Emily Hobhouse and the First World War, Pt. 2

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. This is
part two of our episode on Emily Hobhouse, and in
part one we talked about her early life. We talked

(00:24):
about the basic overview of the Second Anglo Boer War
also called the Second War of Independence from the Borer perspective.
We talked about her work investigating concentration camps where wars
being held during the war and her efforts to bring
relief and improve those conditions in those camps. Um that

(00:46):
is the work that she is most known for today,
especially outside of South Africa. But her work in South
Africa continued after the war was over, and her work
as a humanitarian and a peace activist continued during an
hour after World War Once. Let's what we're talking about today.
I feel like a person who didn't listen to part
one is probably not going to be totally lost. But

(01:08):
there's like a lot of stuff in there that we're
not really gonna go over again. You will miss some context.
For example, Emily hobhouses work in South Africa during the
Second Boer War led to her being deeply reviled by
many British authorities there and by people back in Britain.
Although there were some people who saw the conditions that

(01:30):
she had exposed as a moral failure of the British
Empire which urgently needed to be corrected, others branded her
as a trader. Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener, who replaced Lord
Frederick Roberts as Commander in Chief of the British forces
during the war, called her that bloody woman. In the
spring of nineteen o two, Hobhouse went to France to

(01:52):
try to recover from the time she had spent in
South Africa, and then also that time she had tried
to go back and sent back to Britain immediately. Her
work and that trip had been just physically and psychologically grueling.
She also had a heart condition. As she recuperated in France,
she also worked on a book called The Brunt of

(02:14):
the War and Where It Fell, which came out later
in nineteen o two. This book contained firsthand accounts from
the concentration camps for Boors which people dictated to her
while she was there. A lot of the women in
the camps didn't know how to write, and the army
heavily censored the letters of those who did so. This

(02:35):
became one of the primary historical sources for Boer accounts
of the camps. Hobhouse heard the announcement that the war
was over while she was still in France. Under the
Treaty of Frainaging signed on May thirty one of nineteen
o two, the Boar Republic became British territory, but with
the promise that they would become self governing. The treaty

(02:56):
also included three million pounds sterling to fund re construction
efforts and another three million pounds in interest free loans. Overwhelmingly,
the terms of this treaty applied to the Boer population
of South Africa, in other words, white people, primarily of
Dutch ancestry. They did not apply to the black population

(03:18):
of the region or to any other people of color,
so that relief money was relief money for white people.
The treaty specified that voting rights for black people would
not even be discussed in this area until after the
former South African Republic also called the Transpaal and the
Orange Free State had become self governing. So it was

(03:39):
like these two colonial groups had a war with each
other in someone else's territory, and then in the treaty
that ended that war not only did not address but
disenfranchised the local population who had not asked for this
at all. In nineteen o three, Hobhouse returned to South
Africa to continue her humanitarian word. She had again raised

(04:01):
money to buy food and supplies to deliver to the
Boor people who had been affected by the war and
the scorched Earth policy. As we discussed in Part one,
many of the people who were held in concentration camps
either went there or were forced there after the British
military had burned down their homes and farms. So hop
House wanted to see how these people were faring during

(04:22):
the post war reconstruction. She talked to one Boer family
after another who was really struggling. Hunger was widespread. The
people she talked to said that they had not seen
any of that relief money at all. Part of this
was because the way the money was being apportioned. People
who had remained loyal to Britain throughout the war and

(04:45):
Boor men who had surrendered and signed loyalty oaths, who
were also known as hands uppers, they were given priority.
People who had continued to fight were farther down the list,
and bitter enders, or the people who had fought to
the better end, they were last aside from that hierarchy
and who was getting relief, though, Hobhouse thought corruption and

(05:06):
waste were keeping these funds from getting to the people
who needed them. Hobhouse distributed as much food and as
many supplies as she could, but she also just did
not see a way for the Boers to recover from
the effects of the scorched earth policy that had led
to the destruction of so many homes and farms. In

(05:26):
addition to their homes being burned down, people's animals had
been confiscated or killed, including the teams that they would
normally use to plow, so farmers had no way to
start planting again and to get back on their feet.
How about realized that it was critical for farmers to
get some crops into the ground. She thought maybe if
each district had a plowing team, that team could rotate

(05:51):
to through the farms to prepare the soil for planting,
rather than expecting every farm to find the money to
buy and feed its own team of animals. She thought
the reconstruction effort needed to include making sure every farm
family had what they needed to plow and plant for
the first couple of seasons after the war, after which

