Adding a ‘colonialism disclaimer’ to Rorke's Drift is an insult to our free and educated society Appreciation for the heroism displayed in Rorke's Drift does not endorse imperialism. Why are we no longer allowed to think for ourselves? The Defence of Rorke's Drift by Lady Butler One would have thought that obsessives of political correctness would praise and value the work of Elizabeth Thompson, who after her marriage was known as Lady Butler, and was in 1879 almost the first woman to be elected an Associate of the Royal Academy (she failed by just two votes, and it was 1922 before a female painter finally made it). Her husband was an Anglo-Irish soldier, and she specialised in that most unladylike of subjects, painting battle scenes. One, her 1880 representation of the defence of Rorke’s Drift in the Zulu war (which had happened the previous year) hangs in the Royal Collection in St James’s Palace in London.