Emily Hobhouse and the Boer War, Pt. 1

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. When I
was working on our episode on the Women's March Obratoria,
South Africa not long ago, I kept finding references to

(00:23):
Emily Hobhouse. Emily Hobhouse was a pacifist and a humanitarian.
She's best known for her work exposing terrible conditions at
concentration camps that Britain established in South Africa during the
Anglo Boer War, and trying to help the people who
were being held in those camps, who were predominantly bores.

(00:45):
At the time, a lot of people in Britain saw
her as a trader because in their minds, she was
trying to help the enemy, although to be clear, the
vast majority of people she was trying to help here
were civilian women and children. Her work continued into an
to World War One, and she became a very vocal
pacifist and tried to arrange relief efforts for children and

(01:06):
continental Europe after World War One. Although the perceptions of
Emily Hobhouse eventually shifted, at least somewhat in the UK.
She's still far better known in South Africa and her
work there had some complexities. There's a complicated legacy with
it today. So this episode grew into an accidental two parter.

(01:26):
Today we will be talking about hobhouses earlier life up
through the Border War, which will also here with other
slightly different pronunciations that also vary with people's accents. Just
as a note, in part two of this episode will
be talking about the years after that war and then
up through and after World War One. So Emily Hobhouse

(01:48):
was born April ninth, eighteen sixty in St Eve in
eastern Cornwall. St Eve is not to be confused with
St Ives, which is in western Cornwall on the coast.
Her father was Reginald Hobhouse, Anglican priest and Archdeacon of Bodman.
Her mother, Caroline Trelawny, was the daughter of a baronet.
Although slavery in the slave trade had been abolished in

(02:10):
the UK before Emily was born, some of the family's
money had been earned through the slave trade in earlier generations.
That was something Emily knew about when she was growing up.
Emily had five surviving siblings. They were Caroline known as Carrie, Blanche,
Maud Alfred, and Leonard, and as was common at the time,
the girls had a separate education from the boys. Emily's

(02:33):
brothers went to prestigious schools, and Leonard in particular made
a name for himself at Oxford, but Emily and her
sisters had governesses and then finishing schools, and that was
focused mainly on how to keep a household and be
a good wife. Hobhouse later said, quote, I envied the
boys the special tutors. They had people whose brains they

(02:54):
had the right to pick, of whom they might ask questions,
and never had anyone to cut my mental teeth upon.
In addition to her dissatisfaction with her education, Emily experienced
a series of tragedies. Beginning when she was sixteen. Her
sister Blanche developed an illness, probably tuberculosis, and the family

(03:14):
went to Lose France with the hope that the climate
there would help her recover, but it did not. She
died in eighteen seventy six at the age of nineteen.
The trip had drained the family's financial resources, and once
they got back to Cornwall, there wasn't enough money to
send Emily back to finishing school. She really hadn't been
satisfied with her education there, but once she was stuck

(03:37):
at home, her relationship with her father became increasingly contentious.
She was growing into her own person, with her own
thoughts and opinions, and they were often in conflict with his. So,
for example, she did a lot of work in their community.
She would visit the poor and the sick, and that
included people whose beliefs who didn't strictly conform to the

(03:57):
Anglican Church. Her five other thought religious dissidents should be shunned,
but she kept visiting them nonetheless. Emily's mother died of
a brain tumor in eighteen eighty when Emily was twenty.
By that point, Emily's sister Carrie was married and their
brothers were away. Leonard was at Oxford and Alfred had
moved to New Zealand, so that minute was up to

(04:20):
Emily and Maud to look after their aging father. Maud
got married in eighteen eighty nine to a man who
wasn't seen as the best match for her, leading to
some speculation that she was mostly just trying to get
out of the house. That left Emily, who was the
youngest Hobhouse daughter, in the role of both housekeeper and
caregiver to her father. She wanted to get married and

(04:42):
to have children, and she did have some suitors, but
her father was opposed to the idea of her marrying.
He of course knew that if she got married she
would not have as much time or attention for him.
While they had servants to take care of some of
that day to day work, she found her life at
home really difficult and confining. Her major outlet continued to
be working in the community, so teaching Sunday school and

