Emily Hobhouse

Emily Hobhouse.

Emily Hobhouse (born April 9, 1860 — died June 8, 1926) was a British welfare campaigner, who is primarily remembered for bringing to the attention of the British public, and working to change, the appalling conditions inside the British concentration camps in South Africa built for Boer women and children during the Second Boer War.

Biography

Early life

Emily Hobhouse was born in Liskeard, Cornwall, in Great Britain. She was the daughter of an Anglican rector, and sister of Leonard Hobhouse. Her mother died when she was 20, and she spent the next fourteen years looking after her father who was in poor health. When her father died in 1895 she went to Minnesota, United States to perform welfare work amongst Cornish mineworkers living there, the trip having been organized by the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury. There she became engaged to John Carr Jackson and the couple bought a ranch in Mexico, but this did not prosper and the engagement was broken off. She returned to England in 1898 after losing most of her money in a speculative venture.

Second Anglo-Boer War

When the Second Boer War broke out in October 1899, a 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.

Hobhouse 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 [1].

She set up the Distress Fund for South African Women and Children and sailed for South Africa on December 7, 1900 to supervise its distribution. At the time, she only knew about the concentration camp at Port Elizabeth, but on arrival found out about the many other camps (34 in total).

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

"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 an article that 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 slopes 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." [2]

Lizzie van Zyl, visited by Emily Hobhouse in the Bloemfontein concentration camp

Relief Worker

Hobhouse had persuaded the authorities to let her visit several camps and to deliver aid – her report on conditions at the camps, set out in her report to the Committee of the Distress Fund for South African Women and Children, entitled Report of a Visit to the Camps of Women and Children in the Cape and Orange River Colonies was delivered to the British government in June 1901.

What most distressed Hobhouse was the sufferings of the undernourished children. Diseases such as measles, bronchitis, pneumonia, dysentery and typhoid had invaded the camp with fatal results. In addition, overcrowding and bad unhygienic conditions, 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. About 50 children died every day.

The following extracts from the report by Emily Hobhouse (1901) make very clear the extent of culpable neglect by the authorities:

…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 British people would try to exercise a little imagination – picture the whole miserable scene. Entire villages rooted up and dumped in a strange bare place..

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?

Late in 1901 the camps ceased to receive new families and conditions improved in some camps; but the damage was done.

When Hobhouse requested soap for the people, she was told that soap is an article of luxury. She nevertheless succeeded, after a struggle, to have it listed as a necessity, together with straw, more tents and more kettles in which to boil the drinking water. She distributed clothes and supplied pregnant women with mattresses and other hygiene material.

Hobhouse also visited camps at Norvalspont, Aliwal North, Springfontein, Kimberley and Orange River.

Fawcett Commission

When Hobhouse returned to England, she received scathing criticism and hostility from the British government and many of the media, but eventually succeeded in obtaining more funding to help the victims of the war. She also managed to successfully lobby in the government for the investigation of the conditions in camps. The British Liberal leader at the time, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, denounced what he called the "methods of barbarism". The British government eventually agreed to set up the Fawcett Commission to investigate her claims, under Millicent Fawcett, which corroborated her account of the shocking conditions.

Hobhouse returned to Cape Town in October 1901, but was not permitted to land and eventually deported five days after arriving, no reason being given. Hobhouse then went to France where she wrote the book The Brunt of the War and where it fell on what she saw during the war.

Rehabilitation & Reconciliation

After Hobhouse had met the Boer generals she learnt from them that the distress of the women and children in the concentration camps had contributed to their final resolution to surrender to Britain. She saw it then as her mission to assist in healing the wounds inflicted by the war and to support efforts aimed at rehabilitation and reconciliation. With this object in view, she visited South Africa once more in 1903. She decided to set up Boer home industries and to teach young women spinning and weaving.

Ill health, however, from which she never recovered, forced her to return to England in 1908. She traveled 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.

Later life

Hobhouse was an avid opponent of the World War I and protested vigorously against it. Through her offices, thousands of women and children were fed daily for more than a year in central Europe after this war.

Hobhouse died in London in 1926 and her ashes were ensconced in a niche in the National Women's Monument at Bloemfontein, South Africa.

Legacy

Hobhouse became an honorary citizen of South Africa for her humanitarian work there. Her house in St. Ives, Cornwall, now forms part of The Porthminster Hotel, where a commemorative plaque situated within what was her lounge, was unveiled by the South African High Commissioner Mr. Kent Durr as a tribute to her humanitarianism and heroism during the Anglo-Boer War.

The southernmost town in Eastern Free State is named Hobhouse, after her.

One of the SA Navy's three submarines was named the "Emily Hobhouse."

Publications

• Hobhouse, Emily. 1901. Report of a visit to the camps of women and children in the Cape and Orange River colonies. London: Friars Printing Association, Ltd.
• Hobhouse, Emily. 1903. After the war: Letters from Miss Emily Hobhouse respecting the Transvaal and Orange River colonies. London: National Press Agency.
• Hobhouse, Emily. 1924. War without glamour: or, Women's war experiences written by themselves, 1899-1902. Bloemfontein: Nasionale Pers Beperk.
• Hobhouse, Emily. 1929. Emily Hobhouse: A memoir. London: J. Cape.
• Hobhouse, Emily. 1984. Boer War letters. Human & Rousseau. ISBN 0798118237
• Hobhouse, Emily. 2007 (original published in 1902). The brunt of war and where it fell. Kessinger Publishing. ISBN 1432535897

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Emily Hobhouse. Anglo-Boar War Museum, on http://www.anglo-boer.co.za. Retrieved on June 23, 2007, <http://www.anglo-boer.co.za/emily.html>
• Fockens, Johanna. 1997. Emily Hobhouse. Protea Boekhuis. ISBN 0620220430
• Lee, Emanuel. 1986. To the bitter end. New York: Viking. ISBN 0670801437
• Pakenham, Thomas. 1992. The Boer War. Harper Perennial. ISBN 0380720019
• Roberts, Brian. 1991. Those bloody women: Three heroines of the Boer War. London: J. Murray. ISBN 0719548586
• Terblanche, Annette. 1948. Emily Hobhouse. Johannesburg: Afrikaanse pers-boekhandel.

External links

• Australia and the Boer War – On the history of British engagement in South Africa
• The Boer Wars – On the history of the wars
• Emily Hobhouse – Biography on Anglo-Boer War Museum website
• Emily Hobhouse – Biography on Spartacus Schoolnet
• Emily Hobhouse – Biography on "Special South Africans" website
• The "hysterical" Emily Hobhouse and Boer war concentration camp controversy – Article by Hasian, Marouf Jr. (2003)

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