Emily Hobhouse (1860-1926)

Yesterday was the birthday of Emily Hobhouse, a British welfare campaigner, pacifist, and anti-war campaigner. I hope you all take the time to read Emily’s story here, and the excerpts from her writings which I am going to post on my blog, because they may be some of the most important posts I’ve shared because they are fundamental in highlighting the cruelty and hypocrisy of British colonialism, and how it has been erased by British propaganda from the 1800s to the present day. 

TRIGGER WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES AND SOME INFORMATION THAT MAY BE UPSETTING.

Emily Hobhouse (1860 – 1926) is primarily remembered for bringing to the attention of the British public, and working to change, the deprived conditions inside the British concentration camps in South Africa built to incarcerate Boer and African civilians during the Second Boer War. 

Born in St Ives in Cornwall, she was the daughter of Caroline and Reginald Hobhouse, an Anglican rector and the first Archdeacon of Bodmin. She was the sister of Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse, a peace activist and proponent of social liberalism. She was also cousin of the peace activist Stephen Henry Hobhouse and was a major influence on him. (Again a reminder that even when women are written out of history, they are present in the uncredited influence they had on the men who reaped the credit). 

Tragically, Emily’s mother died when she was 20, and she spent the next fourteen years looking after her ailing father, who died in 1895. Now orphaned, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s wife arranged for her to travel to Minnesota to perform welfare work amongst Cornish mineworkers living there. In America, she became engaged to a man named John Carr Jackson with whom she brought a ranch in Mexico. However, the match was ill-suited and she returned to England in 1898, virtually penniless. Her unworn wedding veil today hangs in the head office of the Oranje Vrouevereniging (Orange Women's Society) in Bloemfontein, the first women's welfare organisation in the Orange Free State, as a symbol of her commitment to the uplifting of women.

“I came quite naturally, in obedience to the feeling of unity or oneness of womanhood ... it is when the community is shaken to its foundations, that abysmal depths of privation call to each other and that a deeper unity of humanity evinces itself.” 

In 1899, the Second Boer War broke out in South Africa and Liberal MP, Leonard Courtney, invited Hobhouse to become secretary of the women's branch of the South African Conciliation Committee, of which he was president. She wrote: 

“It was late in the summer of 1900 that I first learnt of the hundreds of Boer women that became impoverished and were left ragged by our military operations… the poor women who were being driven from pillar to post, needed protection and organized assistance.” 

She founded the Distress Fund for South African Women and Children, and sailed for the Cape Colony on 7 December 1900 to supervise its distribution, arriving twenty days later with a letter of introduction from the British High Commissioner. She was given the use of two railway trucks which allowed her to travel to Bloemfontein with just one truck of supplies.  

Before her departure, she knew of only one camp, at Port Elizabeth, but found that in reality there were up to 45 concentration camps set up by the British. She persuaded the authorities to let her visit several British concentration camps, to deliver aid.

“I call this camp system a wholesale cruelty… To keep these Camps going is murder to the children. It can never be wiped out of the memories of the people.” 

Hobhouse arrived at the camp at Bloemfontein on 24 January 1901 and was shocked by the conditions she encountered. 

What most distressed Hobhouse was the sufferings of the undernourished children. Diseases such as measles, bronchitis, pneumonia, dysentery and typhoid were rampant and there were simply not enough beds to nurse the sick (who were mainly children).  

To highlight these conditions, Houbhouse recalled the tragic death of Lizzie van Zyl (1894–1901), the daughter of a Boer combatant who refused to surrender.

According to Hobhouse, Lizzie was treated harshly and placed on the lowest rations. Suffering from starvation, she was eventually moved to a nearby hospital. However,  unable to speak English, she was labelled an "idiot" by the hospital staff, none of whom spoke Afrikaans. One day she started calling for her mother. An Afrikaner woman, Mrs Botha, went over to comfort her and to tell her she would see her mother again, but "was brusquely interrupted by one of the nurses who told her not to interfere with the child as she was a nuisance", and Lizzie tragically died soon after.

When Hobhouse requested soap for the people, she was told that soap was a luxury. She persevered and eventually succeeded in having soap added to the list of necessities, along with straw, more tents and more kettles in which to boil the drinking water. She distributed clothes and supplied pregnant women, who had to sleep on the ground, with mattresses, but she could not forgive what she called: “Crass male ignorance, helplessness and muddling…”  

I’m glad things have changed, eh?

“Above all one would hope that the good sense, if not the mercy, of the English people, will cry out against the further development of this cruel system which falls with crushing effect upon the old, the weak, and the children.” 

Hobhouse was so distraught by her findings, that she wrote a report on conditions at the camps, set out in a report entitled "Report of a Visit to the Camps of Women and Children in the Cape and Orange River Colonies". This was delivered to the British government in June 1901. Some extracts from this can be found at the bottom of this post. Please take the time to read them, because they are so important to hear, no matter how difficult a read they make.  

