Emily Hobhouse – her quest begins

How and when did Emily Hobhouse decide to become involved in the Anglo-Boer War? This is a question many people ask. It was planned thoughtfully and thought through.

At The Story of Emily, the War Rooms is a rich, immersive, and visual experience. A sensory journey back in time when the Second Anglo-Boer War had dire consequences, especially for the women and children in the concentration camps in South Africa.

It was Emily Hobhouse, an Englishwoman, who had an extraordinary hand in their fate. Here we tell the story of what happened to them.

“The case for intervention is overwhelming …”

According to a report in the morning paper, from which Emily Hobhouse read aloud to Lord Arthur and Lady Mary Hobhouse at the breakfast table on a summer morning in 1899, these were the words of Alfred Milner, Governor of the Cape Colony and the British High Commissioner in South Africa, in a telegram to Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary.

“That means war in my opinion,” was Lord Hobhouse’s sombre comment. Everyone at the breakfast table was upset about the “dark cloud of war” that had been in the news in Britain throughout the summer.

On the 11th of October 1899, the second Anglo-Boer War broke out in South Africa between Britain and the independent Boer Republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State. Three weeks later the South African Conciliation Committee was launched in England by liberal Britons who opposed the war.

The president of the committee was the 67-year-old Leonard Courtney, later Lord Courtney of Penwith, who was a seasoned politician and a former Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons.

His constituency was Liskeard in Cornwall, not far from St Ive where Emily had grown up. His wife Catherine (Kate), too, became actively involved in the committee. Emily knew the Courtneys because Kate (née Potter) was the sister of her cousin Henry Hobhouse V’s wife, Margaret.

Soon, Emily was named the honorary secretary of the committee’s women’s branch. “Our protest was more largely due to our proud desire for England’s honour and our horror lest her rectitude be marred by an unjust act,” Emily wrote.

She decided that women should play a more prominent role and organised a big protest meeting against the war. Kate Courtney agreed with her, and it was decided that a mass meeting would be held in the Queen’s Hall in London. About 3, 000 women attended the meeting and they accepted four resolutions against the war.

The fourth resolution was written and read out by Emily. The meeting attracted widespread attention, especially on the part of the jingo press which, according to Emily, “excelled itself in virulence and inaccuracy” in its reports.

In July 1900 Emily went with MP David Lloyd George to Liskeard, to propagate the objections to the war, at a meeting in the town.

The town hall was packed that evening, with many of Emily’s childhood friends in attendance, but the rowdy “patriotic” pro-war contingent disrupted the meeting to such an extent that neither of the speakers could deliver a speech.

At least Emily managed to get a few words in: “I think you will agree with me that if her majesty the Queen to whom you have sung, were present now, she would be heartily ashamed of her Cornish subjects. I have a great deal that I am anxious to say to you. Will you sit down for a few minutes and listen to me? It seems a strange thing to me that Cornishmen will not listen to a Cornishwoman.”

The majority of the audience became even more disorderly, however, and when chairs and other objects were hurled at the stage, Emily and Lloyd George had to beat a hasty retreat.

Emily increasingly learned from reports out of South Africa that her country’s troops, “contrary to the recognised usages of war, were guilty of the destruction by farmhouses”.

When visiting the War Rooms at The Story of Emily, guests can experience these events, called the scorched earth policy in vivid detail and in a specially dedicated room.

“Thus, the constantly renewed picture of women and children homeless, desperate, and distressed formed and fixed itself in my mind and never once left me. It became my abiding thought,’ she wrote. She planned to be there, in South Africa to help.

She started a fund, known as the South Africa Women and Children Distress Fund, which was non-political, philanthropic, and national in nature, and its object was to feed, clothe, shelter and rescue women and children, both Boer and British, who had been rendered destitute by the war.

“Deeply I had felt the call. Passionately I resented the injustice of English policy. Wholeheartedly I offered myself for relief to the distressed. Carefully step by step I prepared the way. ”

“Sternly I economised and saved. Greatly I felt the wrench and anxiety for my aged relatives. But never did the vision fade of those desolate women and children, nor the certainty that I must go to them.”

She was traveling on her own – a 40-year-old woman headed for a hot, dusty region of the world that was completely unfamiliar to her, radically different in all respects from her own country.

Furthermore, it was a region where a war was raging. In the Boer Republic of the Transvaal, the famous general Koos de la Rey was already fighting in the war. His wife Nonnie, and their many children were back on their farm, Elandsfontein. While he and their two oldest sons are away, she continues farming with the help of the children and farm workers.

When visiting the War Rooms, you can see part of their traditional home and stoep (or verandah). Eventually, Emily would also meet the De La Rey couple. But this meeting is still in the future.

Months before Emily set foot in Table Bay harbour she wrote letters to ladies in Cape Town to ask for their support. When she arrived at 04:00 on the 27th of December 1900, they were there to receive her. Within days she learned for the first time her task was much greater than she thought: there were numerous concentration camps all over the country.

She had to obtain permission to visit the camps. Within two weeks she was invited to lunch with Sir Alfred Milner, the governor of the Transvaal and the Free State as well as of the Cape, and still the British High Commissioner.

For an hour she pleaded her case and had to wait for nine days for a response: She had to travel alone without a female companion and she was not allowed north of Bloemfontein. Lord Herbert Kitchener’s orders.

Again, she asked for a meeting to also visit the concentration camps in the Transvaal. It was refused.

Within days she and her new female friends packed a railway truck with food and clothes. They come to see her off, bringing food for the arduous journey:

“It was a glorious night. Their kindness had been unceasing and I felt I had in them a solid background in case of need. But as the train moved off towards the strange, hot, war-stricken north with its accumulations of misery and bloodshed I must own that my heart sank a little and I faced the unknown with great trepidation, in spite of the feeling that the deep desire of months which had laid so urgent a call upon me, was indeed finding accomplishment.”

She knew little of the dire situation awaiting her, hundreds of miles away.

At The Story of Emily, guests can travel with Emily on this train ride, hear her words, and see the landscape she traveled through.

The journey she had embarked on would change her life and that of others, dramatically.

In the following blogs about Emily, we will write about what she witnessed in the concentration camps during the Second Anglo-Boer War.