(06:13):
point they should be able to sustain themselves. So Emily
Hobhouse started raising money to buy teams of oxen that
could be shared among farmers to get the planting season started.
Since these animals were going to need to plow multiple
farms consecutively, she focused on the strongest, healthiest animals she
could find, and words started to spread about what she

(06:35):
was doing. In one account, she was at a cattle
auction and people wondered what in the world this middle
aged British woman was doing buying all of the best animals,
and when they realized that she was buying them for
this relief effort, they stopped bidding against her. Hobhouse strive
to get churches and other relief organizations and the colonial
government interested in this plowing program. She knew that she

(06:59):
couldn't stay in South Africa forever and she didn't want
it to fall apart without her there to oversee things.
But for the most part, British authorities still saw her
as a nuisance at best. They stridently denied her reports
of hunger and a lack of relief money in the
former Borer republics, and they denied the idea that relief

(07:20):
board responsible for distributing the money. We're doing anything wrong.
Newspapers called her plowing plant absurd and described her as hysterical.
Her response was this quote. To call a woman hysterical
because you have not the knowledge necessary to deny her
facts is the last refuge of the unmanly in the coward.

(07:43):
I always felt, when termed hysterical, that I had triumphed,
because it meant my arguments cannot be meant, nor my
statements denied. Hobhouse returned to Europe in late nineteen o three,
having spent about six months in South Africa. The plowing
teams were set to continue in her absence, and her
next project was an effort to establish educational systems for

(08:06):
Boer women and girls. Families needed more ways to earn money,
but a lot of jobs weren't considered appropriate for women
in Britain. For example, a woman might work as a
teacher or demand domestic service. Those were considered to be okay,
but a lot of Boer women did not have the
education that was required to teach, and in South Africa,

(08:27):
a lot of white people saw domestic service as black
women's work, so there was an element of racism in
the jobs people were willing to do. So hot House
transformed the South Africa Woman and Children Distress Fund into
the Boer Home Industries and Aid Society to raise money
to establish programs that would allow Boer women and girls

(08:48):
to earn money to support themselves and their families. At first,
she was focused on the idea of starting lace making schools,
and she spent some time in Belgium studying lace making.
But as she discussed her plans with other people, some
of them pointed out that lace was really a luxury
item and while it might be possible to export it,

(09:09):
the market for lace within South Africa was going to
be limited. So she traveled to Ireland to learn about
spinning and weaving. This would allow women and girls to
earn money, and it would also help people deal with
shortages of practical everyday goods like rugs and towels. She
started buying spinning wheels and having them shipped to South Africa.

(09:32):
She had also been keeping up a regular correspondence with
Yon Smutz who had been a general in the Boer
forces during the war, Smutz wrote Hobhouse a letter that
was extremely critical of the British government and of English
officials in South Africa. Smuts had never intended for this
letter to become public, but Hobhouse had it published. It

(09:52):
backed up a lot of what she had been saying. This, naturally, though,
upset Smooths deeply, and she apologized for her to him,
but she did not apologize for having published the letter.
In December of nineteen o four, as Hobhouse was planning
to return to South Africa and establish a spinning and
weaving school, her uncle, Lord Alfred Hobhouse died. This was

(10:16):
an enormous loss for Emily and for her aunt Mary.
Mary and Alfred had really been devoted to each other,
and Emily had been really close to both of them,
and a lot of ways they had been like parents
to her. Emily considered canceling her trip to stay with
her aunt, but Mary insisted that she'd go and we'll
get to what happened. After a sponsor break, Emily Hobhouse

(10:47):
left for South Africa again in early nineteen o five,
along with two other women, Adeline Derby, and Margaret Clark.
Clark was a twenty six year old Quaker who had
seen Hobhouse speak at a meeting a cup Bull of
years before, had found her really inspiring and just wanted
to assist her in her work, including going all the
way to South Africa. During their voyage to South Africa,

(11:10):
Hobhouse taught them spinning and weaving and other things associated
with those tasks, and how to speak boor Dutch, and
they she had to keep up with those lessons, even
though Margaret was really seasick. She was like, we were
on a schedule. We gotta be ready to go and
we get there. Once they got to South Africa, they
went to Philipolis in Orange River Colony, where a Jewish

(11:31):
merchant had offered them a house in a shop that
he wasn't using. They had help from two black servants
named Moses and Flora, as well as some assistances from
people in the Boer community, but still turning a disused
house and shop into a place they could live and
a functional weaving school was an enormous amount of work.
Margaret became exhausted and Emily was starting to feel the strain,

