Emily Hobhouse: Beloved Traitor. Elsabé Brits
Emily replied that that was exactly what she had come to do – as well as to help in “personal troubles”. Goold-Adams was of the view that “gifts could be dealt out in a machine-like routine” without personal involvement. “I said I could not work like that, I must treat people like fellow-creatures and share their troubles. He believed this unnecessary.”209 It dawned on Emily that her personal sympathy was being confused with political sympathy with the Boers’ cause. “It was no question of political sympathy. On that score I always maintained a negative attitude.”210
She was shocked when she read Kitchener’s claim in a newspaper that the families in the camps “had a sufficient allowance, and were all comfortable and happy.”211 She knew that they were “all miserable and underfed, sick and dying”,212 and realised that the British public was being sold lies.
This brought Emily to a point where she had to take an important decision: “To stay among the people, doling out small gifts of clothes, which could only touch the surface of the need, or return home with the hope of inducing the Government and the public to give so promptly and abundantly that the lives of the people, or at least the children might be saved.”213
After much reflection she decided to tackle the evil at its root, with those who had started it and had the power to end it. Please book me a passage on a ship to Southampton, she wrote to Caroline Murray in advance.
On the way to Cape Town, the train stopped once again at Springfontein. To Emily’s horror, the same group of about 600 women and children she had seen when passing north ten days earlier were still stuck at the station.214 There was neither water nor toilets, and very little food.
She also came across the elderly uncle and aunt of President Paul Kruger at Springfontein. Despite the cold, the old lady was half naked. Emily took off her own petticoat and draped it over the woman.
Some of the other women clung to Emily in the hope that this angelic figure would deliver them from their misery. “The picture photographed in my mind can never fade,” Emily wrote later.
Though it was bitterly cold, there was no shelter for the women and children. Some tried to sleep under the rail trucks. Others had found some sailcloth from which they constructed makeshift shelters.
Emily was called to one of these shelters where a woman sat with her fast-fading child on her lap.
In a last-ditch effort to save the child’s life Emily sent a message to Captain Gostling, the camp commandant, to request a few drops of brandy, but he let her know that their supply was limited.
Emily was present when the child died in silence.
“The mother neither moved nor wept. It was her only child. Dry-eyed but deathly white, she sat there motionless looking not at the child but far, far away into depths of grief beyond all tears. A friend stood behind her who called upon Heaven to witness this tragedy and others crouching on the ground around her wept freely.
“The scene made an indelible impression upon me. The leading elements in the great tragedy working itself out in your country seemed to have gathered under that old bit of sailcloth whose tattered sides hardly kept off sun, wind or rain.”215
After this gruelling morning she still had enough stamina left to brave the concentration camp, to which she had to walk. Captain Gostling followed her like a shadow, engaged her in seemingly innocent chitchat and kept steering the conversation in a political direction. But Emily was nobody’s fool, and avoided saying anything that smacked of politics. Late that night she boarded the train again as it slowly made its way southwards. The next day she got off at Norvalspont and, as usual, headed straight for the concentration camp where she spent the day.
Late that afternoon she returned to the station on foot, only to hear that the train to Cape Town would only arrive the following day. She had nowhere to sleep, as all the available beds in the town were occupied by the troops. Trudging back to the camp was her sole option. It was pitch dark when she arrived at the tent of an old acquaintance, a Mrs Boshoff, who was overjoyed to see her. Early the next morning Emily crawled out of the tent, in time to catch the train just after seven o’clock.216
When Emily finally reached Cape Town on 5 May, she had not washed for six days. She was indescribably dirty, covered in red dust from top to toe. On some days she had not even been able to wash her hands. There was little time to rest, however, as she had to decide at once whether to leave for England on the Saxon in two days’ time, or wait a while longer. Besides, all the ships were packed to capacity.217
Within an hour she decided to embark on the voyage as soon as possible.
To Emily’s great surprise, Sir Alfred Milner was a fellow passenger on the Saxon.218 “There also on a little raised dais sits His Excellency alone in the upper deck. He has told the captain he does not wish to mingle with anyone nor speak with any lady. However he came and spoke to me as soon as waves and wind allowed and I plunged into my subject, but a noisy windlass cut us short,”219 Emily wrote to Caroline Murray.
Learning “the Taal”220 from fellow passengers was pointless, Milner’s private secretary Walrond informed her, as she should not be allowed to visit South Africa again. Emily suspected him of spreading malicious gossip about her on the ship because many passengers turned their backs on her. Nevertheless, she got another opportunity to speak to Milner when the ship stopped at Madeira and everyone was admiring the view from the deck.
Emily knew somehow that military spies had watched her in Bloemfontein and provided Milner with all kinds of falsehoods about her, such as that she had caused trouble in the camps. No fewer than 60 reports on her had been sent to Milner, and now she had the chance to confront him about it. She pointed out “the low class sort of people that were willing to be informers”, and that he had to be spending a lot of money on informers.221
She emphasised again that she was not in South Africa for political reasons, and also told Milner how Captain Gostling had tried to provoke her into making political statements. She had the impression that he believed her.
“There were two Alfred Milners – there was the charming, sympathetic, gracious and cultivated man, whose abilities and culture found rather a desert in South Africa, and whose liberal leanings were in contrast to the military men surrounding him. And there was the politician who had given his word to carry out the ideas of the English statesmen and felt bound in honour to do so. The clash must have given him many dolorous moments of agony.”222
Emily parted from Milner with these words from the writer Macrobius when a Roman knight had been censured unfairly by Augustus Caesar: “Caesar, when you make inquiries about honourable men, see that you employ honourable men to do it.”223
On 24 May 1901 Emily was back in England after having left for South Africa five and half months earlier. She still had no idea of how exactly she would bring the need in the concentration camps to the attention of the English public in a way that would engender sympathy instead of giving offence.
What she did know was that her experience of the conflict in South Africa had imbued her with an intense aversion to war and everything it entailed. She had seen clearly what war did to people:
“You can no longer be an individual, you are one of a herd – and that herd preserves itself by the reversal of the principle of virtue. Untruth, lies, hatred, inhumanity, destructiveness, spying, treachery, meanness innumerable, suspicion, contempt, unfair dealing, illegality of every kind flourish and become as it were the ‘virtues of war’.
“The atmosphere thus created is a moral miasma.”224
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