In response to the report, a formal commission was set up and a team of official investigators headed by Millicent Fawcett was sent to inspect the camps. They found that overcrowding in bad unhygienic conditions due to neglect and lack of resources were the causes of a mortality rate, that in the eighteen months during which the camps were in operation, reached a total of 26,370, of which 24,000 were children under sixteen and infants. Up to 50 children a day were dying.   

Late in 1901 the camps ceased to receive new families and conditions improved in some camps; but the damage was done. Charles Aked, a Baptist minister in Liverpool, said on 22 December 1901, Peace Sunday: "Great Britain cannot win the battles without resorting to the last despicable cowardice of the most loathsome cur on earth—the act of striking a brave man's heart through his wife's honour and his child's life. The cowardly war has been conducted by methods of barbarism... the concentration camps have been Murder Camps." This statement was not received well, and an angry mob consequently broke the windows of his home. Truth hurts, Britain.

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Unsurprisingly, when Hobhouse returned to England she received scathing criticism and hostility from the British government and press. However, she refused to be silenced and eventually succeeded in obtaining some help for the Boer citizens. Hobhouse returned to Cape Town in October 1901, was not permitted to land and was eventually deported five days after arriving, no reason being given. She rightly felt that she never received justice or respect for her work. Thus, she went to Lake Annecy in the French Alps where she wrote the book The Brunt of the War and Where it Fell on what she had seen during the war in South Africa. Britain might not have wanted her story told, but she was not to be silenced.  

After the war, Hobhouse returned to South Africa where assisted in healing the wounds inflicted by the war and to support efforts aimed at rehabilitation and reconciliation. With the help of Margaret Clark, she established a home industries scheme to teach young women spinning and weaving and lace making so they would have an occupation in their lonely homes. Ill health, from which she never recovered, forced her to return to England in 1908. She travelled to South Africa again in 1913 for the inauguration of the National Women's Monument in Bloemfontein but had to stop at Beaufort West due to her failing health. Her speech which called for reconciliation and goodwill between all races was read for her, to great acclaim. Here, she also met Mahatma Gandhi, a much more familiar name to most.  

Hobhouse was an avid opponent of the First World War and protested vigorously against it. She organised the writing, signing and publishing in January 1915 of the "Open Christmas Letter", addressed "To the Women of Germany and Austria". Through her offices, thousands of women and children were fed daily for more than a year in central Europe after this war. South Africa contributed liberally towards this effort, and an amount of more than £17,000 (nearly £500,000 today) was collected by Mrs. President Steyn (who was to remain a lifelong friend) and sent to Hobhouse for this purpose.

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Emily Hobhouse has been recognised by South Africa for her humanitarian efforts and her work to protect the Boer people from the barbarism of her own. Yet, I posit that you would be hard pressed to find a handful of Brits who could name her, let alone tell you what she had done – why?  

In school in Scotland, we learnt about the Holocaust and the Nazi concentration camps in both primary and secondary school, in a variety of subject classes. The British were lauded as liberators and saviours of the victims of these camps, and the Nazis condemned as barbarous and evil monsters who perpetrated unfathomable crimes. Both of these statements are valid.  Yet, not once in 12 years of formal state education did we learn about the similar crimes perpetrated BY the British. The Boer War is just one example of the horrific crimes the British inflicted on various communities. In its day, this was covered up and where this was impossible it was seen as collateral damage in a righteous fight to “civilise” inferior peoples. And if this is what they did to white resisters, you can only imagine what they did to people of colour.  

And imagine is what Britain would have you do. Unfortunately, the British succeeded in erasing their crimes from history, and creating a national history in which the British are seen as defenders of freedom and leaders of progress. Given that Emily not only shone a spotlight on this hypocrisy, but that she was a woman doing so at a time when a woman’s job was to stay home and stay silent, it is sad but not surprising that Emily’s accounts are so little known today. In fact, it is a testament to her tenacity that she succeeded in being heard by the most powerful men of her day.  

The criticism that Emily and her supporters faced for speaking out against British atrocities may be all to familiar to the “lefty liberal snowflakes” of today. But if Emily could do it despite all the odds she had against her, what excuse do we have?

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The following extracts from the report by Emily Hobhouse make very clear the extent of culpable neglect by the authorities: 

“In some camps, two, and even three sets of people, occupy one tent and 10, and even 12, persons are frequently herded together in tents of which the cubic capacity is about 500 c.f. 

I call this camp system a wholesale cruelty… To keep these Camps going is murder to the children. 

It can never be wiped out of the memories of the people. It presses hardest on the children. They droop in the terrible heat, and with the insufficient unsuitable food; whatever you do, whatever the authorities do, and they are, I believe, doing their best with very limited means, it is all only a miserable patch on a great ill. Thousands, physically unfit, are placed in conditions of life which they have not strength to endure. In front of them is blank ruin… If only the English people would try to exercise a little imagination –picture the whole miserable scene. Entire villages rooted up and dumped in a strange, bare place. 

The women are wonderful. They cry very little and never complain. The very magnitude of their sufferings, their indignities, loss and anxiety seems to lift them beyond tears… only when it cuts afresh at them through their children do their feelings flash out. 