(11:55):
so she eventually wrote to her friend Constance Cluta in
Cape Colony to ask her to come and help as well.
This school opened on March thirteenth, nineteen oh five, with
room four thirteen students, and within two weeks all those
slots were filled. Soon Hobhouse was working on getting more
equipment so they could teach more students, and she was
getting requests from other towns to start schools there. But

(12:19):
even when things seem to be going pretty well, they
were facing a lot of hiccups, like a shipment of
hundreds of donated spinning wheels from Switzerland arrived broken and
they had to be repaired before they could be put
to use. She did, though, eventually get the school in
Philippola's established enough to turn her attention to opening up

(12:40):
a second school in Long Late. Over this period, Hobhouse
was starting to think about whether she should just move
to South Africa permanently. Each voyage between England and South
Africa typically took more than twenty days, and she was
finding it increasingly difficult to divide her time and attention
between the two places. She didn't want to make that

(13:01):
decision without seeing her aunt Mary again. But on May fourth,
nineteen o five, as she was planning to visit home,
she received word that Lady Mary Hobhouse had died, and
this was obviously another sorce of heartbreak for her. Emily
Hobhouse started to feel really lonely during this period of
her life. Adeline Darby had not really worked out at

(13:24):
the weaving school and she had gone back to Britain
once a replacement arrived for her. Margaret Clark eventually went
back to England as well, and Emily did have other
friends in South Africa, so she thought maybe having a
permanent home might help her feel more settled there. She
had a house built with the help of Jon Smooths,

(13:44):
but everything still just felt like a struggle. She made
another trip back to England, but without her aunt living there,
she just didn't feel like that was home anymore either.
In nineteen o seven, while back in Europe, Hobhouse travel
to Switzerland to personally thank the Swiss for their support
in the home industries project. Funding had primarily come from

(14:05):
the Bore Home Industries and Aid Society and from local
fundraising in South Africa, but the Swiss had been really
instrumental in providing spinning wheels, sending thousands of them, including
people's donated heirlooms. Before going back to South Africa, she
got a dog. This was a St. Bernard puppy that
she named Caro, which had been her nickname for her

(14:26):
old fiance, John Carr Jackson. She adored that dog, but
sadly she had him for less than a year. Not
long after she got back to South Africa, he got
sick and died. She never got another dog, but after that,
anytime she saw a person with a St. Bernard, she'd
stopped and she would talk to both the dog in
the person to make things worse. This all happened right

(14:50):
around the same time that another man that Hobhouse had
been interested in got married to someone else, so she
focused on her work. The gun a mint of South
Africa eventually got involved in setting up new spinning and
weaving schools, with at least twenty six schools established in
the first decade of the twentieth century. Eventually, oversight boards

(15:12):
for the schools were established in both the Transvaal and
the Orange Free State, and while they initially went to
Hobhouse for advice and guidance, she eventually became less involved
and less needed, so in October of nineteen o eight,
she once again left for England. The Orange Free State
was technically the Orange River College at that point, but
I feel like the Orange Free State is the name

(15:33):
that people associate most with it. She needed another project,
I mean that one that feels like a success for
the most part. I mean it was a success that
was focused again on on white people. But like she
had started these schools and now they were running themselves,
so she needed something else to do. She turned her
attention to the suffrage movement. She helped establish the People's

(15:54):
Suffrage Foundation, which advocated for universal adult suffrage. There were restrictions, Uh,
it wasn't even that like all men could vote. There
were property restrictions and things like that. So it was
a universal adult suffrage organization. Her direct involvement in this
organization was a little limited, though, because Hobhouse was spending

(16:16):
a lot of her time in Italy. The milder climate
there helped improve her health. She thought being in Italy
also gave her more opportunities to study lace making, and
she revived her plan to start a lace making school
in South Africa. This time, though she did not do
the physical work herself. She met Lucia Starace in Venice,

(16:37):
and Starace worked with Constance Clute and jan A Rude
to set up the school. Hobhouse never personally visited this school.
It wasn't a really remote location. She wasn't physically able
to make the trip. She was experiencing angina, which people
also say angela. She also had rheumatoid arthritis. She had
reached a point where she needed to be carried up

(16:58):
and down the steps to her apart meant she eventually
went to Florence for medical treatment, which she paid for
with a loan from Yon Smoots. Smooths thought this doctor
was really a quack, but hot House spelt like the
treatments helped, and it really it does seem like, even
if his treatments were suspect, she seems to have been
able to be more active and mobile for a while. Afterward.

