The
War and the Prophets (2)
An
Introduction by Postage Stamp
My son Tom was a stamp collector as a boy. (He is now a philatelist.) One of the South
African stamps he acquired intrigued me.
It was a commemorative honoring Emily Hobhouse. I’d never heard of her, but I set about
reading everything I could find about her life.
The more that I learned about her, the more I wanted to know.
For a long time I hoped to write her biography. Eventually Jennifer Hobhouse Balme, who had
inherited a treasure trove of Emily’s letters and other papers, published To Love One’s Enemies: The Work and Life of
Emily Hobhouse (1994).
Emily Hobhouse was born in 1860 in a village in
Cornwall where her father was the Church of England rector. In 1895 she went to the United States to work
at an Episcopal Church mission in Minnesota.
Three years later she returned to England. When politicians and newspaper editors were
crying up a war with the little Republic of Transvaal in South Africa, Emily
helped form the South Africa Conciliation Committee. When war finally came in 1899, she continued
speaking and writing against it.
Aware that women and children were the principal
sufferers, Emily created the South African War Distress Fund for Women and
Children to “feed, clothe, shelter, rescue and help without wounding
self-respect” women and children “affected by the War, irrespective of
Nationality or race.” She wanted aid to
be distributed by women, not by the army or a government agency, and went to
South Africa in 1900 to make arrangements herself.
What she found there changed all her plans. As the war in South Africa became a guerrilla
war (like the war in Vietnam), the British army began a policy of burning farm
buildings and forcibly relocating all civilians to concentration camps.
Emily Hobhouse visited the camps and was appalled by
conditions there where overcrowding, poor food, and lack of sanitation led to a
terrible death rate especially among children.
She worked tirelessly in South Africa and in Britain
to expose and reverse this evil policy.
After the war was over, Emily returned to South
Africa to set up relief for people who were repatriated only to find their homes, barns, farming equipment, and
livestock gone.
Emily’s concern for the young women who were living
in poverty on devastated farms led to her next idea. The South African Women’s and Children’s
Distress Fund was transformed into The Boer Home Industries and Aid
Society. Under its auspices she returned
to South Africa to set up weaving schools.
With some 26 such schools functioning by the end of 1908, she returned
to England.
Emily Hobhouse was invited back to South Africa in
1913 to unveil a monument at the site of the former Blomfontein camp.to the
women and children who bore the brunt of the war.
This is an introduction to the next chapters in her story.
