Emily Hobhouse’s journey in the British concentration camps
It was only Emily’s second day in January 1901 in Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State, and she was already disillusioned with the British officers who had no plan for providing the women with clothing. She did not mince her words:
“Crass male ignorance, stupidity, helplessness and muddling. I rub as much salt into the sore places of their minds as I possibly can, because it is so good for them; but I can’t help melting a little when they are very humble and confess that the whole thing is a grievous and gigantic blunder and presents an almost insoluble problem, and they don’t know how to face it.”
She arrived in South Africa at the end of December 1900, after months of planning.
The concentration camp at Bloemfontein was about 2 miles from the town centre, situated on the southern slope of a koppie (rocky outcrop) in the barren veld without a single tree. It was the first camp of eight she received permission to visit.
The first woman Emily met there was Mrs PJ Botha. There was nothing in her tent—only flies, heat, her five children, and a black servant girl. Several other women joined them in the tent to tell their stories, too. They cried and even laughed together and “chatted bad Dutch and bad English all the afternoon.”
While they were sitting there, a snake slithered into the tent and everyone ran out. Emily, who “could not bear to think the thing should be at large in a community mostly sleeping on the ground”, attacked the creature with her parasol until a man arrived and finished it off.
Over the next few days, the women each told Emily their personal stories: how their farmhouses and crops had been burnt, their livestock killed or injured and left to die; how they had been transported for days on wagons and/or trains and been forced into the camp … They were stories of loss, exposure, starvation, illness, pain and longing.
“The women are wonderful; they cry very little and never complain … Only when it cuts afresh at them through their children do their feelings flash out.”
Within in a few days, Emily discovered the nature and extent of the misery in the camp. The most basic necessities of life were lacking. There were not even candles; they were only used when someone was seriously ill. There was no soap, and none had ever been supplied.
There was no mortuary tent; the dead lay in the heat among the living until they were buried. Flies lay thick and black on everything.
There was virtually no wood or coal to boil drinking water or food, and the water of the Modder River was filthy. Typhoid was rife. Water was limited to two buckets for eight people—for drinking, washing, and cooking. The food rations were not nearly sufficient to stave off hunger and disease.
It was “murder to the children” to keep these camps going, Emily realised.
Her suggestion to Captain Albert Hume, who had been designated to give her a hearing, was that a railway boiler be obtained and that all water be boiled in it. The 50 cows that were supposed to provide the camp inmates with milk were so starved that they produced only four buckets of milk per day. She was also concerned about the “native camp” with about 500 people who were in need of aid.
Emily’s plan was to tell the “other side” of the war story based on an eyewitness account, an alternative narrative to the one that the military authorities and the British politicians were presenting to the world. She started writing down individual women’s stories (which eventually appeared in her book The Brunt of the War and Where it Fell).
This picture, taken in a concentration camp during the Anglo-Boer War, belonged to Emily Hobhouse. She annotated the image, which was published as such in her book The Brunt of the War and Where it Fell in 1902.
She also aimed to use the evidence she was gathering to compile a report for the South African Conciliation Committee in England.
Emily became exasperated with Captain Hume, who considered her too sympathetic towards the camp inmates (she “wanted to box his ears”, and sent him to fetch some brandy for a dying woman).
A man came up and asked her to look at his son, who had been sick for three months. “It was a dear little chap of four, and nothing left of him except his great brown eyes and white teeth from which the lips were drawn back, too thin to close. His body was emaciated.”
An appalled Emily called Hume to observe the scene. “‘You shall look,’ I said. And I made him come in and showed him the complete child skeleton. Then at last he did say it was awful to see the children suffering so …” Yet no milk was made available for the dying child.
“I can’t describe what it is to see these children lying about in a state of collapse – it is just exactly like faded flowers thrown away. And one hates to stand and look on at such misery and be able to do almost nothing.”
The British soldiers regarded her as if she were “a fool, an idiot and a traitor combined”. The material destruction and bodily suffering were one thing, Emily wrote, but the worst aspect of war was the moral miasma that grew from it and infected everything.
The atmosphere in Bloemfontein was so depressing that Emily felt paralysed and intimidated, “like being in continual disgrace or banishment or imprisonment. Some days I think I must cut and run . . . The feeling is intolerable. To watch all these Englishmen taking this horrible line and doing these awful things …”
She was concerned about the image of her country, and the devastation that England was causing; nevertheless, she remained patriotic. “[I]f only the English people would try to exercise a little imagination – picture the whole miserable scene and answer how long such a cruelty is to be tolerated …”
Appealing to her Aunt Mary Hobhouse in a letter, she asked whether her aunt “couldn’t write such a letter about it in the Times as should make more people listen and believe and understand – which would touch their conscience? Is England afraid of losing her prestige? Well, that’s gone already in this country.”
Soon, she told Major General George Pretyman, the military governor of Bloemfontein, that she was most horrified by the sanitation facilities provided.