(17:21):
Parliament passed the South Africa Act in nineteen o nine,
unifying Britain's colonies there by this point known as Cape Colony,
transval Natal and Orange River. This followed a national Convention
held in nineteen o seven and nineteen o eight, at
which all of the delegates were white. South Africa's black,
multi racial and Asian residents were completely excluded from the process.

(17:44):
Hobhouse had already witnessed racial segregation and discrimination in South Africa,
as we talked about in Part one. Her own work
was part of this. She had known about a separate
set of concentration camps for black people during the Second
Lowborer War, and she had tried to get somebody to
investigate and to bring relief to them, but she had

(18:05):
never visited them or tried to bring that relief herself.
Her work was focused on other white people. Similarly, her
post war work in South Africa was still focused on
the Boers, not on any people of color whose livelihoods
were also destroyed in the war. At the same time, though,
she did not agree with segregation or discrimination, and she

(18:28):
was just deeply disheartened by the sense that these two
groups of white people who had fought a war on
someone else's homeland, had now come together to form a
new government that excluded and subjugated the black, multi racial,
and Asian population. Hobhouse carried this feeling into her work
with sculptor Anton van Wow in the early nineteen teens.

(18:51):
He had been born in the Netherlands and had later
moved to South Africa, and he had been commissioned with
sculpting a monument to commemorate the women and children who
had died in concentrate Asian camps during the Boer War.
He worked on the statue in Rome, starting from something
Hobhouse had seen and recorded in the concentration camp in
spring Fontaine in nineteen o one. The monument is an

(19:12):
obelisk with a statue of two women holding a dying
child at the base. They went back and forth over
the statues design, but Hobhouse really did not feel that
he was up to the task, at one point writing
to Jon Smith's wife Easy in a letter quote, oh why,
oh why did they not put the thing into the
hands of Rodents and some really great sculptor. I don't

(19:34):
know why. It cracks me up so much that she
was like, obviously Rodent should have done this sculpture. She
also had some concerns about the monument itself and whether
it really was commemorating all of the women and children
who had died in the camps or only the white ones.
And another letter she asked, quote if this is really

(19:55):
a national monument provided by a national movement or only
a free state affair. In spite of her misgivings about
the inclusivity of the monument, Hobhouse traveled to South Africa
for its unveiling in nineteen thirteen. She also had misgivings
about the trip itself. She was worried that she wasn't
well enough to go. This concern turned out to be warranted.

(20:18):
Although she did make it to Cape Town, she was
too ill to make the journey to the monument's location
in Bloemfonteine. She had her speech translated and printed so
it could be distributed to people there, and Charles Fischart,
son of her late friend Caroline Fischart, read her remarks
at the unveiling. In this address, she talked about what

(20:38):
she had witnessed in the camps during the war and
how she had watched the sculpture being created, how she
had traveled to South Africa for the unveiling. Quote in
obedience to the solidarity of our womanhood and to those
nobler traditions of English life in which I was nurtured
and which, by long inheritance are mine. She described her

(20:59):
sympathy towards the people who had been held in the camps.
Both the survivors and those who had died, and she
cautioned the audience not to open the doors to tyranny
and selfishness, saying that in England leaders were still struggling
with this unlearned lesson. She went on to say, quote
does not justice bid us? Remember today, how many thousands

(21:21):
of the dark race perished also in concentration camps in
a chorl not theirs? Did they not thus redeem the past?
Was it not an instance of that community of interest which,
binding all in one, roots out racial animosity? And may
it not come about that the associations with this day

(21:41):
will change, merging into nobler thoughts as year by year
you celebrate the more inspiring rowen dog. We now inaugurate
the plea of Abraham Lincoln for the Black comes echoing
back to me. They will probably help you, in some
trying time to come to keep the jewel of liberty
in the family of freedom. While in Cape Town, Emily

(22:03):
met another figure whose legacy regarding races complicated, and that
was Mohandas Gandhi. We talked about how the system of
racial apartheid developed in South Africa and our prior episode
on the women's march to Pretoria, and how eventually Indian
was added to that system as a catch all term
for anybody from Southeast Asia. There were also laws and

(22:26):
policies that specifically applied to this community that we're developing
at this point. For example, Indian and Chinese people living
in Transvaal had to register, submit their fingerprints, and carry
paperwork at all times. People who had come to South
Africa from Asia on an indenture had to pay a

