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Historical Parallel: Emily Hobhouse -- Documenting the Camps

Published by: Mortui Vivos Docent Intelligence Project
Last Updated: 2026-02-11
Confidence: HIGH (extensively documented historical figure, multiple academic and archival sources)

Who Was Emily Hobhouse?

Emily Hobhouse was born on 9 April 1860 in the rectory of St Ive (pronounced "Eve"), near Liskeard, Cornwall, England. She was the daughter of Reginald Hobhouse, an Anglican rector and the first Archdeacon of Bodmin, and Caroline Trelawny, daughter of Sir William Salusbury-Trelawny -- one of the oldest and richest families in Cornwall. Her brother, Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse, would become a prominent liberal philosopher and social thinker.

She was the fifth of six children, educated mainly by governesses with only two terms at a boarding school. Her mother died young, and Emily devoted the first 35 years of her life to caring for her ailing father at his rectory. It was not until his death in 1895 that she was free to pursue her own life.

After his death, she spent two years in Minnesota, doing temperance work among Cornish tin miners struggling with alcoholism. She became engaged to John Carr Jackson, a merchant, and moved to Mexico to buy a ranch. The engagement collapsed, her money was lost in speculation, and she returned to London in 1898 -- poorer but harder.

She was not a radical by birth. She was not trained in investigation. She was a vicar's daughter from Cornwall who simply could not look away.

When the Second Boer War broke out in October 1899, Liberal MP Leonard Courtney invited Hobhouse to become secretary of the women's branch of the South African Conciliation Committee. She learned of the British military's scorched-earth campaign and the camps being established to hold displaced Boer civilians. In October 1900, she founded the South African Women and Children Distress Fund -- "to feed, clothe, harbour and save women and children -- Boer, English and other -- who were left destitute and ragged as a result of the destruction of property."

On 7 December 1900, at age 40, she sailed for South Africa. She went to see for herself.

The Second Boer War Concentration Camps

The Policy

From 1899 to 1902, the Second Anglo-Boer War pitted the British Empire against the two Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. When conventional military tactics failed against Boer guerrilla fighters, the British turned to a strategy of total destruction.

Lord Kitchener implemented a scorched-earth policy. Every farmhouse that could shelter Boer guerrillas was burned. Crops were destroyed. Livestock was slaughtered. Wells were poisoned. Fruit trees were cut down. In some cases dynamite was used to demolish buildings. Nearly 30,000 Boer homesteads were razed to the ground. The entire civilian population was then "concentrated" into camps -- ostensibly for their own protection, actually to deny the Boer guerrillas any civilian support base.

The Term "Concentration Camp"

The term "concentration camp" entered the English language through these British camps. While the Spanish had used the concept (campo de reconcentracion) during the Cuban War of Independence in 1896, it was the British camps in South Africa -- the forced "concentration" of a civilian population into a confined area under military guard -- that cemented the term in global consciousness. The Nazis would later adopt this same term, euphemistically, to conceal the nature of their own camps.

The Camps: Scale and Conditions

The British built 45 camps for white Boer civilians and 64 camps for Black Africans. At their peak, the camps held approximately 116,000 white inmates and 115,000 Black inmates. The camps were poorly conceived and managed, located near railway lines and military bases for logistical convenience with insufficient regard for the welfare of the people inside them.

Conditions were appalling:

  • No shelter for new arrivals. People "went to sleep without any provision having been made for them and without anything to eat or to drink."
  • Crowds along railway lines "in bitterly cold weather, in pouring rain -- hungry, sick, dying and dead."
  • No soap. When Hobhouse complained, she was told: "Soap is an article of luxury."
  • Inadequate water supply. No bedsteads or mattresses were available.
  • Starvation rations. Weekly rations for a woman and three children consisted of "two small tins of bully-beef, 1 lb. of unroasted coffee, 7 lbs. of flour, and 3 1/2 lbs. of mealies." No soap, candles, or matches were allowed as rations.
  • Punitive food reduction. Families of men still fighting were classified as "undesirables" and placed on the lowest rations -- a deliberate policy of collective punishment.
  • Fuel so scarce that inmates had to gather green bushes from the hillsides themselves.
  • Rampant disease. Measles, bronchitis, pneumonia, dysentery, and typhoid swept through the overcrowded, unsanitary camps.
  • No milk for children unless they were already ill -- and even then, condensed milk was served out diluted and quickly became sour.

