‘No end of a lesson’: the Anglo-Boer War and British espionage fiction

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the first years of the twentieth century, the British government came to recognize the value of espionage for the defense of the empire. This was a logical outgrowth of increasing anxieties about the intentions of the German Kaiser and the experience of the Anglo-Boer War, in which a numerically superior British army found itself in a protracted battle with local forces skilled in the art of guerrilla warfare. Espionage fiction by writers such as Rudyard Kipling, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Erskine Childers, William Le Queux, and John Buchan used the example of the Anglo-Boer War to draw attention to the deficiencies in imperial intelligence, the potential threats to the empire, and the role of civilian patriots in thwarting internal and external threats. Espionage fiction educated British readers to perceive a need for systematic intelligence gathering, which ran counter to the democratic nature to which the British aspired. The popularity of non-professional patriotic spies as protagonists of mass market fiction allowed for the development of a broad popular constituency in favor of greater government commitment to intelligence gathering. And while this popular enthusiasm was beneficial to the Tory Party, it was not driven solely by conservative politicians, but rather by populist pressure stemming from mass culture inspired by literary reflections on the Anglo-Boer War.