive a knighthood, in 1925.

In some ways Partridge seems to have been less reactionary than Tenniel was. For example, he supported the cause of women’s suffrage. And you can maybe make out a case that this cartoon is less conspicuously anti-Boer than many I’ve copied. But. The cartoon presents the stage of the war as a cricket match. A Boer general – I’m not sure which one it is meant to represent – stands at the wicket, steadfastly ready to block the next delivery. Herbert Kitchener, in the guise of a wicketkeeper stands ready to make a catch. Beneath the cartoon is the title The Last Wicket, and underneath that the caption ‘Kitchener (Captain and wicket keeper) “He has kept us in the field a deuce of a time; but we’ll get him now we’ve closed in for catches.” To me this is commenting on Kitchener’s policy of using block houses and concentration camps – the block houses restricting the Boers’ opportunities to range wide and strike strategically and the concentration camps preventing the Boer families imprisoned there from providing aid to the fighters. And in one way, the cartoon is right in as much as Kitchener’s policies would , eventually, result in the Boer surrender.

But. Although you might say that the cartoon does seem to acknowledge the Boers’ tenacity, to a modern eye it’s just a bit obscene comparing what was really happening to a cricket match. It’s all very ‘playing fields of Eton’. I cut Partridge a little bit of slack here since Emily Hobhouse had not yet delivered her report on the conditions in the concentration camps to Parliament – that would happen in June, so he probably had no more idea of exactly what was going on than the rest of the country.