Emily Hobhouse's Peace Mission, 1916

Few British women can have been so often termed a traitor as Emily Hobhouse, although she was never formally charged with treason. In 1901, returning from a tour of the South Africa war zone, where she had distributed privately-funded relief supplies, Miss Hobhouse condemned the concentration camps into which the British army had herded Boer civilians as hardly better than the 'Black Hole of Calcutta'. Her poignant description of the mismanaged camps evoked a wave of indignation among humanitarians, dissident politicians and pro-Boers which moved the Salisbury Government to ameliorate the plight of the inmates.1 For her appeal to the conscience of the British, Emily Hobhouse was reviled as an unpatriotic busybody and an enemy sympathizer.2 At the same time, anti-war Liberals as well as radicals and proBoers joined her in protesting against the poor food, inadequate shelter and disease in the concentration camps. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the Leader of the Opposition, condemned farm-burning and the camps as barbaric and needless punitive acts. Among radicals, Irish nationalists and humanitarians, Miss Hobhouse was lionized as the embodiment of imperial decency. In short, while those supporting the war impugned her honesty, those who, like Henry Labouchere, opposed the war generally defended her denunciations of the conduct of the British military and civil authorities in South Africa.3

Geochemistry · Political science · Geology · Irish and British Studies