Arthur Conan Doyle and the Adventure of the Boer War

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In May 1899, five months before war was declared between Britain and the two Boer Republics of South Africa, Arthur Conan Doyle turned 40. He was a big man, six feet tall and tipping the scales at 16 stone, with fair hair and a long upper lip on which he cultivated a luxuriant moustache that he combed to either side in what was known as the ‘English’ style. The epitome of the sporting type, he played cricket in the summer, football in the autumn and, in the spring, holidayed in Switzerland, where he was one of the first British tourists to strap on a pair of wooden Norwegian skis. Doyle had trained and practised as a doctor until the success of his Sherlock Holmes stories allowed him to give up medicine and become a full-time writer. He was a great admirer of Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels and he hoped that his own historical novels would form the basis of his literary reputation, along with his histories of the Boer War and the First World War.

The outbreak of war between Britain and the Boer Republics on 13 October 1899 was the culmination of a long campaign of warmongering in Cape Town by Cecil Rhodes – former prime minister of Cape Colony – and the British High Commissioner Sir Alfred Milner. Their motives were commercial – control of the gold mines in the Transvaal – and also political. Rhodes especially nurtured a grand imperialist vision that embraced the whole of Africa. However, the excuse they used for promoting war against the Boers was the position of the uitlanders – foreigners drawn to the Transvaal by the gold deposits on the Witwatersrand – who were denied the vote by the Boer government. Back in Britain, the Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain offered a sympathetic ear to the arguments put forward by Milner and Rhodes.
Arthur Conan Doyle and the Adventure of the Boer War | History Today

It's hard to imagine him as anything but the creator of Sherlock Holmes.