Liskeard – born Emily Hobhouse (1860 – 1926) was a welfare activist, feminist and pacifist who came to fame for her work exposing the appalling conditions within British concentration camps during the Second Boer War.

Daughter of Caroline Trelawny and Reginald Hobhouse, the first Archdeacon of Bodmin, she cared for her ill father between 1880 and 1894, after the death of her mother when Emily was twenty. 

Following her father’s death she became a welfare activist amongst the deprived Cornish miners of Minnesota.  With the outbreak of the Second Boer War (October 1899), Leonard Courtney MP (May 11^th), invited Hobhouse to become secretary of the women’s branch of the South African Conciliation Committee.   It was through this that she became aware of the appalling existence of hundreds of Boer women and children in Port Elizabeth who, she wrote, ‘needed protection and organized assistance’. 

On her arrival in South Africa, Hobhouse was appalled to discover the existence of forty-five other concentration camps.  Her report of  ‘A Visit to the Camps of Women and Children in the Cape and Orange River Colonies’ resulted in the formation of a formal commission of investigation headed by Millicent Fawcett which reported that the appallingly unhygienic conditions endured by the 26,000 people in tented confinement, of whom 24,000 were children had resulted in the previous eighteen months of the death of an average of fifty children per day. 

Hobhouse wrote that ‘To keep these Camps going is murder to the children’ and reported, in January 1901, that the prisoners in Bloemfontein ‘went to sleep without any provision having been made for them and without anything to eat or to drink. I saw crowds of them along railway lines in bitterly cold weather, in pouring rain–hungry, sick, dying and dead. Soap was not dispensed. The water supply was inadequate. No bedstead or mattress was procurable. Fuel was scarce and had to be collected from the green bushes on the opes of the kopjes (small hills) by the people themselves. The rations were extremely meagre and when, as I frequently experienced, the actual quantity dispensed fell short of the amount prescribed, it simply meant famine.’  

The ‘hullaballoo’ she created, as termed by Thomas Pakenham, resulted in Kitchener closing the camps to new prisoners which was a cynically tactical decision since it put extra strain and demands on the Boer ‘guerrilla fighters’ but also created a perception in Britain that ‘something was being done’. 

Upon her return to England, Hobhouse was the subject of hostility from the government and scathing criticism in the press.  This increased with her opposition to the First World War especially when she arranged with fellow pacifists the feeding of thousands of women and children for more than a year.  South Africa contributed many thousands of pounds towards this effort, made her an honorary citizen, and contributed to her purchase of a home in St. Ives.  Hobhouse’s death went unreported in the Cornish press but she had been commemorated with the naming of a town in the Eastern Free State and of the oldest students’ hall on the campus of the University of the Free State.  Latterly, Hobhouse has been commemorated by a statue in St. Ives and the film of her life, ‘That Englishwoman’ (1985)

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