Nearly 165 years ago, in the small village of St Ive, Cornwall, the Anglican priest Reginald Hobhouse and his wife Caroline Trelawny gave birth to a baby girl. Her name was Emily Hobhouse. In her lifetime, she would become both famous and infamous, revered by some and loathed by others.
A major new historical attraction, The Story of Emily, opened this year in St Ive, near Liskeard in Cornwall, to honour her work during and after the Anglo-Boer War. On the same grounds, the rectory, her childhood Victorian home, was also restored to its former glory. There is also a Victorian kitchen garden, contemplation garden, shop, and restaurant that serves heritage food from the 19th century.
https://thestoryofemily.com/
The renovated rectory and outbuildings at the Story of Emily, near Liskeard, and St Ive Church are in the background. Picture: DookPhoto
In the War Rooms on site, Emily’s extraordinary impact on events in the Anglo-Boer War is honoured. Visitors will experience installations, animations, films, and virtual reality and see décor, historical pictures, and original artefacts.
The outside of the War Rooms, where the story of Emily Hobhouse, during and after the Anglo-Boer War is told. Picture: DookPhoto.
Reginald, a stern Victorian man of iron rectitude, was born in Hadspen House in Somerset, which his great-grandfather, Henry Hobhouse II, 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. He was married to Patience Carpenter.
In addition to her distinguished bearing and charm, Caroline also had a handsome dowry of £10,000, which is a whopping £1.6 million in today’s money.
The couple had the Rectory – designed in the Gothic Revival Style – constructed between 1852 and 1854. It was in this house that Emily and her five siblings grew up, and she lived there 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.
The drawing room in the Rectory, at the Story of Emily. Picture: DookPhoto.
Since she was a young girl – educated along with her sisters at home by a series of governesses in the school room – 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.”
A 15-year-old Emily Hobhouse. Picture: Story of Emily Collection
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 Emily Hobhouse’s story. 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 Kitchener1 while the Anglo-Boer War2 was raging that he would call her: “That bloody woman!”
On October 11, 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, liberal Britons who opposed the war launched the South African Conciliation Committee3 in England.
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,” she wrote.
She learned increasingly from reports out of South Africa that her country’s troops, “contrary to the recognised usages of war, were guilty of the destruction of farmhouses.”
A farmstead burning during the scorched earth policy. Picture: Story of Emily Collection
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 started a fund, the South Africa Women and Children Distress Fund, which was non-political, philanthropic, and national in nature. Its object was to feed, clothe, shelter, and rescue women and children. At the end of 1900, she left for South Africa.
She was travelling alone – a 40-year-old woman headed for a hot, dusty region of the world that was completely unfamiliar to her and radically different from her own country.
It was only on her arrival that she heard there were more than 100 British concentration camps4 into which women, children and few men were forced. This forced her to adapt and buy tons of food and provisions with the help of local women.
“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 . . . If 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.”
Hobhouse wrote these words in one of the many letters to her aunt, Lady Mary Hobhouse, while working to improve conditions in the British concentration camps in South Africa. As well as in her 40-page report.
Within days after visiting, Emily discovered the nature and extent of the misery in the concentration camps. The necessities of life were lacking – fuel to cook rations, clean drinking water, lack of food, milk for the children, and clothes. There were not even candles; they were only used when someone was seriously ill. There was no soap, and none had ever been supplied.
Women and children in a concentration camp during the Anglo-Boer War. Picture: Story of Emily Collection
While confronting the camp commanders, she realised how difficult her task to improve hygiene and obtain soap and clean water was: “This seems to have been due to a careless order from Headquarters about the rations, and men don’t think of these things unless it is suggested to them, they simply say: ‘How dirty these people are!’”
But the high death rates were caused by a combination of extreme temperatures, the unsuitability of the bell tents in the open veld, the lack of clean drinking water, poor rations, emotional toil, and diseases. View a projection on the “pond” in the War Rooms that explains this in detail.
Between 28,000 and 34,000 white women and children died, 80% of them under the age of 16. Figures show 15,000 deaths for black women and children, but research now suggests 25,000 died. The true figure may never be known. These were under the Native Refugee Department, which fell under direct British military command.
The “brunt of the war” fell on the women and children, as far more of them died in these camps than men on the battlefield, she realised. She collected experiences and facts weekly to write about in her later report.