(22:47):
tax to stay in the country after their indenture ended.
The Supreme Court had also ruled that only Christian marriages
were legally recognized, something that disproportionately affected Asians, who were
more likely to be and do or Muslim. Gandhi was
trying to address all of this, and hob House heard
that he was planning a protest march to Pretoria for

(23:09):
New Year's Day nineteen fourteen. She sent him a telegram
advising him to hold the march while Parliament was in
session instead, Otherwise she thought it might just stoke people's
hostilities rather than spurring the government into action. Gandhi had
also been trying to meet with various government officials, including

(23:30):
Jan Smoots, who at this point was Secretary of the
Interior and Louis Botha, who was the Prime Minister. Gandhi
later credited Hobhouse was getting both A to finally agree
to having a meeting, and she also insisted to Spoots
that he include Indians and discussions of matters that affected them.

(23:50):
Hobhouse and Gandhi met in person when he came to
Cape Town, and he described being with her as spiritually uplifting.
He was there to wish her farewell when she parted
for England in March of nineteen fourteen, and they continued
to be friends and correspondents for the rest of her life.
That meeting was just a few months before the start
of World War One, which we will get to you

(24:11):
after a sponsor break. Emily Hobhouse's experience during the Second
Anglo War War led to her becoming an ardent pacifist.
Like she had always been against that war, she became

(24:32):
against all war. She was also opposed to what she
described as narrow nationalism, which she thought led to conflict
between nations at the start of World War One. She
wrote to Jan Smoots, who had been named Minister of
Defense obviously held a ton of different positions during his
lifetime she tried to convince him to keep South Africa

(24:54):
out of the war. This wasn't entirely his decision, since
South Africa was a British dem Indian, but she was
incredibly disappointed in him when Britain instructed South Africa to
invade German Southwest which is now Namibia and South Africa did.
This also prompted a failed uprising among the Boer population

(25:14):
of South Africa, who overall did not want to get
involved in another war. So soon Hubhouse wrote an anti
war open letter to the women of Europe which read,
in part quote, a hundred years ago men proclaimed they
fight as each country asserts that is fighting today to
secure the rights, the freedoms and the independence of all nations.

(25:36):
War failed to secure these objects, then can we reasonably
suppose it will do so now? Past podcast subject Jane
Adams invited Hobhouse to attend the International Women's Conference for
Peace and Freedom in nineteen fifteen. Although Hobhouse wrote the
foreword to the report of the conference proceeding, she did
not personally attend. She was worried about her health and

(25:59):
she all so didn't think she'd be able to secure
the necessary travel documents. To get from Rome to the
Hague and back. Hobhouses anti war advocacy had also caught
the attention of authorities and she was being kept under surveillance.
In spite of that, when she was offered a job
in Amsterdam working for the International Committee of Women for

(26:20):
Permanent Peace, she managed to get back into England undetected
so that she could have her travel documents updated. She
traveled to Amsterdam by a burn Switzerland, and while she
was there she met with German ambassador Baron Giesbert von
Romberg to try to advocate for peace, or at least
for steps to be taken to minimize the impact of

(26:41):
the war on the civilian population. How about stayed in
Amsterdam working for the International Committee of Women for Permanent
Peace for about three months, but when she went back
to London in October of nineteen fifteen, she and a
servant she was traveling with were detained and questioned about
their activities. They were ultimately released, but only after Hobhouse

(27:04):
signed a document stating that she would not quote indulge
in propaganda, especially anti war propaganda. Hob also went back
to Italy and British authorities decided that if she came
back into the UK, she was not going to be
allowed to leave again. She stayed in Italy until April
of nineteen sixteen, and then she went to Switzerland, where

(27:26):
she attended a meeting of anti war socialists and a
meeting of the International Women's Union. When British authorities heard
about this, I mean they had previously made her say
she was not going to do any anti war propaganda.
They ordered for her passport to be withdrawn and for
her to come back to England. By that point, she'd

(27:46):
gone back to burn again to try to get permission
to travel through German occupied Belgium to see what conditions
there were like. She also wanted to arrange relief efforts
if she could. When she got a message asking her
to stop by the British embassy, she suspected there was
something afoot, so she left for her tour of Belgium
without doing so. Although she did get to go to Belgium,

(28:09):
she had a military escort the whole time and her
movements were tightly controlled, so she didn't feel like she
got a true sense of what things were actually like there.
A civilian going into enemy territory without permission in the
company of members of the enemy military was a big deal,
but hob houses personal quest for peace during World War

