7

IN THE WEST SUSSEX coastal village of East Wittering, in the early days of 1926, a woman of sixty-six lived with her maid Ella in a damp cottage from which she was able to hear the coming and departing tides. Her home was a sick-room, so that she might well have found consolation in the company of Harriet Martineau and Audre Lorde; and she wrote to her friend Tibbie Steyn:

All the morning as the slow dawn crept on, I have lain listening to the long melancholy moaning of the sea as the waves break upon the shingly shore. It seemed as if daylight and Ella would never come. Yet tonight thank Heaven I had no pain or cough but only the weakness which often seems to me worse than pain. To raise myself in bed becomes an effort and I can no longer get up, light my stove and make my coffee as I want.

In a photograph taken towards the end of her life, she is a small, delicate person, aged beyond her years. She wears a fur coat against the cold, and a style of bonnet which is long out of fashion; her thin hands are clasped in her lap. Her eyes are deeply set, and with a melancholy perceptive quality: she looks steadily out at the observer. She is – or at any rate she seems to be – the epitome of a fading spinster caught between the wars, bearing her small sufferings with a genteel fortitude, and unsuited to any climate beyond the cottage doors.

This frail woman in her winter furs is Emily Hobhouse, who once wrote of herself that ‘pens won’t adequately tell all I have seen and done’. She is not, I confess, an Essex girl, except in spirit; but a Cornishwoman, born in 1860 to an upper-middle-class family, a daughter of the Archdeacon of Bodmin, and a gentlewoman. The first three decades of her life were passed in a fashion which was not untypical of an intelligent and comfortably off Victorian girl with an acute social conscience. She worked diligently with her father for the good of the Parish poor: she founded a library; she walked great distances;^ix she tended to minor ailments by dispensing herbal remedies, having consulted her grandmother’s books. Since her mother died when she was twenty, and her father was in generally poor health, her ambitions and intellect were for much of her youth confined more or less to the domestic sphere.

Emily Hobhouse, aged 42, photographed by Henry Walter Barnett in 1902.

With the death of her father, Emily was conferred a degree of freedom which she seized at once, and with a determination entirely in keeping with her character; and in 1895 she sailed for New York. She wrote to her sister, ‘I feel as if I were in fairyland, or the Arabian Nights.’ On to Minnesota then, where Cornish miners were set to work and, she felt, doubtless in need of support and encouragement from a fellow countrywoman: here she opened a library, and founded a choir, and sang to patients in the hospital. All this was met with disfavour by men: an episcopal minister – mindful of the same Biblical strictures which had required me, as a child, to cover my hair in chapel, and never to be heard in services unless I was singing – took her to one side, and subjected her to an hour’s lecture on her spiritual faults (and here, I think, the ghost of Rose Allin is concealing a smile). ‘He did not think’, wrote Emily, ‘that St Paul would approve of my holiday mission services in a log camp. I said I should do it all the same.’ She was acquiring a bad reputation: nevertheless, she persisted.

She returned to England in 1898, having become engaged, bought a Mexican ranch, broke off her engagement, and lost most of her fortune in bad speculations. A year later, with the outbreak of the Boer War, she was invited by a Liberal MP to serve as the secretary for the women’s branch of the South African Conciliation Committee. Her concern was not with the fortunes of the British army, but rather with the ‘enemy’ women. She wrote, ‘it was late in the summer of 1900 that I first learnt of the hundreds of Boer women that become impoverished and were left ragged by our military operations.’ Favouring, as she always did, deeds above words, she founded the Distress Fund for South African Women and Children, and sailed for South Africa, persuading the authorities to permit her to make an inspection of the British concentration camps.^x Of the conditions she discovered there, she wrote: ‘I call this camp system a wholesale cruelty. To keep these camps going is to murder the children.’ There were those within the authorities whom she considered to ‘do their best with very limited means’, but this was ‘all only a miserable patch on a great ill’. She had encountered, with terrible clarity, the faceless power of the machinery of state evil, against which individual acts of moral courage can seem to count almost for nothing.

Her report on camp conditions was delivered to the British Government in 1901. ‘Above all’, she wrote, ‘one would hope that the good sense, if not the mercy, of the English people will cry out against the further development of this cruel system which falls with such crushing effect upon the old, the weak, and the children.’ In response to her report a formal commission was formed, and official investigators – led by Millicent Fawcett – were sent to make further inspections of the camps. But the quality of English mercy was strained: on the last Sunday before Christmas in 1901 Mr Charles Aked, a Baptist minister, gave a sermon in which he explicitly deplored ‘a cowardly war … conducted by methods of barbarism – the concentration camps have been murder camps’. The congregation was moved more to anger than to pity, and after the service the preacher was followed home by a vengeful crowd, and the windows of his house were broken. When a photograph emerged of the seven-year-old Lizzie van Zyl, dying of typhus in the camp at Bloemfontein, Arthur Conan Doyle surmised that this was proof not of British malignity, but of criminal neglect on the part of a Boer mother (Emily, undaunted, made her investigations; and having identified the photographer was able to exculpate the mother entirely). In her work The Brunt of War and Where it Fell, Emily wrote:

Efforts to nullify the effect of my story, lest public sentiment should be aroused, took two forms, viz. criticism of myself and justification of the camps. I was labelled ‘a political agitator’, a ‘disseminator of inaccurate and blood-curdling stories’.

Nevertheless, the work of Emily Hob-house and the Fawcett Commission had its effects. By the end of 1901 there were no new inmates at the camps, and orders were made to mitigate the death rate – but not for the imprisoned Black population, for whom improvements were delayed, and scant.

Rebecca Solnit, writing of the moment Pandora opened her jar and loosed the world’s ills, reminds the reader that to live in ignorance of those ills is not to live a whole life. ‘Adam and Eve’, she says, ‘eat from the Tree of Knowledge and they are never ignorant again. (Some ancient cultures thanked Eve for making us fully human and conscious.)’ Emily Hobhouse had been Pandora, loosing the lid of the jar, bringing concealed ills to light, to the discomfort and horror of those who would have much preferred to seal the vessel with wax. She said, ‘Crass male ignorance, helplessness and muddling … I rub salt into the sore places in their minds, because it is good for them.’

Late in life, drowsing in her cottage by the sea, still containing inside her body the dauntless traveller she had been, Emily keenly felt the loss of her reputation. On 1 May 1926, she wrote to her friend Tibbie Steyn:

… though it is the late hour and little of life remains in me, I do feel some sort of re-institution in the public mind of England and documentary evidence of it, would do more than anything else to brighten the remaining time.

One month and one week later, having left East Wittering for London, she died. Her death was not reported in the British press; neither mourners nor clergymen attended her cremation in Golders Green. A man who’d never known her signed the register J. Baker, and put the wooden casket containing her ashes on the train to Southampton. These ashes are now buried in the base of the National Women’s Monument in Bloemfontein,^xi which commemorates the 27,000 women and children who died in the British concentration camps. Its central image is that of a Boer woman cradling an emaciated child, created by the sculptor Anton van Wouw thirteen years previously, and based on a description given by Emily of a dying child she had encountered during her investigations in the camps. Never much minded to applaud the works of men, she wrote that it would perhaps have been a more accurate representation of suffering, ‘had he seen it with his own eyes’.