Feathers, Empire, and the Great British Amnesia

You don't see many Boer War memorials these days. Not because they’ve been toppled by vegan anarchists from Islington, but because most people haven’t a clue what the Boer Wars were. Say “South African conflict” today and half the population will think you’re talking about a rugby match.

Yet there it is – in the heart of Carmarthen, which we recently visited – a granite tribute to the lads who died for Queen and Country in a war that was, when you scratch it, less about honour and more about gold mines and imperial sulking. A British soldier cast in stone, staring bravely into the middle distance, his resolve undimmed by the pigeon slowly defecating on his pith helmet. If you want a symbol of Britain’s imperial legacy, look no further – a forgotten war, a forgotten army, and a forgotten statue, now used as a lavatory by birds.

The Boer War – or to be pedantic, the Second Boer War – ran from 1899 to 1902. It was a bloody, sprawling mess kicked off when the British Empire, with all the subtlety of a drunk uncle at a christening, decided it didn’t like the Afrikaners running their own affairs in a patch of land inconveniently sitting on top of gold and diamonds. We sent over half a million men – half a million – to fight a few tens of thousands of Dutch-descended farmers who, inconveniently, could shoot straight and knew the terrain.

Enter the Welsh, the Scots, and the Irish – the backbone of the British Army, as ever. Working class boys in redcoats and khaki, off to fight for Empire in a war they barely understood. Entire regiments from South Wales, especially the Carmarthenshire lads, shipped out from ports they'd never left before, only to find themselves dodging Mauser bullets on the highveld. Some died in battle. Others succumbed to dysentery, poor rations, and the kind of military planning that makes Chris Grayling look like Rommel.

And what did it all achieve? Britain won, technically. The Boer republics were annexed, the gold was secured, and the Union Flag was hoisted. But we also invented the concentration camp – 26,000 Boer women and children died in British-run camps, most from disease and starvation. We called it “civilising.” The rest of the world called it barbaric. The Empire, though, called it Tuesday.

Fast forward a century and the Carmarthen memorial is one of the few reminders that this war even happened. No school syllabus covers it in detail. No politician touches it – there's no mileage in commemorating a war that makes us look like the baddies. So the pigeons carry on their quiet commentary, decorating the heads of empire with democratic dollops of scorn.

The lads who died in that war deserve more than polite forgetting. They deserve more than patriotic bunting and a Costa in the background. They deserve recognition not for imperial glory, but for being the working-class cannon fodder of empire – disposable assets in a boardroom war.

But that’s the rub, isn’t it? The same voices who today wrap themselves in Union Flags and talk about “taking our country back” have no interest in remembering what the Empire really was. They don’t want history. They want myth. They want a world where Britain always wins, always leads, and always smells faintly of warm beer and moral superiority.

Well, here’s your monument. A soldier on a plinth, outnumbered by pigeons, fighting a war we no longer care to explain. A small, proud reminder that the real cost of Empire was always paid in blood – just never the blood of those who profited from it.