Pall Mall Gazette Review

An anonymous critical review of With a Show through Southern Africa and Personal Reminiscences of the Transvaal War written by Charles Henry Du Val and published in 1882 appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1883 (1). The article in full is as follows:

"WITH A SHOW THROUGH SOUTH AFRICA. " (2)

Some wonderful sentences at the very outset of this book warn anyone who has a weakness for grammatical English that he is not to expect that luxury from Mr. Charles Duval: " Madeira belongs to Portugal, and one of the strongest sentiments that exhibits itself in the good people of that nation appears to be the desire to follow the example of their grandsires to the very letter, and whose motto is or should be 'status quo' " There is one of Mr. Duval's constructing, and it will probably suffice as a sample. Under such circumstances a judicious critic has two courses open before him. He may take pencil and paper, and collect examples of his author's curious infelicity of style, or he may neglect his manner of speech altogether (very much as he would that of a chance fellow-traveller whom fate sent him), and confine himself to the task of finding out whether that fellow-traveller has anything interesting to tell.

There are two reasons for following the latter course in Mr. Duval's case. In the first: place, he is so very unpretentious a person, and his book boasts itself so little as in any sense a work of literature that it would be rather brutal—not to say rather stupid—to try him in the Style Division of the Critical High Court of Justice. In the second place, he really has something interesting to tell. Mr. Duval who modestly calls himself a showman, appears to be professionally the giver of an entertainment called "Odds and Ends," and to have thought at the end of the Zulu war that South Africa would be a good field to work. He went out to Cape Town accordingly, and zigzagged about among the various centres of population, taking the Transvaal last. He established himself at Pretoria just before (to the intense surprise of the authorities, but, as Mr. Duval assures us, not in the least to the surprise of English settlers who knew the country) the discontent of the Boers broke out into open revolt. He was besieged in Pretoria, and, like other able-bodied and well-affected Britons, took a hand in the defence. Indeed, he may be said to have taken more than one hand, for he not only served as a volunteer in the Pretoria Carabineers, and saw some pretty sharp fighting at Zwartkopje, the Red House, &c, but he started and edited a newspaper. The News of the Camp, which served as an unofficial gazette of the whole affair, and a complete set of which would be a rather interesting addition to a newspaper library. His two volumes are divided pretty exactly between these two aspects of his tour, the first giving his experience as a professional traveller, the second his warlike adventures.

The first part tells, of course, no very novel tale, and the reader has been sufficiently warned not to look for any excellence of literary manner. But Mr. Duval, if an incorrect, is a very lively writer, and either nature or his professional practice has given him the knack of bringing a scene forcibly before the mind's eye. When he is not indulging in that dreary kind of penny-a-lining wit which consists in paraphrasing common expressions into clumsy and grandiloquent amplifications, his awkward style hardly does much more harm than the awkward spelling of our great-great-grandfathers. Kimberley, East London, Port Elizabeth, Grahamstown, Bloemfontein, Durban, Maritzburg, have been often enough described of late, but Mr. Duval’s re-description of them is quite readable. His journeys from place to place, over "veld " and "karoo," by means of a waggon and six horses; his scapes at drifts and spruits; the pleasures of South African thunder-storms and thunder-showers, when the bolts plough up holes in the ground big enough to bury an ox in close to the traveller, and the sheets of rain drench him and his goods in five minutes; the costliness and incivility of the hotels, the curious mixture of the very latest civilized dodges for making money with the most primitive (and expensive apparatus for securing comfort: all these compose a lively enough narrative.

The story of the siege of Pretoria is still better worth reading, because though Mr, Duval keeps clear (and thereby enables his reviewer to keep clear) of party politics, he throws abundant light on the disasters of the Zulu and Transvaal wars—disasters which it does not require more than moderate acquaintance with the facts and with military matters to know might have very well repeated themselves in Egypt but the more favourable circumstances of that campaign. That a certain general in Zululand who is pretty well identified by Mr. Duval’s description, occupied fourteen waggons with his own personal impedimenta at a time when the said waggons cost fabulous sums, and were a hopeless drag on the army; and that the ill-fated 94th set out for Bronkhorst Spruit with about three times the number of carriages which the transport officer judged safe and sufficient, Mr. Duval only heard. But he saw and experienced at Pretoria the slowness of action, the inability to get free of red tape, the incapacity to divine true sources of intelligence, and the other faults of English military officialism which have often cost us so much. Long before the outbreak in the Transvaal Mr. Duval had been told by Afrikanders that there were two faults in the British soldier — that he was not mounted and that he could not shoot. Of persons celebrated or notorious Mr. Duval has not many stories, but he records of Mr. Alfred Aylward when still in Natal the fact that his favourite toast was "Death to the Saxon," which, in a person bearing Christian and surname both of the purest Saxon strain, is rather amusing. He also recounts some pleasant instances of the pluck and devotion of English womankind which occurred even in so comparatively small a matter as the siege of Pretoria. One lady, quite a girl, carried concealed despatches of importance right through the Boer lines; and another would have done the still more dangerous deed of carrying them out if Sir Owen Lanyon would have allowed her. Altogether Mr. Duval's book may be recommended as exhibiting in a very artless but not unpleasant fashion good temper and the spirit of resource under circumstances sometimes exciting enough and often very trying.

References

(1) Pall Mall Gazette 3 January 1883.

(2) The correct title was With a Show through Southern Africa and Personal Reminiscences of the Transvaal War.
As Vivien Allen correctly points out, "The term South Africa to describe the present state dates only from 1910, when the Union of South Africa was created from two British colonies of the Cape and Natal and the two Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Hence the title of the book, as a tour through Southern, not South, Africa." Du Val Tonight! The Story of a Showman (1990) page 128.