Читать книгу Emily Hobhouse: Beloved Traitor - Elsabé Brits - Страница 6

From slave ship to freedom flight

“I envied the boys the special tutors they had, people whose brains they had the right to pick; of whom they might ask questions. I never had anyone to cut my mental teeth upon. School lessons always bored me … They never taught me the things I wanted to know.”

– Emily Hobhouse, 15 years old

A couple from St Ive in Cornwall were taken to court because of “cruelty towards their children”. When the authorities arrived at the house, the mother was distraught at her inability to care for the children because the parents were destitute.

The policeman who had searched the house could find no food anywhere. The children were dirty, thin and starving. A doctor who had examined the children stated that they were badly starved, but had not been ill-treated.1

The next witness was the 31-year-old Emily Hobhouse. She visited the family regularly, she said, and had given them food and milk. She testified that they were poor and neglected. The father was unable to work as he was too weak. She had the deepest sympathy with them. “It would be no use sending them to prison,” she said, “because they would only come out worse prepared to fight life’s battle.”2

The magistrate decided against imprisonment. Emily paid the £10 guarantee for the couple.

Her father, Reginald Hobhouse, was the Archdeacon of Bodmin. She regularly visited the poor in his parish of St Ive and the neighbouring village of Pensilva, five miles from Liskeard in Cornwall in the southwest of England. St Ive (pronounced “eve”) is a tiny village named after Saint Yvo, a bishop who helped convert the English from paganism to Christianity in 1201.3

Emily kept a list of destitute families whom she visited and tried to assist.4 Among other welfare work in the parish, she founded a library and visited the sick on foot because there was no doctor.5 But these activities were not enough for her; she had a yearning to do more, to make a greater difference.

Emily Hobhouse had been born on 9 April 1860 into a position of privilege as a member of the Victorian English upper class. On both sides of her family distinguished people had left their mark.

Her mother, Caroline (born 1820), was a daughter of Sir William Lewis Salusbury Trelawny, the eighth baronet, heir to Harewood House in Calstock, Cornwall.

The first Trelawny who held the title had been made a baronet by Charles I. On Sir William’s death in 1857 he had left a substantial inheritance to his children and his wife, Patience Christian Carpenter. Caroline, Emily’s mother, inherited £10 000 – an enormous sum at the time.6

Caroline, an attractive brown-haired woman with blue eyes, was someone of “distinguished bearing, combined with quick parts and a natural manner of extreme charm. She applied her unusual abilities to the education of her children, shewing herself an indulgent and devoted mother,” Emily wrote about her mother.7

The Hobhouse family’s history can be traced back to 31 August 1686 when John Hobhouse rented a house near the port of Minehead on the Bristol Channel in Somerset. He was married to Anne Maddox, and three of their sons were Henry, Isaac and Benjamin. The family became established in the area, and in 1708 Henry Hobhouse opened a shipbuilding yard in Minehead while his brother Isaac started doing business with merchants in the colony of Virginia in North America. From Bristol the family became involved in shipping as shipowners and merchants, and the males became full citizens who were entitled to vote.8

The firm of Isaac Hobhouse and Company, which accepted Henry Hobhouse I – a son of Benjamin – as an apprentice in 1729, opened the doors of wealth to the family. Isaac traded between Bristol, the west coast of Africa, the West Indies and the “plantation colonies” in America.9 He acquired a large fortune from his commercial interests, which included the slave trade. The ship Greyhound, which belonged to Isaac’s company, transported slaves from West Africa to Virginia, whereafter it would return to England laden with goods.10 In a letter to Isaac reference is made to a ship that “arrives well slaved, I hope shall make a pleasing acc of ’em”.11

This connection with the slave trade was not kept hidden from the family – Emily, too, was aware of it. The family estate and mansion, Hadspen House in Somerset near the village of Bruton, had been purchased by Henry Hobhouse II, an Oxford-educated barrister, in September 1785.

Emily’s paternal grandfather Henry Hobhouse III (1776-1854) and his wife Harriet Turton (1780-1838) had both died before her birth. Henry III had studied law at Oxford like his father, and had been a solicitor to the Treasury and Under-Secretary at the Home Office in London under Sir Robert Peel. He had also served as a magistrate in the countryside.12 By this time the Hobhouses were already a distinguished family.

