Emily Hobhouse: Beloved Traitor. Elsabé Brits
to embrace and explore far-off and wide worlds and meet many people, and she “dreamt of their universal conversion to goodness (which for me meant then the Church of England) and a lift to material well-being”. Finally Emily came to a crucial realisation: What mattered to her was not the same as what mattered to everyone else, “and that you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear”.
She realised that the parish was but a small world, far removed from a greater reality beyond its confines.22
She also did not share her father’s view that religious dissidents – those who did not agree with all aspects of the Anglican Church – had to be ostracised, and visited such people regularly.23
She became critical of her father’s sermons to which she had been listening for 20 years. “The trouble rather was that he had so little to say – not that he could not say it. He lived too much apart from ordinary humanity to understand it well, and strictly ruled out all that was modern in thought and science from his reading. His preaching never modernised.” Only once did she hear him preach from his heart, and then he cried.24
In 1880 Emily’s mother developed a brain tumour and died within a few months. Emily was 20 years old, her brother Leonard was a student at Oxford, and Alfred had long since left home and moved to New Zealand. Only Maud was still at home and the two girls looked after their father, whose health had deteriorated after his wife’s death. He was now even more withdrawn and reclusive, and refused to let Emily develop her talents.
In 1889 Maud married one of the church’s curates, Ernest Hebblethwaite, without her father’s blessing, most likely to escape from the oppressive atmosphere at home.25
Emily taught Sunday School lessons, sang in the church choir and played the organ. Her life revolved around her father and the small population of St Ive. She read to him from the Times every day, thereby keeping abreast of what was happening in the world – it stimulated her interest in politics. Like her brother Leonard and her uncle, Lord Hobhouse, Emily had liberal political convictions, in contrast to her father’s conservative views.26 She did not dare to discuss her ideas with him, however.
In 1891 Leonard married Nora Hadwed in Oxford, where he lectured at Merton College and later at Corpus Christi College. Their first child, Oliver, was born a year later, and became one of the few joys in Emily’s life.27
Emily’s father was dead set against her meeting any young men. She had to care for him, and her chances of marrying and having a family of her own started diminishing. Loneliness and frustration drove her to “morbid introspection and hysteria”, since all she could do was sing and play the piano and the violin. “I was so low that I took to illumination … “ (a kind of light therapy to treat depression).
Finally she attempted writing, “but never succeeded in that till my mind was released from the shackles of St Ive”.
Decades later she wrote about this time in her life: “I find no record of these years. They are recorded only on my spirit, and fortunately will die with me. It was in a word a period of torture …”28
The circumstances must have been unbearable for someone of Emily’s intellect and spirit. For six years she lived alone in the rectory with her father, apart from the servants.
He died on 27 January 1895, a bitterly cold day. “It was the end of our life as a family.”
All the family’s possessions – from a horse, pigs and chickens to furniture, paintings and a cello – were auctioned. Emily inherited £5 300 from her father.29
Two weeks after his death, Emily packed her suitcases and left St Ive. She never returned to the village.
The car’s temperature gauge registers a low 2°C as I travel the eight kilometres from Liskeard to St Ive. It is a tiny rural hamlet one can easily pass through without realising it.
A beautiful old church, more or less in the middle of the few houses, is impossible to miss. I recognise the building from photographs I have seen of it. This is where Reginald Hobhouse was rector for half a century.
Suddenly I am in the heart of Emily’s early world. About a hundred metres on is the rectory where she spent the first part of her life.
By prior arrangement, a few parishioners are waiting for me at the rectory. “We’re big fans of Emily’s,” Dennis and his wife Doreen tell me.
We walk to the cemetery that surrounds the church. Emily’s mother and father lie buried next to each other. Opposite the church the cottage still stands where her father had lived as a bachelor before the newly married couple moved into the rectory that had been built for them.
I walk around the church, along the pathway to the door through which Emily used to walk every Sunday for so many years, past the baptismal font of stone at the back of the church where she was baptised on 1 May 1860, down the aisle to the pulpit from where Reginald delivered the sermons his talented daughter found so boring.
On the wall next to the pulpit are separate bronze memorial plaques: for Reginald for 50 years’ service, for Leonard, Emily, Alfred and Maud; and another one for Reginald, his wife and the other children.
One of the parishioners, Paddy, relates that Emily sang in the choir and also played the organ. “Those are the choir pews. The men sat here and the women opposite them; it has always been like that. Emily must have sat in that pew,” he gestures.
When one sits in that particular pew the pulpit rises in front of one, with the church-goers to one’s left and the lead-glass windows to one’s right. The organ Emily used to play is directly behind me. It feels to me as if Emily is there too, and I close my eyes to travel back 125 years in time and imagine myself in Emily’s position.
Inching along a long flight of narrow steps on which one has to turn one’s feet sideways, one can climb up inside the dark church tower. On the one side there is a blue rope to hold on to. One the other side there is nothing.
From the top of the tower one has a good view of the surroundings. Diagonally opposite is the rectangular old stone and red sandstone rectory of the Hobhouse family – a listed building that dates from 1852-1854. The house has two storeys, with an attic, a cellar and outbuildings on the stand of several acres. It has a beautiful slate roof.30
Dennis and Doreen have assured me that it is virtually impossible to obtain permission to visit the house. Many journalists, TV crews and writers have failed in their attempts to gain entry. But four months earlier I made contact in a roundabout way with the owner who agreed grudgingly – and provisionally – to a visit. But would he still remember our conversation, and finally give his consent?
What do you know! He recalls my long story over the telephone, and kindly invites me in.
I cross the threshold and enter Emily’s world. Above the door hangs the original bell rope of which there used to be one in each important room – a kind of umbilical cord between employers and servants. When someone pulled the rope, a bell rang next to the name of the particular room on a board in the servants’ quarters, so that the servants knew where they had to rush to.
Their rooms are close to the cellar, the pantry and the kitchen with its spacious cooking area and separate washing-up area. The servants’ area is clearly cordoned off from the living area of the family members by a thick door, and here the wooden floor changes to serviceable tiles. An outside door gives access to the stables and outbuildings where supplies were stored.
There is the high drawing room, where the family would have sat reading or conversing. The fireplace is still there, encased in black marble. And also a study where all the books must have been housed.
Above the stairs are the bedrooms with thick, chamfered wooden ceiling beams. There are several bedrooms with dressing rooms and bathrooms with fireplaces, but it is impossible to say which bedroom was Emily’s. The windows are big and look out over the huge property where the children would have cavorted to their heart’s delight. This was also where Emily and Old Rodge used to play badminton and the children had their own little vegetable gardens.
The church sold the house