Boer War Portraits by Inglis Sheldon-Williams
Past display archive
9 November 2009 - 16 May 2010
Room 23 case display
Free
Edward George Villiers Stanley, 17th Earl of Derby
by Inglis Sheldon-Williams
1900
NPG 4039(2)
The portraits were produced in Johannesburg, South Africa, and were signed by the sitters on 28 November, 1900. This was Lord Roberts’s final day in command. Believing that the war was won, he handed operations over to Lord Kitchener and returned to Britain in triumph.
Yet the Boers continued to wage a humiliating guerrilla war until 1902. They were only forced into submission through a ‘scorched earth’ policy of burning Boer farms and crops. Boer civilians were interred in concentration camps, in which more than 26,000 women and children died of disease and starvation.