(05:04):
establishing a library, trying to help poor people with everything
from getting them food and closed to testifying on their
behalf in court. Reginald Hubhouse died in a few months
before Emily's thirty fifth birthday. Within weeks, she took her
inheritance of fifty pounds sterling and left St Eve. She

(05:25):
spent time in London with relatives, but after six years
living at the rectory with her father, she really just
wanted to find something else to do with her life,
something with both adventure and meaning. She knew that mine
workers from Cornwall had immigrated to the United States and
that conditions in the mining camps could be difficult, so
in the summer of eighteen nine she left Cornwall for Minnesota.

(05:49):
She wound up in the mining town of Virginia, Minnesota,
where it turned out there weren't that many mine workers
who were actually from Cornwall. The mining industry there wasn't
particularly stay so minds tended to close or change hands
pretty often, and most of the Cornish miners who had
immigrated there had also moved on when their minds had closed.

(06:09):
Immigrants from other areas had moved in when new minds
opened up, so hot House stayed on, even though that
wasn't original plan was to work with people from Cornwall,
and she was working with a different group. She worked
on a variety of social programs. She established a library,
she taught people to read. She discovered that the hospital
had a dentist but not a doctor, so she did

(06:31):
wish she could to help care for patients. She taught
Sunday school, and she went out to the mining camps
to preach to the workers, which displeased Episcopal minister James McGonagall,
who thought that that was not appropriate for a woman
to do. She had other disputes with church leaders as well.
Like the mine workers day off was Sunday, so she
thought the library should be open on Sunday so they

(06:54):
could use it. But a lot of the local clergy
thought that the library should be closed on Sunday obviously
because it was Sunday. Although the mine workers seemed to
have generally appreciated hobhouses help, not all of her efforts
were successful. She tried to start a temperance program, and
while some of the miners signed temperance pledges, saloons were

(07:15):
everywhere and a lot of people just wanted it to
stay that way. While living in Minnesota, Emily Hobhouse fell
in love with John Carr Jackson. They had met previously
when they've been staying in the same boarding house, and
since then he had started a business. He had also
been elected mayor of Virginia and was talking about running
for Congress. Eventually, they became engaged and they decided to

(07:38):
move to Mexico. Their plan was for Emily to travel
to Mexico first and then John would join later. He
was having some financial difficulties and he needed to get
his money in order. When Emily got to Mexico, she
bought a farm, one that grew things like coffee, bananas,
and vanilla, and she had a house bill where she
and John would live. It was in a location, so

(08:00):
she bought this property without seeing it, and she never
visited it. She spent part of eight six waiting for
John to join her, but back in the United States,
John's businesses completely collapsed. He and Emily kept making plans
to reunite, and she kept her wedding dress with her.
As each of them traveled, their plans kept falling through,

(08:22):
though they did see each other again at least once.
She went to England to visit family in eighteen seven
and he met up with her there. They never got married,
though in the end, Emily lost the farm as well
as the money that she had spent securing a government
contract for John to provide meat to Mexico City, and

(08:42):
her relationship with John eventually ended. It's not totally clear
why they never married, but it seems like he was
financially incompetent at best, and at worst trying to take
advantage of her financially by Hobhouse was back in London,
staying with her aunt and uncle, Lord Arthur and Lady
Mary Hobhouse. She was very close to both of them,

(09:03):
and in a lot of ways they were like parents
to her. She kept doing work in the community, really
focusing on at risk women and children. In nineteen hundred
she published an article in the Economic Journal that was
titled dust Women. It was about women who physically sorted
household garbage. They got paid ten to fifteen shillings a week.
They were called dust women because this work was so

(09:25):
dirty and dusty. More communities were starting to use things
like incinerators to deal with their garbage, and social reformers
were arguing that this garbage sorting was not a healthy
job for women to do. They were arguing that this
work should be abolished. So hop House documented the workers
pay and working conditions, how those conditions could be improved,

(09:47):
and whether the women actually had other options for work
if this job went away. This had some common themes
to her work in South Africa during the Second Anglo
Boer War, which we were going to get to after
a sponsor break. We talked a bit about the development

(10:12):
of the British and Dutch presence and what's now South
Africa and that recent episode on the women's March to Pretoria,
and it's relevant here as well, so to briefly recap.
Britain and the Netherlands established forts and colonies and parts
of South Africa starting in the seventeenth century, and then
Britain took control of the region during the Napoleonic Wars.

