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Emily Hobhouse (9 April 1860 - 8 June 1906) was a British humanitarian, welfare campaigner and anti-war activist best remembered for exposing the poor conditions in British concentration camps in South Africa.
Biography[]
Hobhouse was born in St. Ive, near Liskeard in Cornwall, the daughter of Archdeacon of Bodmin Reginald Hobhouse. When the Second Boer War broke out in 1899, Hobhouse joined the anti-war South African Conciliation Committee as a secretary in the women's branch, a capacity in which she became aware of the plight of Boer women and children who were displaced by British military action. She founded the Distress Fund for South African Women and Children, a charity designed to provide for homeless Boer women and children, and sailed for Cape Colony on 7 December 1900 to supervise its distribution.
Upon arriving in South Africa Hobhouse discovered the existence of the British concentration camp system, a series of camps used to intern Boer women and children and Bantu labourers. Hobhouse had already been aware of a single camp in Port Elizabeth, but discovered that there were 45 camps in total operating in South Africa. Through her association with British High Commissioner Alfred Milner, who was a friend of her uncle, she obtained permission to visit several of the camps and report on the conditions. During her investigation she witnessed many detainees dying from disease, starvation and dehydration due to overcrowding and poor conditions. The following is an excerpt from her report:
Some people in town still assert that the Camp is a haven of bliss. I was at the camp to-day, and just in one little corner this is the sort of thing I found – The nurse, underfed and overworked, just sinking on to her bed, hardly able to hold herself up, after coping with some thirty typhoid and other patients, with only the untrained help of two Boer girls–cooking as well as nursing to do herself. Next tent, a six months' baby gasping its life out on its mother's knee. Two or three others drooping sick in that tent. Next, a girl of twenty-one lay dying on a stretcher. The father, a big, gentle Boer kneeling beside her; while, next tent, his wife was watching a child of six, also dying, and one of about five drooping. Already this couple had lost three children in the hospital and so would not let these go, though I begged hard to take them out of the hot tent. I can't describe what it is to see these children lying about in a state of collapse. It’s just exactly like faded flowers thrown away. And one has to stand and look on at such misery, and be able to do almost nothing.
In particular, she was appalled when, during a visit to Bloemfontein concentration camp, she came across a Boer girl named Lizzie van Zyl who was dying from starvation. She was given as little food as possible in order to punish her father, a Boer guerrilla who refused to surrender, and when admitted to hospital was ignored by medical staff and labelled "an idiot and a nuisance". The girl eventually died at the Bloemfontein camp. Hobhouse also witnessed many Boer and Bantu detainees suffering from disease due to the unhygienic conditions. When she requested that they be given toiletries and other sanitary items she was told that these were "luxuries" not to be afforded to the general population of the camp. She eventually succeeded in convincing the Bloemfontein staff to list soap, tents and straw to sleep on as necessities.
Hobhouse's report, titled Report of a Visit to the Camps of Women and Children in the Cape and Orange River Colonies, was published in June 1901. The British government initially attempted to ignore her findings, but public outrage forced them to set up a commission lead by Millicent Fawcett to investigate conditions at the camps. The Fawcett Commission corroborated Hobhouse's account and the government were forced to act to improve conditions in the camps; however, as punishment they ordered Hobhouse deported from Cape Colony. Hobhouse's report was a major factor in Henry Campbell-Bannerman's Liberals winning the next election.
After the war ended Hobhouse returned to South Africa to assist those wounded in the war. For her humanitarian work she was granted honorary South African citizenship. She died in Kensington in 1926, and her ashes are interred in the National Women's Monument in Bloemfontein.