Emily’s father, Reginald (born 1818), was one of a family of four sons and four daughters. The boys were all educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. Owing to their good education, the boys Henry IV (heir to the Hadspen estate and manor house), Edmund and Arthur all had successful careers.

On completing his studies, Reginald – according to Emily a reserved, humourless, conservative man – became the Anglican rector in the parish of St Ive thanks to Sir Robert Peel, the prime minister for whom his father had worked. (St Ive should not be confused with St Ives, pronounced “eyeves”, on the far southwestern coast of England.) Before his marriage to Caroline, he had lived alone for seven years in a cottage opposite the 14th-century church. The couple had a big rectory built for them about a hundred metres from the church.

Emily was the fifth of six surviving children, and the youngest daughter. The children were Caroline (“Carrie”, born 1854), Alfred (born 1856), Blanche (born 1857), Maud (born 1859), Emily (born 1860) and Leonard (born 1864).

She and her sisters were educated at home by governesses. Mary, Lady Hobhouse, the wife of Emily’s uncle Arthur, Lord Hobhouse, disapproved of one of their governesses. The woman had made Emily stand on a chair as punishment and when Lady Hobhouse heard about this, she gave the governess notice.13

Emily wrote about her earliest memory from those days: “I do not know if the sense of having an ego of one’s own comes to others at a given moment, or grows imperceptibly, but it was when I was three or four years old that I learnt this. I was sent to see the time … I suddenly realised the clock was not me and I was not it but outside it and different … It was a curious revelation.”14

The curate at the church in St Ive, St Aubyn Rogers, had a soft spot for the children, who called him “Old Rodge”. He tilled a private plot for each of them on the premises of the rectory so that they could plant their own vegetables. He made them garden tables and chairs as well as bows and arrows to shoot with, and joined them in games of hide-and-seek. He took his meals with the family and flicked breadballs at Emily that she would catch in her mouth.

On one occasion, he and Emily played a game of badminton that lasted for two hours – to her father’s frustration, as they were making a noise under his study window. By her count, their tally was 2 000 strokes.15

To Emily, Rogers was like a father; her own father had been sickly since she was six years old. “Old Rodge was everything to us, and my devoted slave in particular.” He was a part of the happiest times of her life.16 In summer they went to the seaside for holidays or visited the Hobhouse family home Hadspen in Somerset.

At a young age Emily acquired the nickname “The Missis”. The name was thought to have originated from a Valentine card she received fom the family at the age of seven, which carried the message: “Wherever I am, I will always be the missis.” Everyone thought that it suited her, and “Missis” remained a nickname throughout her life.17

At the age of eight Leonard went to the prestigious school Eton, like the rest of the boys of the family, while the girls had to be content with inferior home education. Although they had a well-stocked Victorian home library in which Emily immersed herself, and she was taught skills such as sewing, singing, playing the piano and even how to speak French, this was not enough for her. An education of this type was the norm for girls of her social class but she wanted more. She yearned to study further and, like her brothers, equip herself for an occupation.

Emily turned 15 and stood on the threshold of womanhood, but she found life perplexing. “I looked in vain all my life for someone to talk to, and discuss things with, and explain things, but no one had time – the governesses were shallow and incompetent and I was but one of ‘the little ones’ and of no account.

“I envied the boys the special tutors they had, people whose brains they had the right to pick; of whom they might ask questions. I never had anyone to cut my mental teeth upon.” So school lessons always bored me because they were (as taught to us) so superficial. They never told me the thing I wanted to know. If you asked, you were told: ‘Little girls should not ask questions.’”18

At 16, Emily was sent to a finishing school in London where Maud was already a student. Blanche was also there, but had become very ill. The finishing school did not offer the kind of education Emily desired. She was eager to learn, but instead she was given horse-riding lessons and too little food. What they did teach her there was how to entertain and be a good wife to a husband some day. It left Emily bitter.