(10:35):
There were immediate tensions between the British and the Boors.
That's a term that comes from a Dutch word for farmer,
but had come to describe people who were living in
South Africa and had Dutch, German or Hugueno ancestry. As
more British people arrived in South Africa and British officials
increased their control over the region, many Boors started moving

(10:57):
north and east in what came to be known as
the Great Trek. This migration peaked between eighteen thirty five
and eighteen forty one, but it continued into the eighteen fifties.
This wasn't simply a move north to establish new settlements
and get away from British control. There were multiple incredibly
violent conflicts with the local peoples and kingdoms, including the

(11:18):
Zulu and the Bell. The Boors established what came to
be known as the Boer Republics, and these coalesced into
the South African Republic. Also called the trans Ball and
the Orange Free State. These were initially independent and self governing,
but Britain continued to expand its presence farther into South Africa,

(11:38):
and then when diamonds were discovered in the Transpall, Britain
unsurprisingly annexed it. All this fed into the First Boer War,
which was also called the First War of Independence or
the First transpal War of Independence from that perspective, that
started in eighteen eighty This war ended in a Boer
victory in eighteen eighty one. The South African Public was

(12:00):
designated as a British suzerainty, with Britain in charge of
things like international affairs and relationships with the local African
nations and kingdoms, but beyond that the republic was self governing.
This did not put an end to the tensions between
the British and the Borer republics, though, especially after gold
was discovered in the Transfall in eighteen eighties six. This time,

(12:23):
Britain didn't directly annex this territory, but a lot of
newcomers started flocking to the area, and that led to
disputes between the Boers and eight Landers or foreigners, most
of whom were British. Tensions escalated between these groups of
people and between the Borer leadership of the republics and
British officials. It was like a local and more colonial

(12:46):
slash national level that was disputes were going on. A
peace conference held in the Orange Free State capital of
bloom Fontaine in May and June of was unsuccessful at
resolving all of this, and the Second or War, also
called the Second Anglo bar War, the South African War,
or the Second War of Independence, started in October of

(13:07):
eighteen Wars are, of course, incredibly complex, so this was
just a sketchy overview. For the first few months of
this war, things in South Africa progressed through pretty conventional fighting.
A string of Boer victories in December of eighteen ninety
nine was nicknamed Black Week in the British press. This

(13:28):
marked a huge wave of enlistments into the military as
people in the British Empire wanted to turn the tide
of the war. In February of nineteen hundred, British Field
Marshal Lord Frederick Roberts arrived in South Africa with reinforcements.
Over the course of the war, troops from all over
the British Empire served in South Africa, including from Australia, Canada,

(13:51):
and New Zealand. India was also British territory, and Indians
living in South Africa established the Natal Volunteer Ambulance Corps
that was founded by Bajandas Gandhi. They formed that to
act as stretcher bearers for the British troops. Soon British
forces in South Africa vastly outnumbered the Boer fighting force.

(14:11):
Over the course of the war, there were more than
five hundred thousand men on the British side and only
about forty five thousand for the Boers. Each side also
recruited people from the local African population or pressed them
into service, although those numbers are as you can imagine,
not as clear. On March thirteenth, the newly bolstered British

(14:32):
forces occupied Bloomfonteine, and two days later Lord Roberts announced
that any Boers who stopped fighting and signed a loyalty
oath would be free to return to their farms. More
than ten thousand people did so, and the British classified
them as protected Burghers. They were also known as hands uppers.
In May, Britain annexed the Orange Free State, renaming it

