The Significance of the Second Anglo-Boer War

The conflict in South Africa was characterized by setbacks from the start. The better-prepared Dutch forced the conflict into the British-controlled territory. Even after the British deployed their regular army, it experienced surprising difficulty repelling the Dutch farmers. By December 1899, after three successive defeats within a single week, the British realized that their small regular army could not end the conflict quickly, and they called for volunteers.2Miller, Volunteers on the Veld, 54–56. Over 100,000 Britons volunteered over the following months. These men “transcended” class divisions and travelled to South Africa with “a new type of patriotism” and thought of themselves as defenders of the Empire.3Miller, Volunteers on the Veld, 66, 22.

Before these volunteers boarded the ships bound for South Africa, they first undertook a seemingly routine medical examination to ensure they were physically fit for military service. The results of these medical examinations were important because the British used the fitness of their military as a proxy measurement of national health at the fin de siècle. According to historian Daniel Pick, the “image of the strong army was considered crucial, the key symbol of fitness or degeneracy for the nation.”4Pick, War Machine, 81. British military guidelines required soldiers to be of a minimum height of 5 feet 6 inches (although permission was granted to enlist recruits as short as 5 feet in 1901), a minimum chest measurement of 33 inches, and a weight over 8 stones 8 pounds (120 pounds).5Shee, “The Deterioration in the National Physique,” 798–99. While Britons happily volunteered for military service out of a sense of nationalistic pride, many failed to meet these basic physical standards.

In a study of recruitment data from Leeds, Sheffield, and York, social reformer Seebohm Rowntree found that 26.5 percent of potential army recruits were recorded as “unfit” between 1897 and 1900.6Gilbert, “Health and Politics,” 145. Another 11,000 volunteers came from Manchester. Among them, 8,000 men were deemed “unfit to carry a rifle and stand the fatigues.” Another 1,200 were deemed only “moderately fit.”7Mosley, Chimney of the World, 104. On the average, military doctors found that approximately 33 percent of the volunteers they inspected were unfit for military service in 1899, 28 percent in 1900, and 29 percent in 1901.8Miller, Volunteers on the Veld, 64. The principal causes for rejections included “bad teeth, heart afflictions, poor sight or hearing, and deformities.”9Howe, People, Environment, Disease and Death, 179.

The results of these military-medical examinations and, more importantly, the ensuing rhetoric, I argue, shocked medical experts and political elites alike. This data created what historian Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska describes as a “barometer of racial fitness” that brought concerns about national fitness to the forefront of public debate.10Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body, 62. The alarming rejection rates created a very real, large-scale dataset that the medical establishment believed could be used as a proxy for assessing the health of the nation at large. From this data, medical experts and political elites theorized that the population of Great Britain was not nearly as healthy or fit as they believed it to be. That roughly 30 percent of volunteers were rejected as medically unfit for military service forewarned that a large percentage of the British nation was possibly suffering from some sort of serious medical ailment. As a result, it seems, public health was put “on the defensive.”11Hardy, Health and Medicine in Britain since 1860, 40.

Two illustrative (and polarized) parties pressured public health authorities to act: the eugenicists and the Fabian Society. The high rate of unfitness alarmed scientists like Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, promoting their emerging field of eugenics, because they believed that “persons . . . judged unfit” could become “a hazard and a threat to all.”12Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 189. The eugenicists argued that the unfit should be targeted with restrictive or even exclusionary preventative health measures to promote national efficiency. On the other hand, Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s reform-minded Fabian Socialists argued that the powers of local government and public health must be expanded to improve “the nation’s human material.”13Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 185–86. Searle, “Eugenics and Class,” 223–24 argues that many Medical Officers of Health were deeply critical of the eugenics movement, which condemned their sanitary reforms as “inference with the process of natural selection.” Many of them instead aligned themselves with the Webbs, and their continued emphasis on sanitary and hygienic reforms. Curiously, James Niven of Manchester and John Robertson of Birmingham were among the exceptions, who joined their local branches of the Eugenics Education Society, according to Jones, Social Hygiene in Twentieth Century Britain, 20. Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 202, posits that this may have been the result of their “search for and promotion of scientifically rational methods for dealing with social problems in an ordered fashion . . . rather than any strong belief in an exclusively hereditarian evolutionism.” While both groups conceived very different approaches to reform, both shared the same goal of improving “the quality of the race” – a goal derived from their shared fear that “Britain would fail, or be found wanting, in the struggle for national existence.”14Dwork, “The Milk Option,” 53.

As the war in South Africa dragged on into a three-year guerilla conflict, commentators at home became concerned about the fate of the Empire itself. Arnold White, a pro-eugenics journalist, articulated these fears in his book Efficiency and Empire (1901). He suggested that the Empire required “not only military strength, but intellectual and moral force and a keen sense of national and civic duty among the people” to survive.15White, Efficiency and Empire, 27. The volunteers who fought in the South African War felt the call to serve out of a sense of national and civic duty, so White doubted that a lack of nationalist fervor was the cause of their “inefficiency.” Instead, he blamed both public health and the British state for their failure to physically prepare young Britons to become future soldiers.16White, Efficiency and Empire, 30. While White partially attributed the deleterious effects of urban life and parental neglect for the perceived widespread unfitness, he also argued that insufficient government intervention in public health was a principal cause of the decline in “national efficiency.” He lamented that “no statesman has yet pointed out that sightless compassion and the neglect of elementary considerations of health are enfeebling the British race, and thus menacing the future of the Empire.”17White, Efficiency and Empire, 98–99. In his proto-eugenic language, White argued that a lack of state responsibility resulted in the development and reproduction of an “undersized, street-bred people” and created a nation of the physically unfit.18White, Efficiency and Empire, 100. If this was left unchecked, White feared that British fitness could fall so far short of the rest of the Great Powers that the future of the Empire might be put at risk by the “infirmity of the race” in as little as twenty years.19White, Efficiency and Empire, 105. According to White, further and greater government intervention in promoting public health was necessary to “save” the future of the Empire. Within just a few years, in 1904, Parliament would notably act.