This article examines attitudes to the Boer War − and nationhood and empire more broadly − through the prism of carnivals held in London in 1900 to raise money for the Daily Telegraph’s fund for combatants’ widows and orphans. Drawing on detailed press coverage of these events and the rhetoric surrounding them, it highlights how the carnivals and their rationale offered a point of consensus around which participating individuals and organizations with differing stances on the conflict could rally and express gendered national and imperial identities, as well as opportunities for accruing political, economic and social capital.