On this day in 1860, Emily Hobhouse was born in Liskeard, Cornwall. She would go on to fight many a fight for the Boer families in the British concentration camps during the second Anglo-Boer War.
When the Second Boer War broke out in South Africa in October 1899, a Liberal MP, Leonard Courtney, invited her to become secretary of the women’s branch of the South African Conciliation Committee, of which he was president. She founded the Distress Fund for South African Women and Children, and sailed for the Cape Colony on 7 December 1900 to supervise the distribution of its funds, and arrived on 27 December. When she left England, she only knew about the concentration camp at Port Elizabeth, but on arrival found out about the many others – 45 in total.
As the secretary of the South African Conciliation Committee, Emily visited concentration camps set up by the British in the Orange Free State (now Free State) and the Transvaal. Horrified by the ghastly conditions in these camps, she was instrumental in a campaign to send Dame Millicent Fawcett to investigate the situation.
Concerned with the plight of suffering Boer families in the concentration camps, Emily was also concerned with the Indian situation, and reportedly assisted Mahatma Gandhi in his passive resistance campaigns.
Today, Emily is celebrated as a humanitarian who fought for the rights of South African families, both black and white, during the Anglo-Boer War. Therefore she was asked to be present at the unveiling of the Woman’s Monument in Bloemfontein in 1913, and it is there that her ashes were scattered after she passed away in 1926.
The southernmost town in Eastern Free State is named Hobhouse after her.The SAS Emily Hobhouse, one of the South African Navy’s three Daphné class submarines, was also named after her in 1969, but in 1994, after the end of minority rule, it was renamed the SAS Umkhonto.
Information courtesy of: http://bit.ly/2IkaoAx and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Hobhouse.
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