The Deaths

White (Boer) Camps:
- 27,927 Boers died in the camps
- Of these, 22,074 were children under 16 -- roughly 50% of the entire Boer child population
- An additional 4,177 women and 1,676 men (mainly elderly) died
- At peak mortality (October 1901), the death rate reached 344 per 1,000 per year
- The infant death rate reached 629 per 1,000 -- measles alone killed at staggering rates
- That means nearly 1 in 4 inmates died
- 81% of total deaths were children

Black African Camps:
- Official count: 14,154 deaths
- Actual estimate: up to 20,000 deaths (researcher G. Benneyworth's graveyard analysis; records were barely kept)
- Little attempt was made to document who lived or who died among the 107,000 Black inmates
- 81% of recorded deaths were children
- In December 1901 alone, 2,831 Black deaths were recorded in a single month
- Conditions were worse than the white camps. Black inmates received fewer rations, less medical care, and were expected to grow their own food or exchange labor for mealie meal
- The Black camps functioned as forced labor reserves for the British Army and gold mines
- Improvements were much slower to reach the Black camps
- The Fawcett Commission -- sent to investigate conditions -- completely ignored the Black camps

Combined toll: approximately 28,000 Boer deaths + up to 20,000 Black deaths = up to 48,000 dead in British concentration camps. Over 60% of total wartime deaths were civilians.

The case of Lizzie van Zyl became emblematic. A seven-year-old girl, she was deported with her mother to the Bloemfontein camp. Because her father refused to surrender, they were classified as "undesirables" and given the lowest rations. Lizzie was separated from her mother and sent to the infirmary. She died on 9 May 1901, weighing approximately 6.8 kilograms -- 15 pounds. She was seven years old.

A witness recorded seeing children in the camps whose emaciation "could only be matched by the famine-stricken people of India." Another mother asked Hobhouse to photograph her child because she thought it could not live long. By the time Hobhouse reached the tent, the child had already died.

Hobhouse's Investigation

Emily Hobhouse's methodology, viewed through a modern lens, is recognizable as open-source intelligence work combined with field investigation. She was, in essence, the first civilian concentration camp investigator.

Gaining Access

Hobhouse used her social connections strategically. She had a letter of introduction to Lord Alfred Milner (British High Commissioner in South Africa) through her aunt, the widow of the Permanent Under Secretary at the Home Office. When she left England, she only knew about the concentration camp at Port Elizabeth -- she learned on arrival that 34 camps were in operation.

From Milner she obtained the use of two railway trucks for supplies. Lord Kitchener's permission followed two weeks later, though he restricted her to Bloemfontein and limited her to one truck of supplies (about 12 tons). She entered the camps through a humanitarian cover -- distributing aid supplies -- which gave her legitimate reason to be present and to move tent to tent. This is a methodology still used today: humanitarian access as intelligence access.

She left Cape Town on 22 January 1901 and arrived at Bloemfontein two days later.

Field Documentation

On 24 January 1901, Hobhouse arrived at the Bloemfontein camp, finding approximately 1,800 people crammed into an open stretch of barren veld, two miles from town, without a single tree for shade or shelter. The thermometer read 95 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. The camp, she wrote, was "a vast space, almost like a deer park, on a slope, with much long coarse grass" -- and it had "become unmanageably large."

