Produced by the now well-known travelling showmen Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon, Hands off the Flag was filmed in Blackburn and initially advertised for release in the last week of September 1901. The film was listed in The Showman as part of Mitchell and Kenyon’s ‘new series of Boer War films’, which were collectively described as ‘startling, realistic, pathetic’ (Popple, 2002, 18). The film was still advertised for rental in June 1902 in The Era at the top of a list of fifteen Mitchell and Kenyon pictures that were said to offer ‘heroism, bravery and pluck set forth with perfect realism’ (Whalley and Worden, 1998, 38).

Although ‘fake’ Boer War films were prevalent in the early stages of the war, Robin Whalley and Peter Wordon suggested that Mitchell and Kenyon were unusual in continuing to produce these ‘Boer War fakes’ as late as September 1901 (Whalley and Worden, 1998, 37). Indeed, John Barnes noted that by June 1900 ‘the Boer war no longer held the centre of attention’ while The Showman had published an article in September 1900 that suggested that ‘interest in the Boer war has largely died out’ (Barnes, 1997, 83 and Toulmin, 2001, 133). By 1901, these Mitchell and Kenyon films – others titles included A Sneaky Boer, White Flag Treacheryand Shelling the Red Cross– responded to now established representational tropes. Simon Popple argued that they ‘allude to atrocity stories circulating in the popular press and pick up what are constant themes throughout the course of the war such as hygiene and various abuses of the Geneva convention’. In particular, they emphasise the perceived Boer misuse of the white flag. Popple suggested that Hands off the Flag ‘perhaps best exemplifies the content of these atrocity narrative films’ as it uses ‘familiar stereotypes drawn from a mess of cultural forms’ (Popple, 2004, 151).

The film contrasts the behaviour of the British soldier with that of the Boer – a familiar narrative technique within these Boer War films – yet this formula was criticised in a letter published in The Optical Magic Lantern Journal and Photographic Enlarger in November 1901. The writer, who assumed the name ‘Fairplay and Honesty’, argued that ‘it is a made up scene, a playing to the gallery, and a means of instilling hatred in the heart of the young under the guise of what many are pleased to call patriotism’ (The Optical Magic Lantern Journal and Photographic Enlarger, November 1901, 96).

Hands off the Flag depicts Red Cross nurses in the war. In 1898, a year before the Boer War, there were still only 72 female British nurses employed by the Army, yet these figures rose significantly over the next year. Between October 1899 and March 1900 the number of female nurses employed by the Army in South Africa rose from 12 to 800, while hospital staff figures increased from 1000 to 6000 (Summers, 1988, 2, 196). Historian Anne Summers presented the Boer War as a moment of ‘freedom and agency’ for women, a chance to participate in ‘great events upon the world stage’ rather than ‘wait passively in the background, victims of the action’. ‘The image of the Red Cross nurse helped women’ she suggested ‘to channel new aspirations towards service, citizenship, equality and agency in a military direction’ (Summers, 1988, 204).