Welsh Journals

WALES AND THE BOER W AR-A REPLY IT has usually been assumed without question that the overwhelming majority of Welshmen were opposed to the war fought in South Africa between October 1899 and May 1902. This has been the view of most Welsh writers on this theme, from radical Liberals before 1914 down to supporters of Plaid Cymru a half-century later. They have invariably claimed that Welsh people felt an instinctive sympathy for the citizens of the Boer republics, a small, Protestant farming community under the heel of Anglo-Saxon rule, similar in many ways to Wales itself. Evidence for imperialist or 'jingo' sentiment among the Welsh people during the late 1890s tends to be dismissed as a temporary aberration. Presumably that massive support in Wales for extreme forms of xenophobic 'patriotism' during the 1914-18 war later on has to be explained away in the same manner. The prevailing view appears to be that of a Wales radical and pacifist, a nation that largely rejected the pressures of that imperialism welling up in England and Scotland at the same time, a nation of 'pro-Boers' which, during the crisis of the South African War, kept its conscience clean and its principles pure. This view has also tended to be followed by English historians. Thus Mr. A. J. P. Taylor once referred to Welsh sympathy for the Boers as a small nation struggling for self-determination: however, he acknowledged that the Welsh 'pro-Boer' was far more moderate than his Irish counterpart.1 The Irish Nationalists cheered the news of the disasters of the 'Black Week' when they were announced in the Commons in December 1899. Unlike the Welsh, the Irish 'pro-Boers' wanted the Boers to win. Dr. Henry Pelling, however, is the only English historian who has made a real attempt to assess in any precise way Welsh attitudes towards the Boer War. Dr. Pelling has long put all historians of this period deeply in his debt, not only for his earlier magisterial writings on the rise of the Labour party, but even more for his invaluable pioneer study of the social geography of electoral politics between 1885 and 1910. In a most stimulating recent collection of essays, he has also studied in depth popular attitudes, especially among the working class, towards British imperialism. His views on this problem, therefore, command the greatest respect. Dr. Pelling has, in several publications, reiterated that pro-Boer sentiment in Wales largely explains the considerable swing back to Liberalism shown in the 1900 election returns in 1 A. J. P. Taylor. The Troublemakers (1957). pp. 42. 108-9.