Emily Hobhouse: Beloved Traitor. Elsabé Brits
High Commissioner, to meet the ZAR president Paul Kruger in Bloemfontein in May 1899 to discuss these problems. President MT (Theunis) Steyn of the Orange Free State, who wanted to avert war at all cost, had invited them to a conference in Bloemfontein to sort out their differences. But Milner was adamant; he wanted to force Kruger to grant Uitlanders the franchise after five years’ residence.69 Kruger refused, and insisted on a period of seven years. In addition, he demanded compensation for the Jameson Raid and that Swaziland be incorporated into the Transvaal.
On 5 June 1899 Milner broke off the negotations70 and subsequently sent the infamous and emotionally laden telegram to Chamberlain in which he stated inter alia that the Uitlanders were little more than slaves: “The case for intervention is overwhelming … The spectacle of thousands of British subjects kept permanently in the position of helots, constantly chafing under undoubted grievances, and calling vainly to Her Majesty’s Government for redress, does steadily undermine the influence and reputation of Great Britain …”71
Chamberlain’s intention had been to harden the hearts of the British at home against Kruger, but when the president did agree later to give the Uitlanders the franchise after five years’ residence on condition that Britain refrained from further interference in the ZAR’s affairs, Chamberlain conceded nothing.72
On 8 September 1899 England sent 10 000 soldiers to Natal. Chamberlain reckoned that the Boer forces were only a “paper tiger”, and that this show of force would trick Kruger into returning to the negotiating table. He considered it unlikely that war would break out, but if it happened, the British soldiers would already be in position.73
When Kruger heard about the troops the following day, he accepted that war was inevitable. Jan Smuts, the 29-year old State Attorney of the Transvaal Republic, shared his view. Later that month the press reported that a further 47 000 troops were being sent from England to invade the Transvaal on 28 September. The Transvaal as well as the Free State, which threw in its weight with its natural ally, rapidly started mobilising their forces.74
On 9 October the ZAR issued an ultimatum to Britain: Withdraw the troops who are already here from South Africa, those who are on their way may not disembark, and let there be arbitration. Britain was given 48 hours to respond. The British government, supported by the British public who were indignant about the ultimatum, rejected it.
Emily saw a poster of the ultimatum displayed on Trafalgar Square, and realised that the last hope of peace was gone: “It sounded the death knell of tens of thousands of people completely innocent of its cause and it bore within it seeds of things worse than death for England,” she wrote about this moment on the square.
Behind it she saw a motive for the stoking of the conflict: an “appetite for gold and territory”.75
The Anglo-Boer War76 (also known as the South African War or the Second War of Independence) broke out on 11 October 1899.77 The next day, the first skirmish took place at Kraaipan between Vryburg and Mafeking when a Boer force of 800 men under the command of General Koos de la Rey captured a British garrison that had surrendered after a five-hour-long fight.
Three weeks after the outbreak of the war, the South African Conciliation Committee was launched in England by liberal Britons who opposed the war. The president of the committee was the 67-year-old Leonard Courtney, later Lord Courtney of Penwith, who was a seasoned politician and a former Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons.78 His constituency was Liskeard in Cornwall, not far from St Ive where Emily had grown up. His wife Catherine (Kate), too, immediately became actively involved in the committee. The chairman of the executive was Frederick Mackarness, previously a judge in the Cape Colony and now a Liberal MP. Another prominent member of the executive was the Marquess of Ripon, a politician, while his wife Marchioness Ripon was a staunch supporter of their work.
Emily knew the Courtneys because Kate (née Potter) was the sister of her cousin Henry Hobhouse V’s wife Margaret. Another sister of Kate was the famous social reformer Beatrice Webb. Emily was soon drawn into the work of the committee, which aimed to distribute truthful information about the war and to advocate the necessity of friendly relations between people of Dutch and English extraction in South Africa. They wanted to see a peaceful settlement instead of the “deplorable conflict” that had already started.79 Emily “committed herself wholeheartedly” to the anti-war cause in a country engulfed by “war fever”. Several meetings took place at the London home of Lord and Lady Hobhouse at 15 Bruton Street, Mayfair. At that stage Emily had already been living for a few months in a flat in Chelsea, 21 Rossetti Garden Mansions.80 Her flat-mate was a young medical student from India, Alice Sorabji, whose family were old friends of Lord and Lady Hobhouse. The flat was very close to the Courtneys’ house in Cheyne Walk, where many committee meetings were held.
On 15 January 1900 the committee’s activities were officially announced. The members declared that they were pacifists and totally opposed to the war. Within a short space of time they received 400 letters of support.81 Emily was the honorary secretary of the committee’s women’s branch. The climate in which they strove to bring their views across was one where “[t]ruth and reason were obscured”, and “this excitability” about the war was “fanned by the press and the pulpit”, she wrote.82
“We are glad if we are but a light burning on a rock in the midst of the flood of jingoism – feeling that ours is the side of justice and of wisdom,” Kate Courtney wrote to Emily’s brother Leonard.83 The jingoes that they were up against were a section of the British population whose understanding of patriotism was that of “my country, right or wrong”. A large proportion of the British press supported this prevailing mindset.
In February Emily attended the congress of the Liberal Party in London. She enjoyed every minute of it – albeit with an important caveat. “Liberals to the right of you, Liberals to the left of you … with no cold Conservative draught anywhere.” What did irk her, however, was that they were such lukewarm Liberals that they had not invited a single woman to address them.
“Is it not to cut off their best arm?” Emily asked, because the women were the ones who supported the Liberal Party and did the hard work, yet they occupied the subordinate positions.84
She decided that the women should play a more prominent role and organise a big protest meeting againt the war. Kate Courtney agreed with her, and it was decided that a mass meeting would be held in the Queen’s Hall. During the six weeks that they had to prepare for the meeting, Emily’s flat in Chelsea became the headquarters where she and other women worked from 8 am, often to 11 pm, to try and mobilise a general resistance against the war.85 On 24 May 1900 the Orange Free State was annexed by Britain, followed by the Transvaal on 5 June, and shortly afterwards martial law was declared.86 The Boer forces did not regard these annexations as legitimate conquests, and embarked on guerilla warfare to continue the struggle.
Lord Roberts, commander-in-chief of the British forces in South Africa, warned in an announcement that Boers who continued fighting would suffer personal losses. If any railway lines or telegraph wires were damaged or disrupted, the houses in the vicinity of the place where the damage was done would be burnt down.
While this was the start of the scorched-earth policy on paper,87 houses had been burnt from as early as March 1900 on Roberts’s instructions if they had been used to shelter Boer commandos.88 In terms of this policy farmhouses with their contents, as well as barns and outbuildings, were burnt down. Farm animals such as sheep, cattle, pigs and chickens were slaughtered. Farmlands and the veld were set alight, while in some cases entire towns were destroyed. By January 1901 this destruction was taking place indiscriminately, and hundreds of farms in the Free State and the Transvaal were left uninhabitable.89 According to Roberts, it was a punitive measure for continued resistance against the new British regime.
Thousands of women from across the country attended the Conciliation Committee’s mass meeting in London to protest against the war, including delegates of the Women’s Liberal Federation. “Our protest was more largely due to our proud desire for England’s honour and our horror lest her rectitude be marred by an unjust act,” Emily wrote.90
That evening in the Queen’s Hall the women passed four resolutions:
1:That this meeting of