Delville Wood and South African Great War Commemoration

Nasson, Bill

doi:10.1093/ehr/119.480.57

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…The memorialisation of this event, like that of the Mendi, also went through various permutations, closely related to the susceptibilities and ideological imperatives of new political orders. 81 Delville Wood, though grounded in far more solid historical fact than was the case with the mythical material whichlaunched the Mendi version into the realm of extraordinary accounts of war bravery, nevertheless acquired its own afterlife and mythological shape, though not quite in the exaggerated form which marked the Mendi. Historians can do no more than point out these features, perhaps suggesting that the factual evidence can at best temper the dynamics of memorialisation, but ultimately it is bound to find its own niche and purpose in an ever-shifting present.…”

Section: Concluding Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

Mutating Memories and the Making of a Myth: Remembering The SSMendiDisaster, 1917–2007

Grundlingh

2011

South African Historical Journal

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The SS Mendi, carrying the last detachment of the South African Native Labour Contingent to work as non-combatants in France during the First World War, sank just off the Isle of Wight on 21 February 1917. The death toll was high: of the 882 men on board, 615 died and 267 were saved. The grim details are easily verifiable; the subsequent afterlife of the incident is more complex. This article addresses the way in which the Mendi disaster has been recalled over decades and contextualised in terms of public memory at different historical junctures, and how a heroic narrative was constructed with certain elements more pertinently being foregrounded recently to serve a useful purpose in the present.

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Section: Concluding Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

Mutating Memories and the Making of a Myth: Remembering The SSMendiDisaster, 1917–2007

Grundlingh

2011

South African Historical Journal

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“…23 The South African memorial at Delville Wood, too, had a specificity of purpose, since it was, from its inception, 'envisaged as a spiky political commemoration of Dominion identity and achievement in war, a tracing in granite and marble of the colonial strengths of the South African character across French soil.' 24 This narrowness of purpose ostensibly marks any of the Dominion memorials on the Somme and elsewhere but is also apparent that, through time, the memorials have acquired an hybridity that complicates their meanings but which can also distance them in terms of their relevance to the homelands. Foster argues that the imaginative charge of the memorials stems from the 'triangulation' which they set up between 'the living, the dead and geographical place', their qualitative effects depending less and less on historical fact or national identity than on 'landscape'.…”

Section: The Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Ulster's love in letter'd gold’: the Battle of the Somme and the Ulster Memorial Tower, 1918–1935

Switzer

Graham

2010

Journal of Historical Geography

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“…A concerted attempt was made to build a national military myth around the South African stand at Delville Wood, during the Battle of the Somme. 62 Something like a new Union Defence Force military tradition did start to form out of First World War, and it clearly leaned toward a British rather than a Boer model. But that does not mean that Afrikaners would not absorb this ethos.…”

Section: War and Rebellion 1914-1919mentioning

confidence: 99%

Martial Law and Military Power in the Construction of the South African State: Jan Smuts and the “Solid Guarantee of Force” 1899–1924

Hyslop¹

2009

J Historical Sociology

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This paper seeks to provide a new approach to analysing the crucial period of the building of the South African state between the Boer War and 1924. Drawing on the sociology of Michael Mann, it argues that the construction of networks of military power was of central and partly autonomous importance in giving shape to the new state. It goes on to contend that this generated a legal order which was in many ways shaped by practices which derived from martial law. The paper also asserts that these questions of military power and martial law need to be analysed within a framework which does not limit itself to the boundaries of the South African state itself, but is placed within the wider context of the British Empire and the southern African region. A biographical exploration the role of Jan Smuts as the key leader is used to focus the paper's study of this process of state-making.In the hot January of 1902 the young Boer General, Jan Christiaan Smuts, was leading a commando raid, riding across the vast plains of Namaqualand in the northwest of Britain's Cape Colony. The South African War was now in its third year, and the condition of the Boer forces, down to perhaps 15,000 and facing a British army of almost half a million, was desperate. Arriving at the Methodist mission of Leliefontein Smuts was confronted with an appalling spectacle. In an attack by his subordinate, Manie Maritz, the mission station and the surrounding agricultural settlement had been burned to the ground and looted. The bodies of about thirty black British loyalists lay at the outskirts of the village. 1 Smuts was furious at Maritz. Maritz claimed he had responded to a treacherous and nearly fatal attack. 2 Smuts and his young protégé, Deneys Reitz, thought that what had happened was "a ruthless and unjustifiable act". 3 Smuts held to a belief that military activity should be conducted within the accepted law of war. Less than a month before, he had issued orders to his men that prisoners might only be executed if found guilty of espionage or major criminal offences before a tribunal, that such sentences should be confirmed by him before being carried out and that "all inhabitants must be well treated and no exception made in the case of coloured or Britishdisposed persons where they behave peaceably and perform no

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Delville Wood and South African Great War Commemoration

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Mutating Memories and the Making of a Myth: Remembering The SSMendiDisaster, 1917–2007

Mutating Memories and the Making of a Myth: Remembering The SSMendiDisaster, 1917–2007

‘Ulster's love in letter'd gold’: the Battle of the Somme and the Ulster Memorial Tower, 1918–1935

Martial Law and Military Power in the Construction of the South African State: Jan Smuts and the “Solid Guarantee of Force” 1899–1924

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