A visitor’s impressions of The Story of Emily
We were honored to welcome Errol Lincoln Uys, acclaimed author of Brazil and Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression — to The Story of Emily. A South African historian and writer who once assisted James A. Michener on The Covenant, Errol brings a unique perspective on Emily Hobhouse’s life and legacy.
In his evocative narrative, Errol captures the spirit of Emily Hobhouse and the poignant history we preserve; a story of courage, compassion, and humanity that transcends time and borders. We’re delighted to share his moving account with you here.
“A moonlit night in St. Ive, Emily Hobhouse stands at a bedroom window in The Rectory, shadows beyond the meadow beckon her on a path beside a Cornish hedge across time to the War Rooms and a portal to her past.”
I lay awake, thinking of my visit to The Story of Emily and imagining Emily taking this otherworldly journey through past and future. I picture her in her later years, a handsome woman in a white blouse and long skirt, a soulful wisdom in her expression, mindful of the words she wrote in a letter. “I like Maeterlinck’s thought: ‘The dead live again every time we remember them.’”
To see Emily in the War Rooms is to capture the very essence of her being. Here, remembrances are curated with love, respect and understanding, from the ordinary lives of Boer and Briton, the solitude of the veld, the thunder of war amid the carnage of man and beast, the endless rows of bell tents mirroring suffering and sorrow, the talk of generals and politicians, of the rich and highly-placed, of khakis and commandos, and of Emily in her selfless devotion to humanity.
The museum features a replica of the Woman’s Monument in Bloemfontein dedicated to the twenty-eight thousand women, children and men who died in the concentration camps of the Anglo-Boer War. Emily traveled to South Africa for the unveiling on December 16, 1913, though poor health prevented her from attending the ceremony. Her speech, a message of peace and conciliation, was delivered by a close friend in both Afrikaans and English. It resonates still in the War Rooms, honoring the spirit of the heroic women of the Boer nation who made the supreme offering for freedom.
“Generation after generation, your monument will stand here pressing home in silent eloquence these great thoughts: — In your hands and those of your children lie the power and freedom won; you must not merely maintain but increase the sacred gift. Be merciful toward the weak, the down-trodden, the stranger,” Hobhouse said. “Do not open your gates to those worst foes of freedom — tyranny and selfishness.”
Emily made a profound and prophetic appeal to her South African friends: “We in England are ourselves still but dunces in the great world school, our leaders still struggling with the unlearned lesson, that liberty is the equal right and heritage of every child of man, without distinction of race, color or sex. A community that lacks the courage to found its citizenship on this broad base, becomes a “city divided against itself, which cannot stand.’”
My discovery of The Story of Emily in Cornwall was an otherworldly journey, too, for a South African with a passion for history. The pretty village of St. Ive lies amid rolling green fields, where Reverend Reginal Hobhouse, Emily’s father, built The Rectory in 1851. The house was in total disrepair seven years ago when its restoration began, the first stage of developing the forty-acre property with Victorian kitchen gardens, tree-shaded meadows, buildings of Cornish stone, English oak, and South African yellowwood. The zinc-clad War Rooms to the south of The Rectory possess an anonymity by design, provoking the curious mind yet revealing nothing of the human drama within.
The restoration of The Rectory is meticulous, down to reproducing original 19th century wallpapers replicated from fragments recovered under layers of paint, then engraved on blocks and hand-printed color by color. Emily, born in 1860, was the fifth of six surviving children in her upper-class Victorian family, four girls and two boys, the females tutored at home by a governess. Emily’s sister Maud, two years older, wrote an essay in which she left a precious description of the rooms in “Our Rectory,” noting that in the school room “the little window in the corner looks out on the stable yard where there is much going on…”
One sees the house as it would have appeared in 1875 with Reverend Hobhouse and his family, the governess and six servants, cook, maids, groom and gardener. Twenty years later, on a bitterly cold day, Reginal died, Emily caring for him alone for the last six years of his life. “It was in a word, a period of torture,” she wrote. Two weeks after her father’s death, she left St. Ive never to return.
I walk from The Rectory, down the path beside the Cornish hedge, toward the War Rooms. The name of Emily Hobhouse was remembered in South Africa, “die meisie van Engeland” to the Boer women in the concentration camps. My mother, Hester Johanna Maria Uys – “Joey” – was in Bloemfontein Concentration Camp when Emily visited in 1901. Eight years old, she had been captured with her Tant Elizabeth Martia Margaretha Roux and her children, Johannes Petrus and Michiel Christoffel. Joey never forgot seeing Emily Hobhouse as she went from tent to tent in the camp.
“The women are remarkable. They shed few tears and never complain.,” Emily wrote in The Brunt of the War. “The sheer magnitude of their suffering, indignities, loss, and anxiety seems to elevate them beyond tears.”
I sit on a riempie bench on the stoep of a farm in the old Transvaal, an exhibit modelled on the verandah at Elandsfontein, home of General Koos de la Rey and his wife, Nonnie. Clouds drift across the blue African sky, the veld stretches to the horizon, a warm summer’s day, fruit trees in front of the stoep, bird calls, an artist’s space deceiving one’s eye. One thinks of a land far away and the people who come alive again in The Story of Emily.
The museum honors the supreme courage and conviction of Emily Hobhouse. It is a marvel of technology that immerses one in a poignant and stark tale of war and sacrifice. What struck me as I sat on the Boer general’s stoep was the wonder of it all, how the girl from St Ive, who wanted truth about the camps be known, would see the hurrying past.
“Did you ever ask yourselves why I came to your aid in those dark says of strife?” she asked in her speech at the Women’s Monument in Bloemfontein. “When Society is shaken to the foundations, deep calleth unto deep, the underlying oneness our nature appears, and we learn that ‘all the world is kin.’
Author of "Brazi", "Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression". Uys, a South African, who lives in the United States, assisted James A. Micheners on The Covenant, his best-selling novel about the Afrikaners.