(14:55):
Orange of A Colony. Then in June written occupied the
transpaal Ca Bital of Pretoria. Understandably, after occupying both of
these capital cities and annexing the Orange Free State, Britain
thought it had essentially won the war, but soon Boer
forces started a campaign of guerrilla warfare, including attacking railroad

(15:16):
and telegraph lines. On June sixteenth, Lord Roberts announced what
came to be known as a scorched earth policy, so
if railroads or telegraph lines were attacked, British forces would
burn nearby farms and retaliation. The last major Boer force
was defeated in August of nineteen hundred and by September

(15:36):
Britain had annexed the transvol but guerrilla warfare was still ongoing.
In November, Lord Roberts resigned due to illness, and he
was replaced by Herbert Kitchener, First Earl Kitchener, who escalated
roberts scorched earth policy. This included indiscriminately burning farms and
homes and killing and seizing livestock even when there had

(15:58):
been no attacks on the infrastructure, or to purportedly justify it.
This scorched earth policy meant that there were a lot
of Boer civilians who suddenly had nowhere to live. Most
of them were women and children. Britain had already established
refugee camps to house people who had fled from their
homes because of the fighting, or who had surrendered and

(16:20):
couldn't return to their farms, and at this point they
became concentration camps where Boer families were taken by force,
sometimes because their farm had been burned, sometimes under the
idea that the men in their lives might lay down
their arms if they knew their families were in one
of these camps. On December twenty, Kitchener also instituted a

(16:41):
policy that Boers who surrendered would be placed in camps
along with these families. When Emily Hobhouse traveled to South
Africa during the Boer War, it was to investigate conditions
in these camps and to deliver aid to the people
in them. Getting to that part of the story, though,
acquires us to rewind a bit to what she was

(17:02):
doing from the beginning of the war. Yeah. I initially
tried to just tell those stories in Tandemen. I felt
like it was confusing in an audio format, so to
go back to the start of the war from Emily's perspective.
Shortly after the war started, people in Britain who were
opposed to it established the South African Conciliation Committee, and

(17:23):
its purpose was to try to find some kind of
peaceful resolution to the conflicts between the British and the Boers.
Emily Hobhouse was involved from this from the beginning and
was named the committee's secretary. Hobhouse thought women had a
crucial role to play in the anti war movement. She
started organizing anti war activity out of her flat, including

(17:44):
helping the committee plan a mass meeting to be held
at Queen's Hall in London on June nine hundred thousands
of women attended the meeting and they passed a set
of four resolutions condemning the war, protesting attempts to silent
criticisms of government policy, protesting quote against any settlement which
involves the extinction by force of two republics whose inhabitants

(18:08):
allied to us by blood and religion, cling as passionately
to their separate nationality and flag as we do ours,
and expressing sympathy with the women of Transvaal and the
Orange Free State. This last resolution asked these women to
remember that thousands of English women quote are filled with
profound sorrow at the thought of their suffering and with

(18:30):
deep regret of the action of their own government. Because
of this work and her vocal opposition to the war,
Emily Hobhouse was harassed and criticized. Friends who supported the
war started cutting ties with her, and as she found
herself cut off from a lot of her usual social circle,
she decided there was really nothing stopping her from going

(18:51):
to South Africa herself to investigate what was going on
and to deliver supplies and relief. Virtually all of her
family and friends that she was still on speaking terms
with uh tried to talk her out of it, but
Hobhouse established the South Africa Women and Children Distress Fund
to raise money for things like food and clothing. She

(19:12):
also started studying Boer Dutch, which was what people called
the language that would develop into Afrikaans. She also practiced
the language with other passengers who spoke it as she
traveled to South Africa by ship. She arrived there in
late December of nineteen hundred. While Hobhouse was on the
way to South Africa, Lord Kitchener issued another order which

(19:34):
separated the Boer women who were placed in these camps
into two groups. The wives and families of Burghers who
had surrendered were classified as refugees, and the women whose
husbands or other male family members were still fighting were undesirables.
Refugees were supposed to get preferential treatment and pretty much everything.

