Emily Hobhouse: Beloved Traitor. Elsabé Brits
the inmates “poorer and more utterly destitute” than any she had yet seen.
Emily had brought along three cases of clothing and sat on the Sandrocks’ stoep where some of the camp inmates came shuffling up to her in groups. She had enough supplies to clothe about 60 people every day.
“Some are scared, some paralysed and unable to realise their loss. Some are dissolved in tears, some mute and dry-eyed, seem only to be able to think of the blank, penniless future – some are glowing with pride at being prisoners for their country’s sake. A few barely clothed women had petticoats out of the rough brown blankets so-called khaki blankets.”179
The blouses that had been sent from England were unsuitable as they were much too small for “the well-developed Boer maiden, who is really a fine creature”. Could they please send any “out-out women’s sizes”, she asked Aunt Mary.
At Springfontein there was no fuel for fires and although the people were given meat and mealie-meal, they were unable to cook anything because the veld was bare and the vegetation sparse. “I thought Kitchener was considered such a great organiser, but is it good organising to have so little forethought and make so little preparation that thousands of people find themselves dumped down in strange places where there is nothing ready for their reception?”180
Next on Emily’s itinerary was a second visit to Norvalspont. As usual, she wrote letters during her train journey – always with plans aimed at finding solutions.
Again she raised the need in the black concentration camps with the Distress Fund Committee, and appealed to the committee (in the same letter to her aunt) to send people to investigate the conditions there. From what she had heard, there were many large “native” camps where the death rate was also high. Shouldn’t the Society of Friends – the Quakers – that already had people in South Africa who provided relief aid, send someone? Or the Aborigines’ Protection Society, she suggested.181 182
As a liberal by conviction, Emily considered it self-evident that no distinction should be made between the distress of whites and that of blacks. “In my camps there are many kinds of nationalities. They are all suffering alike and it is not always possible to pick out the pure Boer and leave those mixed or intermarried. Often there are little black servant girls whipped up and carried off with their mistresses and these need clothing. Decency demands that all should be provided …”183
In the camp at Norvalspont (where Emily arrived on 8 March) she soon clashed with the camp doctor, as he was of the kind “who cannot open his mouth without using invectives against the Boers”. She felt “ashamed in the name of the English”. In her view he was “an insufferable cad”, and she told him so to his face.184
At this camp the authorities had succeeded in persuading 28 Boer men to fight on the English side. Emily was disgusted as she believed it to be unworthy of an English officer to sink so low, especially because these men had taken the oath of neutrality. “I long to escape from this network of lies and horror,” she wrote.185
Two days later she tried to continue her journey by train via Noupoort to Kimberley, but she had to spend the whole day in the station’s waiting room as conditions were too unsafe for travelling. The sounds of gunfire could be heard, and, according to rumours, the Boers were in the vicinity. By ten o’clock that evening the train had still not arrived, and the only solution was to sleep on the floor of the railway staff officer’s office.186
When she stepped outside later to get some fresh air, the railway officer followed her. Shyly he offered that she could spend the night in the conductor’s carriage, which he had fitted out as his sleeping quarters. He himself would sleep elsewhere. Overhelmed by relief at this kindness, she collapsed on the small bed and started crying.
When she looked around her, she saw that he had prepared a bath for her and made the bed. Oh, it was a wonderful night, she wrote. To her, the man, a certain Pates, seemed almost like a saint.
The following day the train finally departed for De Aar, where they had to wait for hours. She rested in the station’s waiting room but was thrown out by the guard. The train to Noupoort only arrived at four o’clock the following morning.
Emily saw several trains that were on their way to Cape Town. She was sorely tempted to board one of them and end this interminable waiting in the middle of nowhere. She forced herself to look away because the temptation was almost irresistible.
The journey to Kimberley was a melancholy one for Emily; besides feeling unwell, she knew that their line would take them through a succession of battlefields: Belmont, Graspan, Modderrivier, Magersfontein … In the distance she saw trenches and graves.187
On 12 March she finally reached Kimberley, where she stayed in the Queens Hotel, 20 minutes’ walk from the camp. The camp commandant was a Major Wright whom Emily quickly sized up as a “coarse, lazy, indifferent old man”. There was no nurse in the camp, the tents were overcrowded and dirty, and measles and whooping cough were rife.
Among the unfortunate inmates was a Mrs Douw who had been captured on her farm with her children, including a 17-day-old baby, by General Paul Methuen and his troops. She had pleaded with Methuen to allow them to take the donkey along, as the baby could drink only donkey’s milk. Methuen had given special commands that the donkey had to accompany her, but once they reached the Kimberley camp the donkey disappeared. They had tried to give the baby cow’s milk, but the child kept wasting away.188
When Emily arrived at the camp a new donkey had been found, but the baby was already so weak that it was past recovery. “It was still alive this morning when I called,” Emily wrote, “but in the afternoon it was dead. They beckoned me to see the tiny thing laid out – with a white flower in its wee hand. A murdered innocent.”189
In an attempt to soften the grief, Emily bought Mrs Douw black material for a mourning dress; it was a fitting present from England, she thought. She wondered how Methuen’s wife would have felt if it had been her baby.190
The women at Kimberley were more bitter and antagonistic than those she had encountered in the other camps; not towards her, but as a result of what had happened to them. She wished that she could send six of the young girls to England so that they could tell the British Cabinet what was being done in South Africa in the name of England; “you couldn’t beat them in argument – or anything else”.
The women told her that some of them had been brought to the station at Vryburg by large groups of armed black men who were fighting on the English side. They had experienced their treatment as “terrible”. She heard more and more accounts of farms burnt by black people, sometimes without a single British officer being present.
In a long letter to her brother Leonard, Emily wrote: “You must not think that I pick out bad cases to send home. I never pick out at all. The tents are entered at random and I note what they say and often leave a camp without having seen people who have had the worst experiences.”191
Emily wanted to return to Bloemfontein but did not have a permit to do so, and Pretyman, who was now stationed in Kimberley, did not make it easy for her after she had confronted him about the child deaths in his camp. He was angry. Ignorant mothers were causing their own children’s deaths with their home remedies, was his defence.
No, he decided, she could get a permit for a trip to De Aar or Cape Town, but not to Bloemfontein.
Emily now had to decide on her next move. Maybe back to Cape Town to collect another rail truck full of clothing? But in the meantime she had heard that a camp had been opened at Warrenton, and that the need there was terrible. Perhaps she should go there as well as to Mafeking? In the end she opted for Cape Town; without supplies she could not really help alleviate the need.
Meanwhile the South African Conciliation Committee had met at the home of Lord and Lady Hobhouse in Mayfair, London, to read out Emily’s letters, while she was again alone on a train full of sick Tommies on her way to Cape Town. She cared for the sick soldiers, cooked food for them, and took walks with them in the veld when the train stood waiting somewhere for hours.192 On the way she saw rail trucks full of armed black men and told herself: It’s naive to think that they are