Rewriting The Boer ‘Slim’: Alice Stopford Green’s Reports on St. Helena’s Prisoner of War Camp and Her Impact on British Views of Boer Prisoners

Authors

• Natasja A. Swanson, University of Nebraska - LincolnFollow

First Advisor

Dr. James D. Le Sueur

Second Advisor

Dr. Dawne Y. Curry

Date of this Version

5-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Citation

Swanson, Natasja. “Rewriting The Boer ‘Slim’: Alice Stopford Green’s Reports on St. Helena’s Prisoner of War Camp and Her Impact on British Views of Boer Prisoners.” Undergraduate Honors Thesis, University of Nebraska - Lincoln, 2026.

Comments

Copyright Natasja Swanson, 2026

Abstract

Alice Stopford Green (1847 – 1929) was a prominent Irish historian and politician, known for her role as a political activist in the Irish Home Rule movement. Her lesser-known legacy is her investigative journalism on prisoner conditions in British prisoner of war camps during the Second Boer War (1899 – 1902). Her reports on Boer conditions in the Deadwood Prisoner of War Camp on the island of St. Helena reflected maltreatment and institutional abuse by the British Government. These discoveries supported the minority English opposition that thought that England was overstepping the rules of civilized warfare. Green was primarily concerned with how the Boer prisoners and their families would be repatriated following the end of the war, given the deteriorating and increasingly unsalvageable relationship between the imperial English and the Boers, who refused to be subjugated.