Product Code Database
Emily Hobhouse (9 April 1860 – 8 June 1926) was a British welfare spending campaigner, anti-war activist, and Pacifism.Rebecca Gill & Cornelis Muller (2018) The limits of agency: Emily Hobhouse’s international activism and the politics of suffering, Safundi, 19:1, 16-35, DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2018.1404744 She is primarily remembered for bringing to the attention of the British public, and working to change, the deprived conditions inside the British concentration camps in Cape Colony built to incarcerate Boer and African civilians during the Second Boer War.
Her mother died when she was 20, and she spent the next fourteen years looking after her father who was in poor health. When her father died in 1895, she went to Minnesota in the United States to perform welfare work amongst Cornish mineworkers living there, the trip having been organised by the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury. There she became engaged to John Carr Jackson and the couple bought a ranch in Mexico but this did not prosper, and the engagement was broken off. She returned to England in 1898 after losing most of her money in a speculative venture. Her wedding veil (which she never wore) hangs in the head office of the Oranje Vrouevereniging (Orange Women's Society) in Bloemfontein, the first women's welfare organisation in the Orange Free State, as a symbol of her commitment to the uplifting of women.
It was late in the summer of 1900 that I first learnt of the hundreds of Boer women that became impoverished and were left ragged by our military operations… the poor women who were being driven from pillar to post, needed protection and organized assistance.
She set up the South African Women and Children Distress Fund and sailed for the Cape Colony on 7 December 1900 to supervise its distribution, arriving on 27 December. She wrote later:
I came quite naturally, in obedience to the feeling of unity or oneness of womanhood ... it is when the community is shaken to its foundations, that abysmal depths of privation call to each other and that a deeper unity of humanity evinces itself.
When she left England, she did not know about the concentration camps, but on arrival, she learnt about their existence. She only knew about the scorched-earth policy and its devastation.
She had a letter of introduction to the British High Commissioner, Alfred Milner, from her aunt, the wife of Arthur Hobhouse, himself the son of Henry Hobhouse, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Home Office under Sir Robert Peel, and who knew Milner.
From him she obtained the use of two railway trucks, subject to the approval of the army commander, Lord Kitchener, which she received two weeks later, although it only allowed her to travel as far as Bloemfontein and take one truck of supplies for the camps, about 12 tons.
As a result, a formal commission was set up and a team of official investigators headed by Millicent Fawcett was sent to inspect the camps. Overcrowding in bad, unhygienic conditions due to bad planning, poor rations, diseases, and exposure to the elements led to a high mortality rate in the eighteen months during which the camps were in operation. Some 34,000 white women and children and between 15,000 and 25,000 black women and children - of which 80% were under 16 years - died.
The following extracts from the report by Hobhouse make clear the extent of culpable neglect by the authorities:
In some camps, two, and even three sets of people, occupy one tent and 10, and even 12, persons are frequently herded together in tents of which the cubic capacity is about 500 c.f.
I call this camp system a wholesale cruelty… To keep these Camps going is murder to the children.
It presses hardest on the children. They droop in the terrible heat, and with the insufficient unsuitable food; whatever you do, whatever the authorities do, and they are, I believe, doing their best with very limited means, it is all only a miserable patch on a great ill. Thousands, physically unfit, are placed in conditions of life which they have not strength to endure. E.
The women are wonderful. They cry very little and never complain. The very magnitude of their sufferings, their indignities, loss and anxiety seems to lift them beyond tears… only when it cuts afresh at them through their children do their feelings flash out.
Imagine the heat outside the tents and the suffocation inside! ...the sun blazed through the single canvas, and the flies lay thick and black on everything; no chair, no table, nor any room for such; only a deal box, standing on its end, served as a wee pantry. All the morning the gangways are filled with the blankets and odds and ends, regularly turned out to dry in the sun. The doctor told me today he highly disapproved of tents for young children and expected a high mortality before June.
Soap has been unattainable, and none given in the rations. With much persuasion, and weeks after requisitioning, soap is now given occasionally in very minute quantities–certainly not enough for clothes and personal washing. We have much typhoid and are dreading an outbreak, so I am directing my energies to getting the water of the Modder River boiled. As well swallow typhoid germs whole as drink that water–so say doctors. Yet they cannot boil it all, for – first, fuel is very scarce; that which is supplied weekly would not cook a meal a day…and they have to search the already bare for a supply. There is hardly a bit to be had. Second, they have no extra utensil to hold the water when boiled. I propose, therefore, to give each tent a pail or crock, and get a proclamation issued that all drinking water must be boiled.
Above all one would hope that the good sense, if not the mercy, of the English people, will cry out against the further development of this cruel system which falls with crushing effect upon the old, the weak, and the children. May they stay the order to bring in more and yet more. Since Old Testament days was ever a whole nation carried captive?
Historian Thomas Pakenham writes of Kitchener's policy turn:
No doubt the continued 'hullabaloo' at the death rate in these concentration camps, and Alfred Milner belated agreement to take over their administration, helped changed K's mind some. By mid-December, at any rate, Kitchener was already circulating all column commanders with instructions not to bring in women and children when they cleared the country but to leave them with the guerrillas... Viewed as a gesture to Liberals, on the eve of the new session of Parliament at Westminster, it was a shrewd political move. It also made excellent military sense, as it greatly handicapped the guerrillas, now that the drives were in full swing... It was effective precisely because, contrary to the Liberals' convictions, it was less humane than bringing them into camps, though this was of no great concern to Kitchener.
Charles Aked, a Baptist minister in Liverpool, said on 22 December 1901, Peace Sunday: "Great Britain cannot win the battles without resorting to the last despicable cowardice of the most loathsome cur on earth—the act of striking a brave man's heart through his wife's honour and his child's life. The cowardly war has been conducted by methods of barbarism... the concentration camps have been Murder Camps." Afterwards, a crowd followed him home and broke the windows of his house.
They went to sleep without any provision having been made for them and without anything to eat or to drink. I saw crowds of them along railway lines in bitterly cold weather, in pouring rain–hungry, sick, dying and dead. Soap was not dispensed. The water supply was inadequate. No bedstead or mattress was procurable. Fuel was scarce and had to be collected from the green bushes on the opes of the kopjes (small hills) by the people themselves. The rations were extremely meagre and when, as I frequently experienced, the actual quantity dispensed fell short of the amount prescribed, it simply meant famine.
When Hobhouse requested soap for the people, she was told soap was a luxury. She nevertheless succeeded, after a struggle, to have it listed as a necessity, together with straw, more tents and more kettles in which to boil the drinking water.
Crass male ignorance, helplessness and muddling… I rub as much salt into the sore places in their minds… because it is 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 almost insoluble problems, and they don't know how to face it.
Hobhouse also visited camps at Norvalspont, Aliwal-North, Springfontein, Kimberley, Mafekeng, and the Orange River Camp.
Hobhouse returned to Cape Town in October 1901, but was not permitted to land, and was deported five days after arriving. The government agreed she should not be allowed back into the country.
She felt she never received justice for her work. Early the next year Hobhouse went to Lake Annecy in the French Alps where she wrote the book The Brunt of the War and Where it Fell on what she had seen during the war in South Africa. (1994). 9780969713302, The Hobhouse Trust. ISBN 9780969713302
Ill health, forced her to return to England in 1908. She travelled to South Africa again in 1913 for the inauguration of the National Women's Monument in Bloemfontein but had to stop at Beaufort West due to her failing health.
Her speech, which focused on forgiveness, women's rights, the misuse of power and equal rights, was read on her behalf. Shortly afterwards she met Mahatma Gandhi in Cape Town.
|
|