Her inadequate education “has been the root cause of many of my mistakes,” she wrote years later.19

In the winter of 1876 the parents took the three daughters – Blanche, Maud and Emily – to Menton in the south of France shortly after the marriage of the oldest daughter, Caroline. The main reason for the visit was to give Blanche, who probably suffered from tuberculosis, an opportunity to recover. The family spent the entire winter in Menton and then slowly started making their way home. But Blanche’s health failed to improve, and she died at the age of 19 in the French city of Toulouse.20

After their trip there was no longer enough money to send Emily back to the finishing school, as unsuitable as it might have been for her. She had to be satisfied with painting and violin lessons in the neighbouring town of Liskeard.21

Almost everything in Emily’s life had changed at this stage. Her sister Carrie, as they called her, was married. Blanche was dead, and her mother’s “spirit” was “crushed”. Her father increasingly worked in the parish, away from home. With no outlet for her intellectual abilities, Emily sought fulfilment in dreams and thoughts. “I lived with heroes in this imaginary world and fell ardently in love with these fabulous beings.”

Emily went on long walks in the surrounding countryside. She felt the urge to embrace and explore far-off and wide worlds and meet many people, and she “dreamt of their universal conversion to goodness (which for me meant then the Church of England) and a lift to material well-being”. Finally Emily came to a crucial realisation: What mattered to her was not the same as what mattered to everyone else, “and that you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear”.

She realised that the parish was but a small world, far removed from a greater reality beyond its confines.22

She also did not share her father’s view that religious dissidents – those who did not agree with all aspects of the Anglican Church – had to be ostracised, and visited such people regularly.23

She became critical of her father’s sermons to which she had been listening for 20 years. “The trouble rather was that he had so little to say – not that he could not say it. He lived too much apart from ordinary humanity to understand it well, and strictly ruled out all that was modern in thought and science from his reading. His preaching never modernised.” Only once did she hear him preach from his heart, and then he cried.24

In 1880 Emily’s mother developed a brain tumour and died within a few months. Emily was 20 years old, her brother Leonard was a student at Oxford, and Alfred had long since left home and moved to New Zealand. Only Maud was still at home and the two girls looked after their father, whose health had deteriorated after his wife’s death. He was now even more withdrawn and reclusive, and refused to let Emily develop her talents.

In 1889 Maud married one of the church’s curates, Ernest Hebblethwaite, without her father’s blessing, most likely to escape from the oppressive atmosphere at home.25

Emily taught Sunday School lessons, sang in the church choir and played the organ. Her life revolved around her father and the small population of St Ive. She read to him from the Times every day, thereby keeping abreast of what was happening in the world – it stimulated her interest in politics. Like her brother Leonard and her uncle, Lord Hobhouse, Emily had liberal political convictions, in contrast to her father’s conservative views.26 She did not dare to discuss her ideas with him, however.

In 1891 Leonard married Nora Hadwed in Oxford, where he lectured at Merton College and later at Corpus Christi College. Their first child, Oliver, was born a year later, and became one of the few joys in Emily’s life.27

Emily’s father was dead set against her meeting any young men. She had to care for him, and her chances of marrying and having a family of her own started diminishing. Loneliness and frustration drove her to “morbid introspection and hysteria”, since all she could do was sing and play the piano and the violin. “I was so low that I took to illumination … “ (a kind of light therapy to treat depression).

Finally she attempted writing, “but never succeeded in that till my mind was released from the shackles of St Ive”.

Decades later she wrote about this time in her life: “I find no record of these years. They are recorded only on my spirit, and fortunately will die with me. It was in a word a period of torture …”28

The circumstances must have been unbearable for someone of Emily’s intellect and spirit. For six years she lived alone in the rectory with her father, apart from the servants.

He died on 27 January 1895, a bitterly cold day. “It was the end of our life as a family.”

All the family’s possessions – from a horse, pigs and chickens to furniture, paintings and a cello – were auctioned. Emily inherited £5 300 from her father.29

Two weeks after his death, Emily packed her suitcases and left St Ive. She never returned to the village.

The car’s temperature gauge registers a low 2°C as I travel the eight kilometres from Liskeard to St Ive. It is a tiny rural hamlet one can easily pass through without realising it.

A beautiful old church, more or less in the middle of the few houses, is impossible to miss. I recognise the building from photographs I have seen of it. This is where Reginald Hobhouse was rector for half a century.

Suddenly I am in the heart of Emily’s early world. About a hundred metres on is the rectory where she spent the first part of her life.

By prior arrangement, a few parishioners are waiting for me at the rectory. “We’re big fans of Emily’s,” Dennis and his wife Doreen tell me.

