Welcome, to the story of Emily
Nearly a 165 years ago in the small village of St Ive, Cornwall, a baby girl was born to the Anglican priest, Reginald Hobhouse, and his wife Caroline Trelawny.
Her name was Emily Hobhouse. She would become both famous and infamous in her lifetime. Revered by some, loathed by others.
Reginald, a stern Victorian man with iron rectitude, hailed from Hadspen House in Somerset, which his great-grandfather purchased in the 18th century.
In contrast, her mother Caroline was a doting and loving mother, whose father was Sir William Lewis Salusbury-Trelawny, the eighth baronet and heir to Harewood House in Calstock, Cornwall.
In addition to her distinguished bearing and charm she also had a handsome dowry of £10,000. In today’s money that is a whopping £1.6 million.
The couple had the Rectory – designed in the Gothic Revival Style - constructed between 1852 and 1854. It was in this house where Emily and her five siblings grew up, and she lived until she was 34 years old. The family, part of the landed gentry had a busy happy home, with a cook, maids, groom and gardener.
Since she was a young girl – educated along with her sisters at home by a series of governesses in the school room – it was evident Emily wanted more from life. When she was a teenager she wrote:
“I envy the boys at school and their special tutors […] People whose brains they have the right to pick; of whom they may ask questions. I never had anyone to cut my mental teeth upon. So, school lessons always bore me, because they are so superficial.”
The fate of many Victorian women was also hers: too great an ability and too little scope to utilise it. This was her reality for many years, when she was left to care for her father at home, after her mother had died.
But this was not the conclusion of the story of Emily Hobhouse. Yearning to explore the world, to be visible in an era when women were invisible, she found meaning in hers.
One would never have foreseen that one of the most powerful men of the time, Joseph Chamberlain, Secretary of State for the Colonies, would in years to come say this about Emily: “The Empire was not threatened by a hysterical spinster of mature age.”
Nor, that she would become such a festering wound in the side of Lord Herbert Kitchener, while the Anglo Boer War was raging, that he would call her: “That bloody woman!”
It was a resolute and determined woman who arrived two days after Christmas in 1900 in Table Bay harbour, Cape Town. The task ahead of her was to change her life irrevocably and those of the women and children of the Anglo Boer War.
Come! Leave the present behind and journey back in time with us at The story of Emily to reveal her story.
On the way to the Rectory, you will stroll through handsome grounds, ornamental and kitchen gardens – full of vegetables - past stables, chickens, and an outside privy. Do have a peek inside the privy, if you like. Just note that a Victorian lady would never have used this facility, she would have preferred the commode inside one of the upstairs bedrooms.
It is nearly impossible to ignore the tantalising smell from The Restaurant, when the boerewors is being cooked on an open grill.
Boerewors is the Afrikaans (South African) word for traditional South African beef and/or pork sausage with all kinds of herbs, usually made by farmers on farms. But it is only one of the scrumptious and unique dishes you can taste here.
Then we invite you to enter the world of the Hobhouse family when Emily was 15, thus in the year 1875.
It took experts years to lovingly restore this old house. Listen to the whispers of ages… you might hear a female voice over tea in the drawing room.
Soon, we will have a lot more to offer when we open the War Rooms, an immersive experience, that shares the resolve and courage of Emily and the Boer Women and children, before, during and after the Anglo Boer War. Come and see how one woman from this Cornish village shaped events a world away.
