Jameson Raid

Steps away lay another plaque marking the grave of Leander Starr Jameson, a South African political leader and Rhodes’s business partner, who led the famous Jameson Raid against Afrikaner forces in the Transvaal in 1896, a run up to the Boer War.

So all this is quite amusing, but it is noticeable that no one emails the far more interesting example of the fateful mispunctuated telegram that precipitated the Jameson Raid on the Transvaal in 1896 - I suppose that’s a reflection of modern education for you.

Do you know of the Jameson Raid, described as a “fiasco”? Marvellous punctuation story.

Arguably his most notorious moment was his backing of the disastrous Jameson Raid of 1895, in which a small British force tried to overthrow Paul Kruger, the Afrikaaner president of the gold-rich Transvaal Republic.

The parliamentary inquiry into the Jameson Raid – the illegal assault on the Transvaal which proceeded the Boer war – had to decide if Joseph Chamberlain, the colonial secretary at the time, was party to the conspiracy that armed and encouraged the invasion.