(28:31):
One did not stop there. She started corresponding with German
Foreign Minister Gottlie von Jago. She got the sense from
him that Germany was willing to talk to terms for peace,
at least in like an unofficial sense. When Hobhouse returned
to burn, British Ambassador Sir Evelyn Grant Duff questioned her

(28:52):
about what she'd been doing. Understandably, he founded alarming. He
berated her about having unauthorized meetings with German officials, traveling
to German territory without British permission, and basically making herself
into an unauthorized one person peace delegation. Knowing that she
was in trouble, Hobhouse tried to make a plan to

(29:14):
keep a line of communication open to von Jago's office,
one that was complete with various spy like cryptic instructions
and vague letters and code words. British authorities discovered some
of this, they questioned her again. They searched all of
her belongings, and then sent her back to London. Various
authorities described her as everything from a silly old woman

(29:37):
to a German agent and propagandist. In response to her actions,
the Defense of the Realm Act was amended to specifically
forbid British subjects from traveling into enemy territory without official permission.
Hobhouse was never prosecuted for anything, though it's probably because
there were concerns that it would turn her into a martyr,

(29:58):
particularly among pe of Dutch descent in South Africa, who
really saw her as a hero. Hobhouse was already detested
in many circles in Britain because of her activities during
the Boer War and because of her pacifism, and at
this point she was seen as doubly a traitor, first
for siding with the Boers and then for siding with Germany,

(30:21):
although she never actually sided with each one. She was
consistently on the side of civilians who were being harmed,
and she was against war in general. Her reputation took
another blow when one of her relatives, Stephen Hobhouse, was
imprisoned as a conscientious objector. When World War One ended
in nineteen eighteen, Hobhouse thought the situation in continental Europe

(30:43):
was probably a lot like what it had been in
South Africa. After the Second Anglo Boer War, so once
again she started traveling to assess the situation and raising
money to try to provide relief. She co founded the
Swiss Relief Fund for Starving Children, which later became part
of the Save the Children Fund. She also established the

(31:04):
Russian Baby's Fund and acted as its chair. Through these organizations,
she raised money and started distributing things like food and milk.
In nineteen nineteen, she went to Vienna with a friend
and found that thousands of children there were still starving.
She raised more money to try to help, including contacting
Jane Adams, various Quaker organizations, and other likely supporters for money.

(31:29):
She got donations from people she had previously helped in
South Africa, this time to help the children of Europe.
According to her records, from January nineteen twenty to January
ninety one, her work provided two point four million hot
meals for children. This work took a physical toll on her,
and in ninety one and doctor ordered her to take

(31:51):
a month of bed rest. She tried to keep working,
and she started using a wheelchair, but eventually she returned
to Italy, where she had to be hot bittalized. The
work she had started continued though, with another one point
four million meals provided between January of ninety one and
March of ninet We touched on Hobhouse's suffrage advocacy earlier

(32:14):
in In In nineteen twenty two, after a change in the law,
she became eligible to vote because she owned property, but
we don't know if she actually did. In her early
life she had generally sided with the Liberal Party, but
during her work in South Africa she had become increasingly socialist.
As this election approached, she told her brother Leonard quote,

(32:35):
who on earth is there to vote? For? Full suffrage?
Regardless of gender or things like property or ownership wasn't
granted in the UK until after her death. When Emily
Hobhouse turned sixty, she started looking for a home where
she could spend her last years, and she fell in
love with the house in st Ives this time, not

(32:57):
St Eve was in Cornwall. I'll be sleep. This was
much bigger than one person really needed, and it's two
story layout wasn't entirely practical for her, considering that sometimes
she was not able to climb stairs. But she really
really fell in love with it, and it had enough
room for friends from other parts of Europe and from

(33:17):
South Africa to stay with her when they visited. It
was also well beyond her financial means. Her friend to
be Stained from South Africa took up a collection to
help her buy it, feeling that South Africa had never
adequately thanked her and owed her a debt of honor.
When that collection wasn't enough, Jan Smuts and Annie botha

(33:38):
widow of the late Louis Botha, contributed the rest. Every
year on her birthday. Emily got lots of gifts from
South Africa and she called them wonder boxes, and she
often held onto things like dried fruits and honey and
biscuits to serve to friends from South Africa when they
came to visit. While living in St Ives, Hobhouse started

(33:59):
putting her personal papers and order and writing an autobiography
she got through her life from eight until the establishment
of the weaving schools, but she never finished it and
it was never published. She also translated the wartime Diary
of Ali Bodenhorst and published it as Tante Ali of Transvaal.

