Emily Hobhouse: Beloved Traitor. Elsabé Brits
a great deal of my time … and I respect and admire him more every time I see him … We are sort of half engaged and expect to be wholly so in a short while,” she wrote to her aunt, Lady Hobhouse.
A few days later she informed her aunt excitedly “that I promised Mr Jackson on Sunday night that I would marry him so now we are really engaged and I feel happy over it and quite at home with him, and as he has never known a home or comfort or happiness, he is quite dazed with joy.”48 To Maud she wrote that John was very handsome, and that her pet name for him was “Caro”.49
The town, however, was experiencing tough times. There was serious conflict between the mining bosses, and one mine after the other closed down. John found himself in financial difficulties because he had extended too much credit to people who were unable to pay.
John and Emily decided to leave Virginia, but that they would depart separately. He would stay behind for a while to wind up his affairs. The townspeople were sad to take their leave of Emily in September (1896), and a crowd came to see her off – with an orchestra accompanying her down the street to the station.
The train took her to Cleveland, Ohio,50 where Emily spent some time with friends of her sister-in-law Nora (Leonard’s wife) before continuing her journey to Mexico – a trip that took five days. Emily was the one who had to explore new possibilities for her and John while he was finalising his affairs in Virginia. In the end she used her inheritance money to buy a farm in Mexico with coffee, banana, pineapple and vanilla plantations, and had a house built on the property at a cost of £80. The farm was so remote that Emily never saw it.
Days, weeks and months went by, but John failed to arrive.
Thanks to new friends Emily had made, she was offered a government contract in terms of which John could supply fresh meat to Mexico City. Emily had only 12 hours to decide whether or not to buy the concession of £1 200. With what was left of her inheritance money, she took this gamble.51
The entire winter of 1896 Emily waited for John in Mexico, learning Spanish and history, and painting occasionally. For months she kept hoping …
John was probably bankrupt by April 1897, as his shop with all its contents was sold and he left Virginia soon afterwards “without a handshake and a parting word”. According to a report in The Virginian he was on his way to Chicago to meet Emily and marry her there; from there he would go to Mexico, where a new high position was said to await him.
But the reality proved to be less rosy: the man who had bought his shop had to close it immediately on account of lawsuits, as John was insolvent. Moreover, Virginia’s coffers were empty after his year-long stint as mayor.52
Emily was still hoping to be reunited with John, and travelled to Chicago to meet him there. During her journey the train’s boiler exploded and she saw the driver’s body hurtling through the air. The burnt corpse of the stoker lay before the door of her compartment.
Was this perhaps an omen of what would follow? Emily kept believing that she and John would marry; presumably she dreamt of children of her own, but in the end nothing came of her hopes.53 Orders were issued against John to appear in court because of bad debt.54
In 1897 Emily returned to England for a while to visit her family. She had a wedding dress with her and during this period John visited her and the family in Britain, but little is known about this visit.55
Early in 1898, with the wedding dress in her suitcase, Emily returned to Mexico as she and John had arranged. Meanwhile a letter from him was on his way to inform her that she had to delay her departure, but it failed to reach her in time.56
In Mexico there was no trace of John. Within a few weeks Emily was on her way home, heading for London and the home of Uncle Arthur and Aunt Mary.
Amid all this uncertainty and to-and-fro travelling, Emily lost the farm in Mexico too. It is not clear what had gone wrong, but there is a strong suspicion that John had abused Emily financially. Maybe he never really intended to marry her. Emily, however, had been genuinely in love, had wanted to marry him and had believed the marriage would take place. She never wrote about this pain in documents that are still extant.
Yet there was one item that Emily preserved for the rest of her life: the bridal veil she never wore. It is made of the finest lace.
3
A vision that grows like a seed
“The constantly renewed picture of women and children homeless, desperate and distressed, formed and fixed itself in my mind and never once left me.”
– Emily Hobhouse in her draft autobiography, 1900
“The case for intervention is overwhelming …”
According to a report in the morning paper from which Emily read aloud to Lord and Lady Hobhouse at the breakfast table on a summer morning in 1899, these were the words of Sir Alfred Milner, Governor of the Cape Colony and the British High Commissioner in South Africa, in a telegram to Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary.57 “That means war in my opinion,” was Lord Hobhouse’s sombre comment. Everyone at the breakfast table was upset about the “dark cloud of war” that had been in the news in Britain throughout the summer.
While Emily found the news of an impending war “incredible”, she realised that it seemed unavoidable. Nevertheless, this was a period of calm and peace in her life during which she undertook long walks with her uncle and his dog Meg, and went on excursions with her aunt in the horse-drawn carriage. The childless couple treated Emily like their own child, but she wrote that she “never found it easy to talk to them very confidentially”.58
Because Lord Hobhouse served on the Judicial Committee of the government’s Privy Council, he was not at liberty to express his views publicly – including his opposition to the looming war in South Africa.
The tensions in South Africa had had a long run-up. After the First War of Independence (16 December 1880 – 23 March 1881) between Britain and the South African Republic or Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR), also known as the Transvaal, the Transvaal was returned to the Boers, or burghers,59 and they obtained limited self-government.60 The British still retained control with regard to foreign policy and legislation pertaining to black people, but in 1884 greater internal independence was granted to the Transvaal.61 After gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand in 1886, however, everything changed, and so-called Uitlanders (foreigners), most of whom were British subjects, flocked to the Transvaal. Before long they started demanding voting rights and a say in the mines,62 and claimed that they were “oppressed by the Boers”.63
Cecil John Rhodes, who dreamt of a united South Africa under the British flag, became prime minister of the Cape Colony in 1890. The territory referred to as South Africa was already surrounded by British colonies. Rhodes sought control of the gold mines, and the only way of achieving this was to invade the Transvaal in the hope that the Uitlanders would be incited to rebel.
Rhodes’s friend Leander Starr Jameson and his mercenaries, as well as a number of Uitlanders, invaded the Transvaal over the New Year period in 1895/96 via the then Bechuanaland (Botswana). The Boers defeated the invaders before they could reach Johannesburg, but the “Jameson Raid” was a final blow to the trust between Boer and Briton.64
Although Rhodes had to resign as prime minister, his image was untarnished in Britain.65 Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary and an avowed imperialist, had evidently supported the Jameson Raid.66 Annexing the Boer republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal and unifying them with the Cape and Natal in a South Africa under British rule would be the jewel in the imperialist crown, with the British flag flying from Cape to Cairo.67
In response, the Afrikaners became increasingly nationalist and started attaching greater value to their identity. More and more Afrikaners in the Cape Colony began to support their northern kinfolk in their anti-British sentiment. The Uitlanders, meanwhile, started giving stronger expression to their grievances. They claimed to constitute the majority of the white population of the ZAR, and through a petition they called on Britain to help them achieve equal rights, particularly voting rights.68
Chamberlain