Once inside, she conducted systematic observation and testimony collection:

  1. Tent-to-tent surveys. She moved through the camps daily, documenting conditions in each tent she visited. When "eight, ten or twelve people who lived in the bell tent were squeezed into it...there was no room to stir."
  2. First-person testimony. She collected detailed accounts from Boer women about how they were brought to the camps, what had been destroyed, and what conditions they faced. These testimonies would later fill her book War Without Glamour.
  3. Statistical tracking. She counted rations, measured supply shortfalls, documented disease outbreaks and death rates.
  4. Individual case documentation. She recorded individual cases in detail -- names, ages, conditions, causes of death. The emaciated four-year-old boy. Lizzie van Zyl. Specific, named victims.
  5. Supply chain analysis. She documented not just the conditions but the systemic causes -- the scorched-earth policy, the deliberate destruction of farms, the punitive ration reductions for "undesirable" families.
  6. Photographic evidence. She annotated images of camp conditions, which were later published in The Brunt of the War and Where it Fell (1902).
  7. Repeat visits. After Bloemfontein, she visited camps at Norvalspont, Aliwal North, Springfontein, Kimberley, and Orange River -- and returned to document how conditions had deteriorated -- providing temporal evidence of a worsening crisis rather than a static snapshot.

The Report

Her 40-page "Report of a Visit to the Camps of Women and Children in the Cape and Orange River Colonies" was completed and tabled in the Westminster Parliament in June 1901. It documented overcrowding, lack of sanitation, inadequate food, rampant disease, and systemic neglect. It was not polemic. It was evidence.

The Reporting Chain

Hobhouse's distribution strategy mirrors modern OSINT publication methodology:

  1. Raw field report to the South African Conciliation Committee (June 1901)
  2. Direct political engagement: Personal interviews with Secretary of War W. St. John Brodrick and Liberal leader Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman
  3. Political amplification: Campbell-Bannerman took her findings to Parliament, delivering his famous "methods of barbarism" speech at a dinner of the National Reform Union at Holborn on 14 June 1901: "When is a war not a war? When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa."
  4. Networked distribution: She sent her report to multiple politicians including George Robinson, 1st Marquess of Ripon
  5. Public publication: Her book The Brunt of the War and Where it Fell (1902) put the evidence before the general public
  6. Primary source archive: War Without Glamour collected first-person testimonies from Boer women

What Makes This OSINT

Hobhouse did not have classified access. She did not steal documents. She walked into camps that the British government had built, looked at what was there, talked to the people being held, wrote down what she saw, and published it. She used public access and social networks to get into position. She used systematic observation and testimony collection to build evidence. She used political and media channels to amplify findings.

This is open-source intelligence. She just didn't have a name for it yet.

The Government's Response

The British government's response to Emily Hobhouse is a textbook study in how states retaliate against documenters of state violence. Every tool they used in 1901 has a modern equivalent.

Character Assassination

Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain dismissed her as "a hysterical spinster of mature age" -- reducing her systematic evidence to emotional instability. The gendered dismissal was not incidental: it was the primary weapon. She was not wrong, she was hysterical. She was not documenting evidence, she was being emotional.

Lord Kitchener called her "that bloody woman."

Pro-war newspapers published scathing attacks. Imperial supporters denounced her as a traitor for "aiding the enemy." The framing was clear: documenting your government's crimes is treason.

Parliamentary Indifference

When Hobhouse brought her evidence to Parliament, the vast majority of MPs showed little sympathy. The government won the parliamentary debate by a margin of 252 to 149. She wrote of the experience:

"The picture of apathy and impatience displayed here, which refused to lend an ear to undeserved misery, contrasted sadly with the scenes of misery in South Africa, still fresh in my mind. No barbarity in South Africa was as severe as the bleak cruelty of an apathetic parliament."

Physical Exclusion

When Hobhouse attempted to return to South Africa in October 1901, the government moved to physically prevent her from reaching the camps again.

She sailed on the SS Avondale on 5 October 1901, keeping quiet about her return because she had been refused permission to revisit the camps. Four days after she departed, martial law was extended to Cape Colony -- whether by coincidence or design, this gave the authorities additional powers to block her.

When the Avondale arrived in Table Bay on 27 October 1901, a British officer's launch was already heading toward the ship. Every one of the 450 passengers was examined, with Hobhouse deliberately held for last. When she finally met the officer, she was told she was under arrest and would be sent back to England.

She refused to leave voluntarily. She was held aboard ship for five days, denied permission to set foot on South African soil, and then forcibly carried in a chair onto another vessel bound for England. No official reason was given.

She had been banned from the scene of the crimes she was documenting.

The Counter-Investigation: The Fawcett Commission

Rather than address the substance of Hobhouse's findings, the government deployed a classic counter-narrative strategy: they sent their own investigators.