Suspicions about Emily’s intentions
Pretyman was quick to cast suspicion on her. Emily had said beforehand that her mission was non-political, he wrote to Lord Alfred Milner, but “I hear that since her arrival, the refugees in this camp have suddenly found out that they are very badly treated and ought to be supplied with many more comforts than at present afforded them … I can see she is very much in sympathy with our enemies … I fear this class of fanatic will not do the cause much good from our point of view.”
Yet Pretyman also made a surprising admission: “But at the same time I could not help in my heart agreeing with her that this policy of bringing in the women and children to these camps, is a mistaken one.”
In February she left to visit other camps, travelling by train and walking from the stations to the camps on foot. Among others, Norvalspont, Aliwal North and Kimberley.
While Emily was travelling from one camp to the other, the authorities increasingly took note of her activities. Major Sir Hamilton John Goold-Adams, who had succeeded Pretyman in the meantime, reported to Milner: “Miss Hobhouse has been playing the dickens with the women in the camps.” She was “creating a great deal of unrest by impressing upon such people the hardships they are enduring”.
“They accused me of talking politics, whereas we could only talk of sickness and death, they objected to me ‘shewing sympathy’ but that was needed in every act and word.”
A small kindness
During her journeys, she had to spend a whole day in the Noupoort station’s waiting room as conditions were too unsafe for travelling. The sounds of gunfire could be heard, and according to rumours the Boers were in the vicinity. By ten o’clock that evening the train had still not arrived, and the only solution was to sleep on the floor of the railway staff officer’s office.
The railway officer followed her when she stepped outside later to get some fresh air. Shyly he offered that she could spend the night in the conductor’s carriage which he had fitted out as his sleeping quarters. He himself would sleep elsewhere. Overwhelmed by relief at this kindness, she collapsed on the small bed and started crying.
Looking around her, she saw that he had prepared a bath for her and made the bed. Oh, it was a wonderful night, she wrote.
The train journeys were exhausting and lonely; there was no one Emily could talk to about her real thoughts and feelings. Invariably she fell back on pen and paper and wrote lengthy letters to the family in England, albeit that they would first be scrutinised by the censors.
Emily was convinced that nothing would improve unless there were a constant influx of doctors, nurses, other workers, food, clothing and bedding. The death rate had now risen to about 20 per cent, and there was no hope that it would decline.
She pleaded with Goold-Adams that he should try to improve conditions in the camp, but he informed her that inhabitants of the Transvaal and the Free State were now being placed in camps on an increased scale; “a new sweeping movement has begun”.
She was shocked when she read Lord Kitchener’s claim in a newspaper that the families in the camps “had a sufficient allowance, and were all comfortable and happy.”[i] She knew that they were “all miserable and underfed, sick and dying” and realised that the British public were being sold lies.
This brought Emily to a point where she had to take an important decision: “To stay among the people, doling out small gifts of clothes, which could only touch the surface of the need, or return home with the hope of inducing the Government and the public to give so promptly and abundantly that the lives of the people, or at least the children might be saved.”
After much reflection, she decided to tackle the evil at its root, with those who had started it and had the power to end it. She decided to leave and return to Cape Town and then immediately to England.
The scene made an indelible impression upon me
On the way, the train stopped at Springfontein. Emily’s horror, the same group of about 600 women and children she had seen when passing north ten days earlier were still stuck at the station. There was neither water nor toilets, and very little food.
Emily was called to shelter where a woman sat with her fast-fading child on her lap.
Emily was present when the child died in silence.
“The mother neither moved nor wept. It was her only child. Dry-eyed but deathly white, she sat there motionless looking not at the child but far, far away into depths of grief beyond all tears. A friend stood behind her who called upon Heaven to witness this tragedy and others crouching on the ground around her wept freely.
“The scene made an indelible impression upon me. The leading elements in the great tragedy working itself out in your country seemed to have gathered under that old bit of sailcloth whose tattered sides hardly kept off sun, wind or rain.”
Emily witnessed this scene, which later inspired the bronze figures of the Women’s Monument, unveiled in 1913. A replica can be seen in the War Rooms at the Story of Emily.
On 24 May 1901 Emily was back in England after having left for South Africa five and half months earlier. She still had no idea of how exactly she would bring the need in the concentration camps to the attention of the English public in a way that would engender sympathy instead of giving offence.
What she did know was that her experience of the conflict in South Africa had imbued her with an intense aversion to war and everything it entailed. She had seen clearly what war did to people:
“You can no longer be an individual, you are one of a herd – and that herd preserves itself by the reversal of the principle of virtue. Untruth, lies, hatred, inhumanity, destructiveness, spying, treachery, meanness innumerable, suspicion, contempt, unfair dealing, illegality of every kind flourish and become as it were the ‘virtues of war’.
“The atmosphere thus created is a moral miasma.”
Souce
1. Rebel Englishwoman – The Remarkable Life of Emily Hobhouse. Elsabé Brits, 2019, Robinson.