Emily Hobhouse: Beloved Traitor. Elsabé Brits
(1901) Emily arrived in Cape Town, where she stayed once more with Caroline Murray. She addressed a large meeting in the city for one and a half hours, explaining in detail what was happening in the camps. She was probably the only person who had personally visited so many of the camps.193 The packet of letters to her that she received in the city had been “mostly censored, some doubly censored”.194
Emily met with Sir Walter Hely-Hutchinson, the new governor of the Cape Colony, who gave her the necessary permits to visit both Warrenton and Mafeking. He was also very cooperative in arranging for tons of clothes, which the Cape women had helped to collect, to be sent by train to the various camps. This time Emily had the supplies delivered directly to the camps in question. The journey from Cape Town to Kimberley took five days, but she was determined to assist the distressed people in the Kimberley camp once more.
The train journeys were exhausting and lonely; there was no one Emily could talk to about her real thoughts and feelings. Invariably she fell back on pen and paper and wrote lengthy letters to the family in England, albeit that they would first be scrutinised by the censors. Despite buying a first-class ticket and being at the station hours before a train’s departure, she seldom managed to get a seat in first-class carriages. The English officers simply shoved her aside and sat wherever they wanted to. “First class here is about equal now to third class at home so that anything below is very dirty, smelly and disagreeable.”195
Four days later she was again on her way to Mafeking when the train halted at Warrenton. Here she found 310 women who had been “pushed” into the church and the school because there were no tents for them. And hundreds more women and children were on their way here after all the Boer commandos of Hoopstad had also been captured, a young British captain informed her on the train.196
Somewhere outside Warrenton, on her way to Mafeking, Emily witnessed a scene next to the railway line that would stay in her memory for the rest of her life, the result of the British forces’ “sweeping” of the countryside:
Crowds of human beings, both black and white, milling around.
Captured women and children.
Soldiers.
Thousands of animals of many kinds. Carts and wagons. The animals were bellowing for food and water.
The faces of the women and children wore grimaces of pain as a result of exposure, hunger and exhaustion. The scene represented the cruelty and horror of war in its clearest form.
Emily was shocked to the very fibre of her being. These people were on their way to Warrenton where there was not even a tent to put them into, let alone food and medicine. Things would only get worse for all of them. She happened to know, as she had just come from there.
Moreoever, it was 9 April 1901, her 41st birthday.
The next day she arrived in Mafeking for the first time: “ … a lonely, lonely spot. Mafeking itself feels like the end of the world and the camp seems like driving six miles into space.”197
The camp had been in existence for almost a year, and was the oldest of the camps she had visited. Its 900 inhabitants were very surprised that an Englishwoman had arrived at this remote spot and seemed to care for them and their suffering. She spent three busy days at the camp, interviewing people, recording what was happening and trying to convince the military authorities to improve the conditions.198
Here, too, there was no soap, and many people had no blankets. Emily distributed clothing and formed a committee of seven camp women to help her with all the work. A certain Mrs Coetzee (“a real character”), after lamenting her fate for almost a hour, ended with solemn thanks to the Lord that the English people cared enough to send someone just to look upon the Boers’ misery.
Emily was still haunted by the scene next to the railway line outside Warrenton. Passing through this town again on her way to Kimberley, where she was on 13 April, she found that only 150 were left of the more than 300 people who had been there earlier. At the station there were two trainloads of people, about 240 in all, waiting in open coal trucks. They followed Emily’s armoured train to Kimberley. From her inquiries there it was clear that no one had known that these people were supposed to arrive there. No one could help, and no one knew where to get hold of fuel or kettles late on a Saturday night.199
When Emily returned to the Kimberley camp two days later, she heard that seven children had died during the few days she had been away. The rain kept pouring down and it was cold inside the tents, most of which were leaking. The meat the people received was maggotty, and those who complained did not get meat again.200
On her way to Bloemfontein, Emily got off the train at the Springfontein camp. She was shocked to find that the camp population had increased from 500 to 3 000 since her previous visit. At the station she found another 600 women and children who were forced to sit waiting in open trucks with no shelter from the sun, wind and rain. They had been there for two days. This was even worse than what she had witnessed at Warrenton.
It was a Sunday morning. Clara Sandrock, the daughter of the German missionary at Springfontein, had seen Emily’s train arriving and had run down to the station with a can of hot coffee for her. Emily did not drink any of it herself and gave the coffee as well as all the food she had on the train with her, a “two-penny loaf” and some tinned meat, to the women in the open rail trucks.
The children were crying from hunger because they had not eaten anything for three days. Emily gave Clara money to buy all the food she could find and told her to take it to the women, with a further instruction: “Leave the church today.”201
It pained Emily that she could not see to the alleviation of the people’s plight herself, but her permit did not allow her to break her journey to Bloemfontein. With a heavy heart she jumped back on the train, just in time for its departure. The women and children in the open trucks she had to leave to the mercy of the elements. Even though she was wrapped in her thick grey shawl, it was still bitterly cold.202
Just because Emily stayed at the home of Caroline Fichardt in Bloemfontein, Caroline’s permit was withdrawn so that she could no longer ride out to their farm Brandkop to visit her husband’s grave.
At the Bloemfontein camp Emily found that the number of women and children had almost doubled in the six weeks she had been gone; the population now stood at 4 000. “My camp work grows so fast and so rapidly that I feel it is almost impossible to cope with it.”203
“It is endless and hopeless,” she wrote to Aunt Mary. “I feel paralysed in the face of it. I feel money is of little avail and there are moments when I feel it would be wisest to stop trying and hasten home to state plain facts and beg that a stop may be put to it all.”204
The camp would only increase in size, Goold-Adams assured her after she had gone to talk to him again. Meanwhile 62 people had died there while she was away. The doctor himself was sick, and two of the Boer girls who had been trained as nurses were among the dead.205
There was still no soap in the camps. The official answer Emily got was that it was a luxury, and that the soldiers were not given soap either. According to the authorities, feed for the emaciated cows – her solution so that they could produce more milk for the children – was too precious to be used for this purpose. And, no, railway boilers could not be procured for the boiling of water. Boilers could be built from bricks, but this was too expensive.206
Emily was appalled at the condition of many of the people in the Bloemfontein camp who had been hale and hearty during her earlier visit. “Disease and death were stamped upon their faces.”207
Emily was convinced that unless there was a constant influx of doctors, nurses, other workers, food, clothing and bedding, nothing would improve. The death rate had now risen to about 20 per cent, and there was no hope that it would decline. She pleaded with Goold-Adams that he should try to improve conditions in the camp, but he informed her that inhabitants of the Transvaal and the Free State were now being placed in camps on an increased scale; “a new sweeping movement has begun”.208
She made a last attempt to visit the northern camps, such as the one at Kroonstad. Again she requested Goold-Adams’s permission,