In August 1901, the government established the Fawcett Commission -- six prominent women led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett, a pro-war Liberal Unionist and vocal critic of Hobhouse. Fawcett was carefully chosen as a "safe pair of hands" to provide an "impartial, female perspective" that would neutralize the impact of one inconvenient woman's testimony.

Three critical facts about the Fawcett Commission:

  1. Hobhouse was deliberately excluded. She was not invited to participate, despite being the person who had uncovered the crisis.
  2. The Commission confirmed her findings. Between August and December 1901, the Fawcett Commission conducted its own tour of the camps -- and, to their own evident discomfort, produced a report "highly critical of the camps and their administration" that substantiated "the most serious of Emily Hobhouse's charges." Their recommendations -- improved rations, water purification, sanitation measures, additional nurses -- were strikingly similar to what Hobhouse had called for months earlier.
  3. The Commission completely ignored the Black camps. The 64 Black concentration camps holding 115,000 people were not investigated. When the Aborigines Protection Society requested the government investigate conditions for Black inmates, Sir Montagu Ommaney, the permanent under-secretary at the Colonial Office, dismissed the request, calling the Society's secretary "this busybody."

Hobhouse was never credited in the Fawcett Commission's report. She herself noted the omission of the Black camps. She later pointed to the thousands of camp deaths that occurred between the publication of her report in June 1901 and the appearance of Fawcett's in January 1902 -- lives that might have been saved had the government acted on her evidence instead of attacking the woman who brought it.

The Pattern Repeats

During World War I, Hobhouse advocated for peace, organizing the "Open Christmas Letter" to German and Austrian women in January 1915. She was again branded a traitor. The government and much of the public turned against her for the second time.

When she died on 8 June 1926, The Times of London described her as "a propagandist and agitator" and attributed the suffering of the Boers to "the ignorance of the Boers themselves." She remains unrecognized by the British state. She died branded a traitor for telling the truth about children dying in government custody.

Impact and Legacy

Despite every effort to silence her, Hobhouse's documentation changed material conditions and saved lives.

Immediate Impact

  • Campbell-Bannerman's "methods of barbarism" speech (June 1901) turned the camps into a national scandal. Lloyd George openly accused the government of "a policy of extermination" against the Boer population.
  • The Fawcett Commission (August-December 1901), despite being designed to discredit Hobhouse, confirmed her findings and recommended sweeping improvements in diet, medical facilities, and sanitation.
  • Camp administration was transferred from the military to civilian authorities under Lord Milner in November 1901. Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain ordered Milner to ensure that "all possible steps are being taken to reduce the rate of mortality."
  • The death rate collapsed. By January 1902, the mortality rate had dropped to 160 per 1,000 per year. By February, it was 69. By May, it was 20. By the end of the war, the death rate had fallen below the peacetime rate.
  • Death rates in Black camps improved more slowly, reflecting the structural racism that had kept them invisible in the first place.

Post-War

  • Hobhouse returned to South Africa after the war to help with reconstruction. With Margaret Clark, she set up The Boer Home Industries in 1908, teaching young women spinning, weaving, and lace making -- practical economic recovery for communities that had been destroyed.
  • She worked on reconciliation between Boer and British communities.
  • Her books -- The Brunt of the War and Where it Fell (1902) and War Without Glamour -- became the definitive records of the camp system.

Legacy in South Africa

Emily Hobhouse is a beloved national figure in South Africa:

