The Unseen Emily Hobhouse

Emily Hobhouse was not only a pacifist and humanitarian who spoke out against power during the Anglo-Boer War to alleviate the suffering of tens of thousands of women and children in the British concentration camps; she was also an enigmatic person.

Her tireless work is sometimes overshadowed by other interesting adventures she has had, showing her personality and often quirky, occasionally dramatic responses to life. This is the lesser-known, unseen Emily Hobhouse.

Could she speak “Afrikaans”? While travelling to South Africa for the first time at the end of 1900 Emily Hobhouse read books about the country and tried to learn as much as possible “Boer Dutch” as she referred to “Afrikaans”. She also had lessons in London before the journey, and she wrote that the language attracted her. During the following years, when she visited the country several times, she became quite proficient in it, and wrote: “What humour it can convey, what tenderness, what poetic feeling.”

In fact, she learnt French and Latin as a child, and a bit of Spanish when she travelled in Mexico during the late 19th Century. Later in life, she spent several years in Italy, where she began studying Italian, followed by German.

Where did Emily Hobhouse travel to? She travelled to various countries, including South Africa, America, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Belgium. Here she is in 1903 in Bloemfontein.

On the first day she visited a concentration camp in 1901, she wrote that they sat down in the Bell tents with the women. They cried together and laughed together. They spoke in “bad English and bad Dutch” but could understand each other. “While we sat, a snake came in.” People said it was an adder and very poisonous.

Emily, who still would endure much for the next four months, “attached the creature” with her parasol. Afterwards, she was told it was a puff adder.

A few years later, she killed another snake in the house she was living in, in the town of Philippolis, in the Free State. A companion who travelled with her from England, Margaret Clark, tried to scare or kill the snake by throwing the Manchester Guardian at it! But Emily grabbed an umbrella – an upgrade from the parasol she used before – and made short work of it.

Even though she was used to comfort, she did not shy away from living and travelling in extreme conditions for months at a time. Unable to wash for days, when she travelled between the concentration camps during the Anglo-Boer War, she was often covered in dust.

Did you know she travelled alone because the authorities refused her a female companion?

Once she sat for hours at a station waiting, but late at night, she heard there would be no more trains and the waiting room would be locked. There was nowhere to go. Eventually, she was offered a storeroom to sleep in, but it was so terribly dirty that she had to devise a plan. It was crawling with insects. Always prepared, she made a ring with insect powder and lay within it for a few hours' rest.

Sometimes she walked several miles per day. Alone. In her numerous letters to her aunt, Lady Mary Hobhouse, and her brother, Leonard, she did not complain. But did express sadness, frustration, anger, and remarkable insight into the events and people. Only once, to our knowledge, did she cry during the visits to the camps when someone gave her a place to sleep and prepared a bath for her.

She often quoted writers, a favourite being George Eliot.  After witnessing the death of a baby, she wrote: “Tragedy”, says George Eliot, “must represent irreparable collision between the individual and the general. It is the individual with whom we sympathise, and the general of which we recognise the irresistible power.”

Travelling and seeing places were part of her being. Emily Hobhouse never really settled down in one place. From America to Mexico, to numerous towns in South Africa. Then to Rome, Florence, and Switzerland. And during and after the Great War, to Belgium and Germany. She had so many homes that her post was often sent to her bank in London.

When she lived in a rented house in Langlaagte, a suburb of Johannesburg, in 1905, she decided not to spend Christmas at home.  Yearning for a change of scenery and fresh air, Emily decided to erect a tent on a friend’s farm outside the city and spend Christmas there, taking her cat and a servant, Johanna, along.

With difficulty, she managed to arrange transport for a tent and provisions, but by the time everything finally arrived at the farm, the tent had disappeared into thin air.

There was no house on the farm, only a roofless house. So, she, Johanna and the cat camped under the stars in the roofless summer house. Fortunately, it did not rain, and to Emily the starry skies at night were a beautiful sight. The only provisions that arrived were rice and bully beef.