Some people in town still assert that the Camp is a haven of bliss. I was at the camp to-day, and just in one little corner this is the sort of thing I found – The nurse, underfed and overworked, just sinking on to her bed, hardly able to hold herself up, after coping with some thirty typhoid and other patients, with only the untrained help of two Boer girls–cooking as well as nursing to do herself. Next tent, a six months' baby gasping its life out on is mother's knee. Two or three others drooping sick in that tent. 

Next, a girl of twenty-one lay dying on a stretcher. The father, a big, gentle Boer kneeling beside her; while, next tent, his wife was watching a child of six, also dying, and one of about five drooping. Already this couple had lost three children in the hospital and so would not let these go, though I begged hard to take them out of the hot tent. I can't describe what it is to see these children lying about in a state of collapse. It’s just exactly like faded flowers thrown away. And one has to stand and look on at such misery, and be able to do almost nothing. 

It was a splendid child and it dwindled to skin and bone ... The baby had got so weak it was past recovery. We tried what we could but today it died. It was only 3 months but such a sweet little thing… It was still alive this morning; when I called in the afternoon they beckoned me in to see the tiny thing laid out, with a white flower in its wee hand. To me it seemed a "murdered innocent". And an hour or two after another child died. Another child had died in the night, and I found all three little corpses being photographed for the absent fathers to see some day. Two little wee white coffins at the gate waiting, and a third wanted. I was glad to see them, for at Springfontein, a young woman had to be buried in a sack, and it hurt their feelings woefully. 

It is such a curious position, hollow and rotten to the heart’s core, to have made all over the State large uncomfortable communities of people whom you call refugees and say you are protecting, but who call themselves prisoners of war, compulsorily detained, and detesting your protection. They are tired of being told by officers that they are refugees under "the kind and beneficient protection of the British". In most cases there is no pretence that there was treachery, or ammunition concealed, or food given or anything. It was just that an order was given to empty the country. Though the camps are called refugee, there are in reality a very few of these–perhaps only half-a-dozen in some camps. It is easy to tell them, because they are put in the best marquees, and have had time given to them to bring furniture and clothes, and are mostly self-satisfied and vastly superior people. Very few, if any of them, are in want. 

Those who are suffering most keenly, and who have lost most, either of their children by death or their possessions by fire and sword, such as those reconcentrated women in the camps, have the most conspicuous patience, and never express a wish that their men should be the ones to give way. It must be fought out now, they think, to the bitter end. It is a very costly business upon which England has embarked, and even at such a cost hardly the barest necessities can be provided, and no comforts. It is so strange to think that every tent contains a family, and every family is in trouble–loss behind, poverty in front, sickness, privation and death in the present. But they are very good, and say they have agreed to be cheerful and make the best of it all. The Mafeking camp folk were very surprised to hear that English women cared a rap about them or their suffering. It has done them a lot of good to hear that real sympathy is felt for them at home, and so I am glad I fought my way here, if only for that reason. 

Imagine the heat outside the tents and the suffocation inside! ...the sun blazed through the single canvas, and the flies lay thick and black on everything; no chair, no table, nor any room for such; only a deal box, standing on its end, served as a wee pantry. In this tent live Mrs B's five children (three quite grown up) and a little Kaffir servant girl. Many tents have more occupants. Mrs M. ..has six children in camp, all ill, two in the tin hospital with typhoid, and four sick in the tent. A terrible evil just now is the dew. It is so heavy, and comes through the single canvas of the tents, wetting everything… All the morning the gangways are filled with the blankets and odds and ends, regularly turned out to dry in the sun. The doctor told me today he highly disapproved of tents for young children, and expected a high mortality before June. 

“They went to sleep without any provision having been made for them and without anything to eat or to drink. I saw crowds of them along railway lines in bitterly cold weather, in pouring rain–hungry, sick, dying and dead. Soap was not dispensed. The water supply was inadequate. No bedstead or mattress was procurable. Fuel was scarce and had to be collected from the green bushes on the opes of the kopjes (small hills) by the people themselves. The rations were extremely meagre and when, as I frequently experienced, the actual quantity dispensed fell short of the amount prescribed, it simply meant famine.” 

Soap has been unattainable and none given in the rations. With much persuasion, and weeks after requisitioning, soap is now given occasionally in very minute quantities–certainly not enough for clothes and personal washing. 

We have much typhoid and are dreading an outbreak, so I am directing my energies to getting the water of the Modder River boiled. As well swallow typhoid germs whole as drink that water–so say doctors. 

Yet they cannot boil it all, for – first, fuel is very scarce; that which is supplied weekly would not cook a meal a day…and they have to search the already bare kopjes for a supply. There is hardly a bit to be had. Second, they have no extra utensil to hold the water when boiled. I propose, therefore, to give each tent a pail or crock, and get a proclamation issued that all drinking water must be boiled. 

Above all one would hope that the good sense, if not the mercy, of the English people, will cry out against the further development of this cruel system which falls with crushing effect upon the old, the weak, and the children. May they stay the order to bring in more and yet more. Since Old Testament days was ever a whole nation carried captive?”