emily hobhouse

Human Rights

1860–1926

Suggested by Judith Whitehouse, Martin Rich, Bryan Hammond, Rachael McLean, Natalie Thomas and Sam Kendall  

Emily Hobhouse was a Cornish campaigner, feminist, and pacifist best known for bringing the conditions in British concentration camps in South Africa, built to incarcerate African and Boer civilians during the Second Boer War, to the attention of the British public.

Emily was the daughter of Caroline Trelawny & Reginald Hobhouse, Archdeacon of Bodmin. Her brother, Leonard was a pacifist and proponent of social liberalism, and Emily’s work influenced her second cousin, peace activist Stephen Hobhouse. Emily’s mother died when she was 20. She looked after her father for 14 years until he died in 1895 when she went to Minnesota to do welfare work for Cornish mineworkers.

After an unsuccessful engagement in America, Emily returned to England and in 1897, was invited to be secretary for the women’s branch of the South African Conciliation Committee, receiving information about the suffering of women and children as a result of British military operations.

At the outbreak of the South African War in 1899, Emily was an outspoken critic of the British government. She travelled to Capetown in 1900, intending to distribute supplies to a number of concentration camps. Here, she witnessed the true scale of suffering that she felt could only be rectified through putting pressure on government at home. She returned to England where inspite of hostility towards her, she obtained further funds to help Boer civilians and The Fawcett Commission was set up to investigate her claims, which corroborated her account of the shocking conditions.

In 1901 she returned to Cape Town where she was not permitted to land and was deported, no reason being given. In the following year Emily wrote her book, “The Brunt of the War and Where it Fell” on what she had witnessed in South Africa. She continued humanitarian work in South Africa after the end of the Second Boer War and campaigned against the First World War.

womenincornwall.org
hypatia-trust.org.uk