In its review of How a British Bulldog Saved the Union Jack in October 1906, The Optical Lantern and Kinematograph Journal suggested that the subject ‘is likely to go particularly well in the Colonies or in some country towns – anywhere, in fact, where what may be called the Imperial spirit is strong’. The journal further noted that ‘it has a strong vein of patriotic feeling running through it, of the sort of which audiences are particularly fond’ (The Optical Lantern and Kinematograph Journal, October 1906, 225). 

The film appeared to play throughout the Empire. For example, in December 1906, it played in New Zealand at the Theatre Royal in Taranaki, the Opera House at Waraganui and at the Town Hall in Wellington as part of a programme put on by T.J West and H. Hayward (Taranaki Herald, 4 December 1906, 7). The film also played in America, at the Dreamland Theatre in Indiana, Pennsylvania in April 1907. The local paper commented that it was ‘full of thrilling scenes and shows the British soldiers in many lively skirmishes’ (Indiana Evening Gazette, 25 April 1907, 1).

Advertisements in New Zealand described the film as a ‘most dramatic picture illustrating an incident of the late Zulu rebellion’ (Wanganui Herald, 13 December 1906, 7). During 1906, the Zulus staged an uprising against the imposition of a new poll tax in Natal. The so-called Bambatha rebellion culminated in the killing of a Zulu Chief and approximately 4000 of his followers by imperial forces. This incident was widely seen as a last act of resistance and as a final military defeat for the Zulus. Aside from the fictional recreations, there were cameramen filming events in South Africa at this time. For example, Andrew Roberts noted that in August 1906, H. D. Roberts recorded several army units that were engaged in suppressing the Zulu rebellion (Roberts, 1987, 192).

How a British Bulldog Saved the Union Jack was produced by the Walturdaw Company, which had begun trading two years earlier in 1904 as a distributor, before branching out into production in the summer of 1905. A significant presence in the British film industry for some fifteen years thereafter, its output embraced both fiction and non-fiction, foreign and domestic subjects. The company took its name from its three founders J.D. Walker, E.G. Turner, G.H. Dawson. More detailed information on the development of the company was published in a series of articles, penned by Turner, for Kinematograph Weekly during the summer of 1926. In these articles Taylor indicated that the film was, in all probability, photographed at Wembley Park by Ernest Howard, with J.B. McDowell and E. Bloomfield assisting as the cameramen during this period. Howard explained that the company ‘took a lease of Wembley Park and erected there something novel in the way of outdoor studios – a revolving platform, which allowed us to put up three sets of scenery at a time, when the wind allowed it, and each could be brought to the camera as required’ (Kinematograph Weekly, 1 July 1926, 18).