We walk to the cemetery that surrounds the church. Emily’s mother and father lie buried next to each other. Opposite the church the cottage still stands where her father had lived as a bachelor before the newly married couple moved into the rectory that had been built for them.

I walk around the church, along the pathway to the door through which Emily used to walk every Sunday for so many years, past the baptismal font of stone at the back of the church where she was baptised on 1 May 1860, down the aisle to the pulpit from where Reginald delivered the sermons his talented daughter found so boring.

On the wall next to the pulpit are separate bronze memorial plaques: for Reginald for 50 years’ service, for Leonard, Emily, Alfred and Maud; and another one for Reginald, his wife and the other children.

One of the parishioners, Paddy, relates that Emily sang in the choir and also played the organ. “Those are the choir pews. The men sat here and the women opposite them; it has always been like that. Emily must have sat in that pew,” he gestures.

When one sits in that particular pew the pulpit rises in front of one, with the church-goers to one’s left and the lead-glass windows to one’s right. The organ Emily used to play is directly behind me. It feels to me as if Emily is there too, and I close my eyes to travel back 125 years in time and imagine myself in Emily’s position.

Inching along a long flight of narrow steps on which one has to turn one’s feet sideways, one can climb up inside the dark church tower. On the one side there is a blue rope to hold on to. One the other side there is nothing.

From the top of the tower one has a good view of the surroundings. Diagonally opposite is the rectangular old stone and red sandstone rectory of the Hobhouse family – a listed building that dates from 1852-1854. The house has two storeys, with an attic, a cellar and outbuildings on the stand of several acres. It has a beautiful slate roof.30

Dennis and Doreen have assured me that it is virtually impossible to obtain permission to visit the house. Many journalists, TV crews and writers have failed in their attempts to gain entry. But four months earlier I made contact in a roundabout way with the owner who agreed grudgingly – and provisionally – to a visit. But would he still remember our conversation, and finally give his consent?

What do you know! He recalls my long story over the telephone, and kindly invites me in.

I cross the threshold and enter Emily’s world. Above the door hangs the original bell rope of which there used to be one in each important room – a kind of umbilical cord between employers and servants. When someone pulled the rope, a bell rang next to the name of the particular room on a board in the servants’ quarters, so that the servants knew where they had to rush to.

Their rooms are close to the cellar, the pantry and the kitchen with its spacious cooking area and separate washing-up area. The servants’ area is clearly cordoned off from the living area of the family members by a thick door, and here the wooden floor changes to serviceable tiles. An outside door gives access to the stables and outbuildings where supplies were stored.

There is the high drawing room, where the family would have sat reading or conversing. The fireplace is still there, encased in black marble. And also a study where all the books must have been housed.

Above the stairs are the bedrooms with thick, chamfered wooden ceiling beams. There are several bedrooms with dressing rooms and bathrooms with fireplaces, but it is impossible to say which bedroom was Emily’s. The windows are big and look out over the huge property where the children would have cavorted to their heart’s delight. This was also where Emily and Old Rodge used to play badminton and the children had their own little vegetable gardens.

The church sold the house in 1985 and since then it has been privately owned.

We walk round the back of the house, and I stand for a long time in the garden gazing at the charming old house, the outbuildings and the stables. “There is a pleasant shady garden around the house. It is a very good size, plenty of flowers and vegetables in their season, there are four fields and we have two cows, two pigs, and hosts of pets,” Maud wrote in 1873, when Emily was 13.31

After the death of their father Reginald in January 1895, “two fat pigs, a horse, cows and calves” were offered for sale at the rectory. The enclosed horse carriage that was for sale was fitted out stylishly with cushions and lanterns.

The windows of the spacious drawing room look out on the open land behind the house. One can imagine seeing Emily and her sisters gazing out of this window, perhaps each with a book in her hand.

When the Hobhouse family lived there, this room used to contain a small sofa and a piano, a writing table and piles of books. In summer they would hang white curtains lined with green gauze in front of the windows. In winter the room had crimson curtains and a bright fire glowed in the grate, Maud wrote.32

Sleet falls as I drive back on the narrow, winding road to Liskeard; one can hardly imagine a greater contrast than that between the green, muddy, wet fields of Cornwall and the glaring sun, heat and dust of South Africa that would colour Emily’s blonde hair red.