  • Honorary citizenship of South Africa -- granted for her humanitarian work.
  • The National Women's Monument (Vrouemonument) in Bloemfontein, unveiled 16 December 1913, was built to honor the women and children who died in the camps. The central bronze sculpture group -- depicting two sorrowing women and a dying child -- was designed from Hobhouse's own sketch based on what she witnessed at the Springfontein camp on 15 May 1901. Approximately 20,000 mourners attended the unveiling.
  • Hobhouse was invited to officiate at the unveiling but fell ill during the journey and had to turn back at Beaufort-West. Her speech was read by others. In it, she urged the Afrikaner people to forgive: "Because you can afford it."
  • Her ashes were interred in a niche at the base of the National Women's Monument in October 1926 -- laid to rest alongside President M.T. Steyn and General C.R. de Wet. Tens of thousands of mourners, both Black and white, attended -- the greatest farewell ever accorded to a non-South African.
  • A town named Hobhouse exists in the Eastern Free State.
  • The oldest campus residence at the University of the Free State is named after her.
  • She is called "the Angel of Love" by Boer descendants.
  • In 1921, the people of South Africa raised 2,300 pounds and sent it to Hobhouse with the explicit mandate that she buy a home along the coast of Cornwall. She purchased a house at St. Ives.
  • The journalist Elsabe Brits later tracked down Hobhouse's personal papers in a trunk on Vancouver Island, Canada -- diaries, letters, scrapbooks, photographs -- and published the biography Emily Hobhouse: Beloved Traitor (2016).

The Invisible Victims -- A Legacy Still Unfinished

Hobhouse herself recognized that her work was incomplete. At the 1913 monument unveiling, she spoke words that are now inscribed at the Garden of Remembrance:

"Does not justice bid us remember today how many thousands of the dark race perished also in Concentration Camps in a quarrel which was not theirs?"

Academic study of the Black concentration camps did not begin until the 1980s -- more than 80 years after the camps were closed. The erasure Hobhouse protested continued for generations.

Why We Tell This Story

This section draws explicit connections between Emily Hobhouse's work in 1901 and the documentation work of Mortui Vivos Docent in 2026. These parallels are not metaphorical. They are structural.

Documenting Deaths in Government Custody

Then: The British government confined civilians in camps where they died of disease, malnutrition, and neglect. The government called them "refugee camps." Emily Hobhouse went to see for herself, counted the dead, named the victims, and published the evidence.

Now: The United States government confines people in detention facilities where they die of medical neglect, abuse, and despair. The government calls them "processing centers." We document the dead, name the victims, and publish the evidence.

The mechanism is the same: concentration of vulnerable populations under state control, in conditions that kill, with official language designed to obscure what is happening.

The Government Calls Documenters "Traitors"

Then: Hobhouse was called "that bloody woman," a traitor, a hysterical spinster, a propagandist. She was physically deported from South Africa -- forcibly carried off a ship in a chair. She was banned from returning to the scene of the crimes. Joseph Chamberlain dismissed her evidence as emotional instability.

Now: People who document ICE detention conditions are called threats to national security, enemies of immigration enforcement, traitors. They are surveilled, arrested, silenced. Their evidence is dismissed as partisan propaganda.

The label changes. The function is identical: delegitimize the documenter to avoid addressing the documentation.

The Invisible Victims

Then: 28,000 Boers died and the world was outraged. Up to 20,000 Black Africans died in separate, worse camps and nobody investigated. The Fawcett Commission ignored them entirely. Academic study of the Black camps didn't begin until the 1980s.

Now: Deaths that generate media attention are disproportionately those of people with visibility, connections, citizenship. The quiet deaths of people without documentation, without English, without media connections -- these remain invisible unless someone documents them.

The pattern is consistent across 125 years: the deaths of the privileged generate outrage; the deaths of the marginalized are barely recorded.

The Power of Evidence Against Propaganda

Then: The British government sent the Fawcett Commission to discredit Hobhouse. Instead, the Commission confirmed everything she had reported. The evidence was too strong to deny. Conditions improved. The death rate dropped. Lives were saved.

Now: We operate on the same principle. Document systematically. Verify relentlessly. Publish everything. Make the evidence so thorough, so well-sourced, so undeniable that the counter-narrative collapses under its own weight. Hobhouse's 40-page report forced Parliament to act. Our dossiers serve the same function: evidence that cannot be ignored.

The Document Outlives the Documenter

Then: Emily Hobhouse was deported, banned, slandered, and dismissed. She died branded a traitor by her own country. But her report survived. Her book survived. Her testimony survived. Today she is honored as a national heroine in South Africa, and her evidence is the primary historical record of what happened in those camps.

Now: We build evidence designed to survive the silencing of any individual. The dossiers are distributed. The sources are verified. The methodology is documented. The work continues regardless of what happens to any one person.