(19:54):
So for example, according to notebooks that Hobhouse kept while
she was in South Africa, undesirables got smaller amounts of
various rations, like they received one pound of meat twice
a week, while refugees got three quarters of a pound
of meat every day. We're going to get into Hobhouses
time in South Africa during the war, after a pause

(20:16):
for a sponsor break, when Emily Hobhouse arrived in Cape
Colony in December of her plan was to buy and
distribute relief supplies. She had brought some letters of introduction

(20:36):
with her, but she was worried about whether she was
actually up to the kind of work she was about
to do. She had done, you know, community work, she
had taken that trip to Minnesota, but at this point
she was a single, forty year old woman in a
foreign country who was going to have to convince military
leaders to give her access to concentration camps in a
region that was at war. She also knew that this

(20:59):
is going to be hard work, both emotionally and physically.
She had a heart condition that affected her for most
of her life. She started buying clothing and food to
take to the camps, but quickly realized that everything was
more expensive than it had been at home. The money
that she had raised through the South Africa Women and
Children Distress Fund did not go nearly as far as

(21:19):
she wanted, but even so, when she wrote to her
brother about it, she said she had six tons each
of clothing and food. She sounded disappointed in this, not pleased,
since the amount only filled about half a train car.
Haveb House negotiated with various military officials to try to
get permission to visit the camps, and she finally got

(21:40):
a telegram from Lord Kitchener that granted permission to do it,
but only to go as far north as bloom Fontaine,
preferably without taking a boorer woman with her. This is
a disappointment to her, both because there were camps north
of bloom Fontain that she wanted to go to and
also because she had planned to travel with a Boer

(22:01):
woman to interpret in case she turned out to need
that also just to have company, Hibhouse carried this telegram
with her in case she ran into any problems, and
then she went to bloom Fontein on a troop train
on January. Conditions at the camp for boars in bloom
Fontaine were terrible when she got there. It housed about

(22:24):
two thousand women, nine children, and a few men who
had surrendered. There weren't enough candles, so the few that
the camp did have were saved to provide some light
for people who were caring for the seriously ill. The
tents were tremendously overcrowded, and if a person died, their
body just lay there in the tent until it could
be buried. This was demoralizing and de humanizing, and it

(22:48):
also caused huge problems with flies and odors, especially because
this was the summer. There was a herd of cows,
but they were so underfed that they were barely producing
any milk for the camp. There wasn't enough fuel to
cook or to boil water, and two buckets of water
hauled from a river was supposed to last eight people.

(23:09):
Throughout an entire day with that water, which was again
from a river, not very clean, that was supposed to
be used for everything cooking and cleaning and hygiene. And
then in terms of hygiene there was no soap. Combined
with a lack of clean water and the serious overcrowding,
this meant diseases spread really quickly. Regarding that lack of soap,

(23:31):
Hubhouse wrote, quote, this seems to have been due to
a careless order from headquarters with regards to the rations,
and men don't think of these things unless it is
suggested to them. They simply say how dirty these people are.
As a side note, At various points in her writing,
Hobhouse makes pretty broad descriptions about the men she's dealing

(23:51):
with who are making all these decisions. At one point,
she wrote about how the military just had no plan
for clothing the people who were in the camps, many
of whom had arrived at the camps with nothing because
that same military had also burned down their homes. She wrote,
quote crass male ignorance, stupidity, helplessness, and muddling. I rub

(24:14):
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 but 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. I

(24:34):
feel like that could be applied to a lot of
people in a lot of situations. Um Hobhouse talked to
the women and children at this camp and recorded their
stories as she studied the conditions there. She also distributed
food and clothing, and she did other things that she
just thought needed to be done, like on her first day,
a snake sometimes described specifically as a puff adder, crawled

(24:57):
into a tent where she was talking with some women
and children, and everyone else fled. She killed the snake
with her parasol because she quote could not bear to
think the things should be at large in a community
mostly sleeping on the ground. There's more than one story
from her life about Emily Hobhouse killing a snake with
her parasol as everybody else screamed it right away. Hobhouse

