Hello everyone welcome back to the history hit warfare podcast I'm your host James Rogers and as I've promised we have broadened the focus of this

podcast we're going to go all the way back to the seven years war and all the way forward to the war on terror looking at all the

forgotten secret wars of the Cold War in between and still focusing on the

turbulent period of the world wars as well. So as I was digging through the Dan Snow's history hit archive,

I came across an episode on Arthur Conan Doyle,

Rudyard Kipling, and Mary Kingsley, and how at one point or another they were all involved in the Boar War.

It is a fascinating history, one that I had heard nothing about before and it's brought to life

by the brilliant author Sarah Lofano who's released a new book called

something of themselves, Kipling Kingsley, Conan Doyle and the Anglo-Bore War.

A truly fascinating history. I know you're going to love it enjoy Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. It's my pleasure. This is such an interesting idea looking at these three most famous

and celebrated novelists at the time all go out to South Africa during the Boar War.

What were they doing there?

Yeah, well it is kind of extraordinary already. When I embarked on this project I didn't realize that these

three were in South Africa during the Boer War at exactly the same time so it kind of

it was just amazingly serendipitous and seemed to grow kind of richer and richer the more that I looked at.

So the three writers are Roddard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle and Mary Kingsley, and they were there at the same time but for

different but overlapping reasons. So Kipling was there very much because he was very invested in the Boer War.

He was very invested in the imperialist vision that was one of the motivating forces behind it. He'd been to South Africa before and he'd become very friendly with he

become very close to Cecil Rhodes. Now Cecil Rhodes at that point was

his imperialist vision that set things under train to a certain extent.

So Kipling was there for those political reasons.

Conan Doyle was therefore similar but slightly different reasons because although the war, you know, one of

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