Hobhouse built the evidence to outlast her own reputation. We build the evidence to outlast our own freedom.

The Moral Clarity

Then: Hobhouse declared: "It was no personal link that brought me hither. Neither did political sympathy of any kind prompt my journey. I came -- quite simply -- in obedience to the solidarity of our Womanhood and to those nobler traditions of English life in which I was nurtured."

Now: This is not about being pro-immigrant or anti-American. It is about the simple principle that people should not die in government custody while the government pretends it isn't happening.

Hobhouse didn't need to be "pro-Boer" to know that starving children to death was wrong. You don't need to hold any particular political position to know that preventable deaths in government custody are wrong.

Key Quotes

Emily Hobhouse -- On What She Witnessed

"I saw crowds of them along railway lines in bitterly cold weather, in pouring rain -- hungry, sick, dying and dead."

"It was a dear little chap of four, and nothing left of him except his great brown eyes and white teeth from which the lips were drawn back, too thin to close. His body was emaciated."

"The population had redoubled and had swallowed up the results of improvements that had been effected. Disease was on the increase and the sight of the people made the impression of utter misery. Illness and death had left their marks on the faces of the inhabitants. Many that I had left hale and hearty, of good appearance and physically fit, had undergone such a change that I could hardly recognize them."

"When the eight, ten or twelve people who lived in the bell tent were squeezed into it...there was no room to stir."

On Parliamentary Indifference

"No barbarity in South Africa was as severe as the bleak cruelty of an apathetic parliament."

On the Invisible Victims

"Does not justice bid us remember today how many thousands of the dark race perished also in Concentration Camps in a quarrel which was not theirs?"

On Liberty and Justice

"Be merciful towards the weak, the down-trodden, the stranger. Do not open your gates to those worst foes of freedom -- tyranny and selfishness. Are not these the with-holding from others in your control, the very liberties and rights which you have valued and won for yourselves?"

"We in England are ourselves still but dunces in the great world-school, our leaders still struggling with the unlearned lesson, that liberty is the equal right and heritage of every child of man, without distinction of race, colour or sex."

What Others Said Because of Her

"When is a war not a war? When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa."
-- Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Liberal leader, 14 June 1901

Lloyd George accused the government of "a policy of extermination" directed against the Boer population.

Sources

Primary and Archival

  • Hobhouse, Emily. "Report of a Visit to the Camps of Women and Children in the Cape and Orange River Colonies" (1901). UK National Archives, Catalogue ref: WO 32/8061
  • Hobhouse, Emily. The Brunt of the War and Where it Fell (1902)
  • Hobhouse, Emily. War Without Glamour (collected testimonies)
  • Hobhouse, Emily. "Women's Memorial Inauguration Speech: 'Vrouwen-dag'" (16 December 1913). Cape Town: Atlas Printing Works
  • Campbell-Bannerman papers, "Notes on South Africa." British Library, Add MS 41243 A
  • Ripon Papers, British Library, Add MS 43638

Academic and Historical

  • Seibold, Birgit Susanne. Emily Hobhouse and the Reports on the Concentration Camps during the Boer War, 1899-1902: Two Different Perspectives. Columbia University Press
  • Spies, Stephen Burridge. Methods of Barbarism: Roberts and Kitchener and Civilians in the Boer Republics (1977)
  • Van Heyningen, Elizabeth. The Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War: A Social History. Oxford Academic
  • Brits, Elsabe. Emily Hobhouse: Beloved Traitor (2016)
  • Kessler, Stowell. Research on Black camp deaths (2003)
  • Benneyworth, G. Research on Black camp graveyards and death toll estimates
  • University of Warwick, Centre for the History of Medicine. "Morbidity and Mortality in the Concentration Camps of the South African War (1899-1902)"

Web Sources (accessed 2026-02-11)

Published by Mortui Vivos Docent Intelligence Project
"We acknowledge the past. We focus on the present. We document for the future."

"No barbarity in South Africa was as severe as the bleak cruelty of an apathetic parliament."

She documented. They retaliated. The evidence survived. The dead were remembered.

That is the work. Then and now.