(25:20):
also visited other Boer camps, including ones farther north than
Bloemfontaine and it's not totally clear how or whether she
got permission to do that, contrary to what Lord Kitchener
had told her she could do. At some of these camps,
the conditions weren't quite as dire like they weren't as overcrowded,
and maybe they had water that was piped in from

(25:41):
a spring instead of being hauled from a river and buckets.
But in others it was worse, like tents that weren't
just overcrowded, they were also leaky, or food that wasn't
just in short supply, but was also infested with maggots.
Sometimes she also returned to a camp that she had
already visited to find that the conditions had deteriorated while

(26:03):
she was away, that the situation becoming even dirtier and
more overcrowded. She also saw people who were in desperate
need and weren't in a camp, like a group of
about six hundred women and children that she saw stranded
at a train station who were still there when she
passed back through roughly ten days later. Hobhouse spoke very

(26:25):
stridently to officers in charge about the conditions at these camps,
which were not just unpleasant, they were deadly illnesses like
typhoid and measles were just rampant. At one point, an
officer and Kimberly refused to let her go back to
bloom Fontaine, telling her she could go to a town
that was outside of the former Boor republics, or she

(26:47):
could go back to Cape Town. Like not interested in
letting her go back to somewhere she might keep causing trouble,
so she wound up going back to Cape Town used
that opportunity to get more supplies before returning back to
the Boer camps again. Something that she did not do
was to investigate or visit what we're known as native camps,
Native being a term used to describe black people in

(27:10):
South Africa. There were some black people in the Boer camps,
mostly household servants that Boers had brought with them, but
there were also separate camps for black people who had
been displaced through the war and that scorched Earth policy,
whether the farm they had been working on had been
destroyed or for some other reason. Most black people were

(27:30):
transported to or arrived in these camps in mid nineteen
o one or later. Overall, there's been way less research
into these camps than into the camps for boarders, and
most of that research has been done only in more
recent years. But in general these camps had even fewer
resources and less organization and worse conditions than the Boer

(27:51):
camps did. There were also more men at these camps
than at the Boer camps, since they tended to include
farm workers and in some case those entire villages that
had been captured or displaced. Hobhouse knew these other camps existed,
and she thought they probably also needed help. She tried
to get other organizations to send representatives to South Africa

(28:13):
to do their own investigation, organizations that she thought might
already have an interest in the welfare of the black population,
like the Quakers and the Aborigines Protection Society that was
an international organization focused on the rights and welfare of
indigenous and Aboriginal peoples throughout the British Empire. Her report
back to the South Africa Women and Children Distress Fund

(28:37):
also contained multiple references to the native camps and their
need for help, at one point saying quote, I understand
the death rate in the one at Bloomfontein to be
very high, and so also in other places, but I
cannot possibly pay any attention to them myself. This report
doesn't say why she could not possibly pay attention to

(28:59):
them herself. One possible reason is that she had raised
this money specifically to help borer women and children, and
she didn't think she could use it for another purpose.
Although some of the people in these so called native
camps may have spoken some boor Dutch, most of them
were more likely to speak a Bantu language, which hop
House didn't speak and also wouldn't have had as many

(29:19):
resources for learning. Another possibility is that she thought focusing
her attention and resources on black people might alienate the
borer women whose trust she was trying to gain, or
that they might find it antagonizing, or that the people
whose financial support she was relying on to do this
work might see it that way. Although hob houses own

(29:40):
values included racial equality, if this was her rationale, she
was basically appeasing racists. Whatever her exact reasoning or how
she felt about it, this decision had multiple long term effects.
One was at the concentration camps for black people did
not get nearly the attention that the ones for boers
did not in terms of relief during the war, and

(30:03):
not in terms of documentation and historical focus later on.
Over the course of the war, there were at least
fifty camps for Boers and at least sixty four for
Black Africans, and in total about two hundred eighty five
thousand people were held at these two sets of camps.
About fifty five thousand of them died, about thirty thousand

(30:27):
of them were white, and about five thousand of them
were black. Most of these deaths were among children, and
most of them were due to disease. For comparison, there
were a little more than twenty one thousand deaths among
British soldiers during the war, two thirds of those from disease,
and just under ten thousand military deaths among the Boers.