(34:19):
Bodenhorst had given Hobhouse this journal with the hope that
one day it would be published. She was quote desirous
that future generations should know and avoid the cruelty of war.
She also translated narratives boor women had written for themselves
in the camps, or if they were written in English
by women who didn't actually know English very well, she

(34:39):
edited them. She published these accounts as War Without Glamour
or Women's War Experiences Written by Themselves in Eventually hob
House couldn't handle the stairs anymore. She started living only
on the bottom floor of the house, using the study
as her bedroom. She sold that house at nine Team

(35:00):
and moved to a smaller place. She also made a
trip to Germany to see how it was recovering from
the war and how it was faring in light of
the penalties against it that were part of the Treaty
of Versailles. She used a wheelchair from Ability on this trip,
but she had to cut it short after falling down
some stairs and being seriously injured. After getting home again,

(35:23):
she issued a plea for relief to be sent to
the people of Germany. It's come up on the show
a number of times that like these sanctions that were
placed after World War One fed into a lot of
things that led to World War Two. In the last
years of her life, Emily Hobhouse was increasingly ill and
she didn't have a permanent place to live. She died

(35:45):
in London on June at the age of sixty six.
Her cause of death was listed as pleuritis, heart failure
and cancer. A funeral service in Kensington was attended mostly
by family and friends. At her request, Emily Hobhouse's body
was cremated and her ashes were sent to South Africa.

(36:06):
She had been made an honorary South African citizen and
a funeral was held for her in Bloemfonteine on October.
It was the only state funeral ever held for a
foreigner in South Africa. Thousands of people came to pay
their respects. The front rows of the church were filled
with about four hundred women who had been in the

(36:26):
concentration camps or who had attended one of the weaving
schools that Hobhouse had established. Jon Smuts and his wife
were there, as well as several other government officials. A
funeral procession escorted hobhouses ashes from the church to the
women's monument that she had helped design. This procession was
led by six boys who had been in the concentration

(36:49):
camps who were now grown men. There were six girls
who carried the casket containing her ashes, and then six
people who had been named after her. There was also
an orchestra, hundreds of women, delegates and official guests as
part of this procession. Thousands of people were gathered at
the Women's monument and multiple people gave addresses there, including

(37:11):
Jon Smuts, the daughter of you On a Rude who
had helped establish the lace making school and had become
you Onna Osborne after getting married, released a flock of
white doves as Emily hobhouses ashes were interred at the monument.
Gandhi wrote a tribute to Emily Hobhouse shortly after her death,
and it read, in part quote she worked without ever

(37:31):
thinking of any reward. Hers was a service of humanity,
dedicated to God. Describing his own efforts towards the rights
of Indians in South Africa, he also wrote quote, she
made my way smooth among them by throwing in the
whole weight of her influence with the Indian cause. Emily
Hobhouse was obviously beloved by the Boers of South Africa,

(37:54):
who she had spent so much of her life trying
to help The town of Hobhouse in the South African
province of Free State is named after her. But her
legacy has not been entirely positive. As we've discussed in
both parts of this episode, her work in South Africa
was focused on white people, particularly the Boors, who were
a tiny minority compared to the native black population and

(38:18):
it's diverse collection of kingdoms, nations, ethnic groups and languages.
Apart from her work with Gandhi, she did not focus
on people of color at all. After her death, Emily
Hobhouses work with the concentration camps and her documentation of
the conditions there, which were in many cases legitimately horrifying

(38:39):
and appalling, they became part of Boor nationalism in South Africa.
The camps themselves and the scorched earth policy that led
to their being so many of them both contributed to
the development of poor and later Afrikaannor as an identity,
and one aspect of that identity for a lot of
people was the idea of having been oppressed at the

(39:02):
hands of the British, which was then used to justify
a sense of racial superiority. There's a sense of like
the Boers were the real victims here, ignoring the indigenous
people of Africa, who are left out of that discussion entirely.
The focus of Hobhouses work on only white South Africans

(39:23):
was only one aspect of all of this. Another was
her focus on white women specifically. Many of the accounts
she published began with women's experiences on their homes and
farms and what happened to them as they were fleeing
toward or being forced into the concentration camps, and some
of those experiences involved being the victims of violence carried

(39:45):
out by black men. Many of these men were either
fighting alongside the British or we're fighting to protect their
own lands and peoples from encroachment or violence by white people,
but this context didn't matter. Instead, these counts reinforced a
narrative of white women needing to be protected, specifically from

(40:05):
violence at the hands of black men, and that played
a part into the system of racism and apartheid in
South Africa. It's the same narrative that was used to
support white supremacy in the lynching of black men in
the United States. The idea of the Boors as having
been violently oppressed by the British fed into African or nationalism.

