The Commemoration of the South African War (1899–1902) in British Public Schools

Abstract

Mass public commemoration of war dead in Britain is often held to be a twentiethcentury phenomenon, with its genesis in the Great War. However, the war memorial movement in the aftermath of the South African War (1899–1902) foreshadowed that of the Great War and acted as a blueprint for later commemorative activity. At the forefront of this movement were the nation’s great public schools. The memorialization process provided these institutions with the opportunity to mold the memory of their alumni’s war service to reaffirm the validity of their underlying principles and ethos. As debates over the form that Canterbury’s memorial to the fallen of the Great War should take rumbled on into 1919, the chairman of the city’s memorial committee, H. A. Wace, made a direct comparison with Britain’s last imperial war to emphasize the size of the task he and his fellow committee members faced. The municipal authorities had, he reminded a gathering of civic dignitaries, “erected a memorial in Dane John Gardens in commemoration of those who fell in the Boer War. That was an important event, but, great as it was, it was small in comparison to the Great War.” Equally aware of the importance of the duty with which the committee members had been entrusted, the mayor of Canterbury, R. A. Bremner, was uncertain that the South African War memorial would serve as a useful blueprint for their work. “Very few people,” he pointed out to Wace, “now took the trouble to find out what the Dane John statue stood for; they said ‘What is that soldier for?’” 1 The implication inherent in this exchange, that the South African War memorial movement would be eclipsed by the mass commemorative activity of the First World War,