(30:48):
Both the British and the Boers recruited black people to
do everything from manual labor to active combat, including forcing
some of them into service. Their death toll is not clear,
but even with that in mind, more people died in
these camps than were killed in combat during the Second
Anglo Boer War. Emily Hobhouse advocated for changes and improvements

(31:11):
at the Boer camps while she was in South Africa,
things like getting a train boiler and using that to
boil the water for the whole camp, assigning a matron
to each camp who spoke both English and door Dutch,
establishing schools for the children, reducing overcrowding, and providing more food, water,
and soap, but a lot of the time officials just

(31:33):
dismissed her. Eventually, she felt like she had done everything
she could in South Africa and that to get to
the root of this problem she would have to go
back to England to talk to government and military leaders there,
and to publish uncensored accounts of what she had seen.
People in Britain were at least somewhat aware of what
was happening in South Africa, although a lot of correspondents

(31:55):
out of South Africa had been censored. Newspapers had reported
on the scorched earth policy. It had not caused a
lot of outcry in Britain, though some people thought it
was justified since British troops sometimes found weapons on Boer
farms and some Boers who signed loyalty oaths ultimately resumed fighting.

(32:15):
But by early nineteen oh one, word was starting to
spread about how dire the situation was. On February eighteenth,
Liberal MP David Lloyd George gave a speech before the
House of Commons and which he quoted a Lieutenant Morrison
is saying, quote, the country is like Scotland, and we
moved from valley to valley, lifting cattle and sheep, burning

(32:35):
and looting and turning out women and children who weep
in despair beside the ruin of their once beautiful homes.
It was the first touch of Kitchener's iron hand, and
often a terrible thing to witness. And I do not
know that I want to see another trip of this sort.
Emily Hobhouse arrived back in England a little over three

(32:56):
months after that, on nineteen o one. In June, she
issued her report of a visit to the camps of
women and children in the Cape and Orange River colonies.
This report detailed what she had observed in the camps
and her recommendations that someone be tasked with doing something
similar for the camps for black people. Although the people

(33:17):
have House was talking about were civilians, almost all of
them women and children, she was branded as pro boer.
People called her hysterical and biased. She tried to arrange
meetings and public addresses to tell people more about what
she had found, but again and again venues canceled her
bookings or local authorities refused to give her permission to speak.

(33:40):
When she did manage to put together a speaking to her,
she was harassed, including people throwing vegetables at her. At
the same time, though, the government also faced increasing criticism
about what she reported, and some government leaders who spoke
to her were on her side. Liberal Party leader Sir
Henry Campbell Bannerman, for ample, used the phrase quote methods

(34:02):
of barbarism to describe the things that Hobhouse had told him.
Now that term became pretty tightly connected to Britain's actions
during this war. The British government tasked Milicent Fawcett with
leading a commission of women to go to South Africa
and investigate. Although Fawcett was a suffragist and a campaigner

(34:24):
for women's rights, she generally supported the government and the war,
so she was seen as more moderate than Emily Hobhouse
and kind of a better choice from the government's perspective
of somebody to send down there. The Fawcett Commission confirmed
a lot of what Pobhouse had reported about things like
a lack of food and clean water, and it made

(34:45):
a lot of recommendations for things like providing more fuel
and more food and including having more fruits and vegetables
available things like that. Like Hobhouse, the Faucet Commission did
not visit or investigate the camps for black people at all,
and when Hobhouse realized this, she once again tried to
find someone else to do it, but it does not

(35:06):
appear that effort was successful. Emily Hobhouse tried to return
to the Boer camps in the fall of nineteen oh one.
She knew that British authorities were keeping an eye on
her and would not approve of this trip, so she
kept her travel plans a secret, but word got out
while she was on the way to South Africa. When
her ship got to Cape Town, authorities refused to let