On the stoep at the spinning and weaving school in Langlaagte, 1906. From the left: the two servants Johanna and Maria, Emily, Constance Cloete and one Hester, either Hester Krugel or Hester Strauss. It was Johanna and Emily who spent a Christmas under the stars.

Did Emily Hobhouse like animals? Apart from her cat, she also brought a St. Bernard puppy to South Africa with her in 1907, which she called Caro. And she doted on the tamed meerkats, which many people in South Africa kept as pets.

Emily Hobhouse's St. Bernard, which she had in South Africa.

A year later, Caro fell ill with biliary fever. Emily immediately took him to a vet, who warned her that ‘he must be nursed like a human being. He was. I spared no pains or strength.’ She sat up with Caro night after night, and every two hours she gave him beef tea or eggs.

During the fifth night, she suddenly woke after she had fallen asleep next to Caro’s bed. Something was wrong. She was late with the beef tea. Caro raised his head, but ‘the effort was too great’. Before she could stand up and reach him, he died.

Nothing or no one could fill Caro’s place in Emily’s life. ‘I missed his welcome, and having someone to speak to; it was the blank left by an intelligent and devoted companionship.’ She never got another dog. Caro’s collar and chain and the whistle he responded to so faithfully, she preserved, unused, for the rest of her life.

Did Emily Hobhouse marry? No, however, she was once engaged in 1896 to a man she met while she did charity work in America. She broke off the engagement when it was discovered that he owed a substantial amount of money. She wrote in 1905: “It is common to most spinster women who, debarred from the contacts arising from work or pleasure owing to ill health and small means, to pass their days and weeks in a silence which becomes oppressive.

“I would, however, be the last to disparage solitude. I was fond of it as a child, and at last, though not without painful initiation, have accepted it as the most abiding factor of my life. I could now, not exist without long spells of it.”

As serious and composed as she could be, so dramatic could she also be. When she was arrested in October 1901 in Cape Town, she was forcibly deported five days later on another ship. Not only did she write scathing letters to the authorities, she “braced herself for battle” and refused to pack her trunks.

After days of trying to get her to comply, the British authorities had to tie her arms down with her own shawl. The men picked her up and strapped her down on a stretcher with a black cord “like a baby.” They carried her down from the ship to the carriage. And again, had to carry her onto the next ship, as she refused to walk.

What else did Emily Hobhouse do? In 1914, with the outbreak of the Great War, she immediately became involved in peace actions. She wrote two important public letters: a letter to the Women of Europe and an “Open Christmas Letter” to the women of Germany and Austria, which appeared under her name in the feminist monthly Jus Suffragii (The Law of Suffrage), the mouthpiece of the International Women’s Suffrage Association. More than a hundred of the most prominent pacifists, all women and leading thinkers of their day, had added their signatures to the letter.

In these letters, she urged women to stand in unison for peace and pacifism. She was part of the famous International Congress of Women in The Hague, where 1,200 women from 12 countries gathered in April 1915 to campaign for peace and women's rights.

It was Emily who wrote the foreword of this Congress Report. This meeting had a profound impact on the future of the women's movement, and Emily was a key participant thereof..

The delegates that gathered were quite productive, creating both 20 resolutions and a pacifist women’s organisation that still advocates for peace to this day.  It is now known as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

What else did Emily Hobhouse do? She was also involved in the Suffrage Movement and various peace initiatives during the Great War. This photo, where she is seen reading a book was taken in 1915.

One of her favourite sayings was: “Rather wear out than rust out.” Emily was always involved in work to campaign for peace and for the rights of women. Ever busy, never lazy; when she was committed to a cause, people helping her would often complain that she would not allow them a day’s rest.

Emily also had a great sense of humour: With one of her favourite jokes being:

“Why is a woman like a telegraph?

Because her intelligence is always in advance of the male.”

Sources:

1. Emily Hobhouse, Draft Biography 1899-1908. Free State Archive Repository.

2. Emily Hobhouse – Feminist, Pacifist, Traitor? Elsabé Brits, 2018.