Emily wrote a long letter to her brother Leonard: “You must not think that I pick out bad cases to send home. I never pick out at all. The tents are entered at random and I note what they say and often leave a camp without having seen people who have had the worst experiences.”
Children in a concentration camp during the Anglo-Boer War. Picture: Story of Emily Collection
After months she had to return to England. “In view of the need for instant action … I had no right to delay. It showed me that the affair now must be considered under the Home Government only.”
Back in England, she lobbied members of parliament, held numerous public meetings, and met with St John Brodrick, Minister of War, to improve the deteriorating conditions in the concentration camps. In a detailed report, she made recommendations to Brodrick on how the conditions could be improved. On June 18, 1901, her report was published and debated in both houses of Parliament.
She found herself at the centre of a political war, which was by its nature a war with few rules. Many Britons resented her for her “unpatriotic conduct,” the jingoes denounced her as a traitor to her country, and most newspapers wrote scathing reports about her. To her great shock, the majority of the English public showed no or little sympathy for the impoverished women and children in the camps.
This came as a shock to her, as she never took sides politically. She was a genuine, even radical, pacifist who was morality-driven to help women and children. Of war she said: “That is, I think one of the worst features of war . . . the rotting away or jeopardy of Justice, Truth and Humanity.”
Emily Hobhouse, circa 1902. Picture: Story of Emily Collection
Months later, a commission was sent to investigate the conditions in the camps, but Hobhouse was purposely left out. Their recommendations were the same as hers, yet she was never mentioned in their report or acknowledged for the work she did. Conditions improved greatly when the running of the camps was transferred from the military authorities to civilian colonial administrators.
In 1903, Hobhouse returned to South Africa to witness first-hand the effect of the scorched earth policy in the Transvaal and Orange Free state, where 30,000 homesteads of white farmers and all they had – including livestock – were lost, along with an estimated 100,000 dwellings of black people.
Again, she fed many people with leftover funds from her project but soon realised another strategy was needed. She invented a ploughing and planting scheme and raised £10,000 to buy teams of oxen and mules and pay for labour and seed. The teams went from district to district for many years.
Her next project, from 1905 to 1908, was to teach young women to spin and weave and the art of lace making. Some 26 spinning and weaving schools and a lace-making school were established.
When Hobhouse returned to South Africa in 1913 to unveil and deliver the main address at the inauguration of the Women’s Monument in Bloemfontein, she had a powerful message about forgiveness, the misuse of power, equality, and human rights.
It was a punchy message at a time when patriarchy is dominant around the globe. In structure, her address echoes the famous Athenian general Pericles. But unlike him, she does not honour men – warriors – but voteless women.
Here are some of those timeless words:
“If you have pity to spare, give it even now to those who, still alive, must ever carry in their hearts the heavy memories of the blundering wrong by which they wrought that war.”
“Liberty is the equal right and heritage of every child of man, without distinction of race, colour or sex.”
“Be merciful towards the weak, the downtrodden, the stranger.”
Emily Hobhouse, a woman from Cornwall, changed events during a war and challenged the might of the British Empire a world away.
To visit The Story of Emily please make a booking at: https://thestoryofemily.com/
Endnotes:
- Field Marshall Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener, was a British Army officer and colonial administrator who came to prominence for his imperial campaigns, his involvement in the Second Boar War and his central role in the early part of the First World War.
- The Second Boer War, also known as the Boer War, Transvaal War, Anglo–Boer War, or South African War, was a conflict fought between the British Empire and the two Boer Republics (the South African Republic and Orange Free State) over the Empire’s influence in Southern Africa.
- The South Africa Conciliation Committee was a British anti-war organisation opposed to the Second Boer War. The committee was formed in 1899 in response to the outbreak of the war, for the “dissemination of accurate information”, and to seek an early “peaceable settlement between this country and the Boer Republics”.
- During the Second Anglo-Boar War (1899–1902), the British operated concentration camps in the South African Republic, Orange Free State, Natal, and the Cape Colony.
Elsabé Brits
Elsabé Brits has been closely involved in making The Story of Emily since 2017 and is still a content consultant for the project. She is also the author of a biography of Hobhouse, which was published in the UK in 2018: Emily Hobhouse: Feminist, Pacifist, Traitor? and in softback in 2019: Emily Hobhouse: Rebel Englishwoman.