(35:28):
her disembark until another ship was ready to depart for England.
Then she was restrained with her own shawl and physically
carried from one ship to the other. Her response to
the soldiers who forcibly removed her was this quote, you
are disgracing your uniforms by obeying such an order. A
higher law forbids you. The laws of God and humanity

(35:52):
forbid you. At this point, In addition to the heart
condition that we mentioned earlier, Hobhouse was experiencing back pain
and near ritus. She had also fallen and injured her
hip on the voyage to South Africa. This is all
physically very difficult. The ship that she was sent back
to Britain on was a troop transport, and the only

(36:12):
other women on board were officers wives, who all refused
to speak to her. The voyage took more than twenty
days in each direction, and this time it was forty
eight days total, and she had no way to wash
her clothes that entire time. Her family also didn't know
what had happened to her. A friend in Cape Town

(36:33):
sent a coded telegram to her relatives, which her brother
Leonard eventually decoded to learn that she had been deported.
Lord Alfred Milner, High Commissioner for South Africa and Governor
of the Cape Colony, took over administration of the camps
in November of nineteen o one. On December fifteenth, Lord
Kitchener issued an order that women and children not be

(36:56):
transported to the camps anymore. Together with the set commissions changes,
this seems to have reduced the death rate at the camps,
at least in the camps for Boers. The Boers surrendered
in late May of nineteen o two, and the war
officially ended with the Treaty of Fanniging on May thirty
one of that year. The two Boer republics were placed

(37:18):
under British authority, but they did retain a lot of autonomy.
This is where we're ending this episode, and we will
talk about Emily Hobhouse's life after the war next time.
This is kind of a logical stopping point, especially because
that part of her work is the thing that most
people like. That's the thing that she's become more associated with,

(37:38):
But she had a whole, whole other part of her
work that's going to follow. Do you have listener mail
for us? This is from Teddy I do. Teddy has
titled this email. I went to a Shaker school, and
Teddy wrote, Hi, Tracy and Holly. I wanted to write
in after the episode on Rebecca Cox Jackson because I
have a close history with the Akers. I went to

(38:01):
the high school that's currently occupying three of the families
that's building groups of the Mount Lebanon Shaker village. When
the Lebanon Shakers were low on numbers, they started a
boy's school that's still continuing today. I went to class
and rooms that used to be Shaker workshops and homes,
and I especially love the meeting house building, which is
now the school's library. I'll never forget the words two

(38:23):
simple gifts, and I remember all sorts of morbid rumors
about them, some real, like one building was used as
a morgue and body storage if a brother or sister
died in the winter and the ground was too frozen
to dig a grave, and probably some not true, like
that a building was haunted by the ghosts of a
baby secretly born to a Shaker sister and hidden in

(38:44):
the walls. Thank you for educating me about Rebecca and
her mission. I've always been fascinated by the visions and
gifts that Shakers experience and how they influenced the leadership
of the group. Their access to the divine was much
more egalitarian than in other contemporary groups. Ifs could come
to any person, regardless of gender, age, or class, come
to appreciate their worldview a lot more than I would

(39:06):
have predicted when I was first introduced as a ninth grader.
I'm attaching some pictures of my kittie persephone, including one
of her extra toes she's got twenty six and a
half and her cousin Earl Gray, sticking his tongue out.
Thanks so much, Teddy. Thank you Teddy for this email
and also for the cat pictures. I also love cat pictures. Um. Also,

(39:28):
you know, having two cats with extra toes, I love
the extra toes. Also, they're not extra, they're the perfect number. Yes,
um Onyx in particular has a very large, perfect number
of toes on each foot her front paws. In particular,

(39:48):
clipping the nails is always just the whole whole thing
set aside a month. Um. Fortunately they're both really good
about like that. We did start doing nail clipping like
as soon as we got them, and they are both
pretty good about it. So anyway, Teddy, thank you for
that email and the adorable pictures. You'd like to write

(40:10):
to us about this or any other podcast or history
podcasts at I heart radio dot com. We're also on
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to our show on the iHeart Radio app and wherever
else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed

(40:33):
in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Emily Hobhouse and the Boer War, Pt. 1