(40:26):
Heading into the middle of the twentieth century. The National Party,
which came to power in really took Emily Hobhouses something
of an emblem and used her work to justify a
sense of white racial grievance. The National Party is the
party that formalized the system of racial apartheid that then
remained in place in South Africa for almost fifty years.

(40:50):
Of course, none of this happened in isolation, and Hobhouse's
work was not the only thing involved. For decades after
the war, British accounts of it disingenuously also described the
Boers as dirty and uneducated, including when they were being
held in concentration camps at which there literally was no soap.
British accounts also largely glossed over the worst aspects of

(41:13):
the camps, focusing on the ones that were somewhat better
provisioned and organized when they were discussed at all. Conversely,
most writing about the war and the camps from the
Boer perspective was in the form of things like poetry
and songs that commemorated and memorialized the hardship. More objective
historical examination of the war itself and Britain's concentration camps

(41:36):
for the Boers has been a lot more recent and
this is also true of research into Britain's concentration camps
for black South Africans during the war. I mean a
lot of that research is just within the last couple
of decades. Even though Emily Hobhouse tried to get someone
else to visit and investigate those camps, the fact that
apparently no one did, and that she also did not

(41:58):
do it herself, and that they were just poorly documented
to the general public as much of the war was happening.
That trend continued after the war was over, and then
as apartheid was implemented in the decades after the war,
that became the way bigger focus. So when apartheid was dismantled,
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that followed it was really

(42:20):
focused on the period from nineteen sixty until it wasn't
looking all the way back to the Border War. So
like as I was researching this, I just kept unearthing
more and more things about the camps that were specifically
for black people in South Africa that are just brand

(42:41):
new written within the last couple of years. So this
is obviously work that is still ongoing and is still
important and was delayed in part by Hobhouses decisions. This
is a heavy duo of episodes. It is do you
have a listener mail that's less heavy? I have a
listener tweets. I have a listener tweet from Joseph who

(43:06):
tweeted at us. Bucky Fuller produced his own world map
projection called the Dimaxian projection. He really liked the word dimaxion.
I had never heard of this map projection before I
locked it up after getting this tweet. Obviously, this is
this follows our Mercater projection episode that is a fascinating projection.

(43:31):
We talked about in that episode how the Mercat projection
is the globe projected onto a cylinder. This is a globe,
you know, which is normally a sphere projected onto an icosahedron.
The geometric shape with twenty phases like a twenty side

(43:53):
and die approximately but not really uh and then just unfolded.
It is just a fascinating looking one. I guess a
convex one is roughly like the shape of a twenty
side and die, but it can also be uh arranged differently.
Um I'm doing a bad job of explaining what this

(44:17):
looks like. But anyway, Uh, it is a map projection
where the relative sizes um of the land masses are
pretty much preserved, but you have all kinds of disruption
in the map itself. That's the thing that is sacrificed
to make up for that. In this tweet, Joseph also

(44:39):
uh noted that that buck MMR Fuller had thought about
taking his own life, but then uh did not do
that and stopped speaking for a year and then invented
a bunch of amazing things. Buckminster Fuller is of fascinating
person who maybe someday will be an episode of the show. Um.
I it was a person. I was like, do we

(45:02):
not have an episode on him already? I don't think
we do. Um So anyway, thank you for that tweet
and for giving me the chance to look at that
very wild projection of the map. It looks like a
geometry puzzle to me, yeah, because it does like things
form into like when you laid out flat they're big

(45:22):
like sort of you know, angled gaps and stuff, And
it looks it looks like a puzzle you're supposed to well,
and he's uh he popularized geodesic domes, and that, like,
it really makes sense to me that he would have
a fascination with this. Also like that, oh yeah, the
DNA is shared between Yeah. When I first looked at it,

(45:43):
I was like, this looks almost like a map that
was projected onto a geodesic dome and then taking apart.
So anyway, thank you again for that tweet. If you
would like to write to us about this, there any
other podcast or history podcast at i heart radio dot
com or also Oliver social media at miss some History
that Story. We'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.

(46:03):
You can subscribe to our show on the I heart
Radio app where Realty your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in
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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 First World War, Pt. 2