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A vision that grows like a seed

“The constantly renewed picture of women and children homeless, desperate and distressed, formed and fixed itself in my mind and never once left me.”

– Emily Hobhouse in her draft autobiography, 1900

“The case for intervention is overwhelming …”

According to a report in the morning paper from which Emily read aloud to Lord and Lady Hobhouse at the breakfast table on a summer morning in 1899, these were the words of Sir Alfred Milner, Governor of the Cape Colony and the British High Commissioner in South Africa, in a telegram to Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary.57 “That means war in my opinion,” was Lord Hobhouse’s sombre comment. Everyone at the breakfast table was upset about the “dark cloud of war” that had been in the news in Britain throughout the summer.

While Emily found the news of an impending war “incredible”, she realised that it seemed unavoidable. Nevertheless, this was a period of calm and peace in her life during which she undertook long walks with her uncle and his dog Meg, and went on excursions with her aunt in the horse-drawn carriage. The childless couple treated Emily like their own child, but she wrote that she “never found it easy to talk to them very confidentially”.58

Because Lord Hobhouse served on the Judicial Committee of the government’s Privy Council, he was not at liberty to express his views publicly – including his opposition to the looming war in South Africa.

The tensions in South Africa had had a long run-up. After the First War of Independence (16 December 1880 – 23 March 1881) between Britain and the South African Republic or Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR), also known as the Transvaal, the Transvaal was returned to the Boers, or burghers,59 and they obtained limited self-government.60 The British still retained control with regard to foreign policy and legislation pertaining to black people, but in 1884 greater internal independence was granted to the Transvaal.61 After gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand in 1886, however, everything changed, and so-called Uitlanders (foreigners), most of whom were British subjects, flocked to the Transvaal. Before long they started demanding voting rights and a say in the mines,62 and claimed that they were “oppressed by the Boers”.63

Cecil John Rhodes, who dreamt of a united South Africa under the British flag, became prime minister of the Cape Colony in 1890. The territory referred to as South Africa was already surrounded by British colonies. Rhodes sought control of the gold mines, and the only way of achieving this was to invade the Transvaal in the hope that the Uitlanders would be incited to rebel.

Rhodes’s friend Leander Starr Jameson and his mercenaries, as well as a number of Uitlanders, invaded the Transvaal over the New Year period in 1895/96 via the then Bechuanaland (Botswana). The Boers defeated the invaders before they could reach Johannesburg, but the “Jameson Raid” was a final blow to the trust between Boer and Briton.64

Although Rhodes had to resign as prime minister, his image was untarnished in Britain.65 Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary and an avowed imperialist, had evidently supported the Jameson Raid.66 Annexing the Boer republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal and unifying them with the Cape and Natal in a South Africa under British rule would be the jewel in the imperialist crown, with the British flag flying from Cape to Cairo.67

In response, the Afrikaners became increasingly nationalist and started attaching greater value to their identity. More and more Afrikaners in the Cape Colony began to support their northern kinfolk in their anti-British sentiment. The Uitlanders, meanwhile, started giving stronger expression to their grievances. They claimed to constitute the majority of the white population of the ZAR, and through a petition they called on Britain to help them achieve equal rights, particularly voting rights.68

Chamberlain sent Sir Alfred Milner, the new governor of the Cape Colony and the British High Commissioner, to meet the ZAR president Paul Kruger in Bloemfontein in May 1899 to discuss these problems. President MT (Theunis) Steyn of the Orange Free State, who wanted to avert war at all cost, had invited them to a conference in Bloemfontein to sort out their differences. But Milner was adamant; he wanted to force Kruger to grant Uitlanders the franchise after five years’ residence.69 Kruger refused, and insisted on a period of seven years. In addition, he demanded compensation for the Jameson Raid and that Swaziland be incorporated into the Transvaal.

On 5 June 1899 Milner broke off the negotations70 and subsequently sent the infamous and emotionally laden telegram to Chamberlain in which he stated inter alia that the Uitlanders were little more than slaves: “The case for intervention is overwhelming … The spectacle of thousands of British subjects kept permanently in the position of helots, constantly chafing under undoubted grievances, and calling vainly to Her Majesty’s Government for redress, does steadily undermine the influence and reputation of Great Britain …”71

Chamberlain’s intention had been to harden the hearts of the British at home against Kruger, but when the president did agree later to give the Uitlanders the franchise after five years’ residence on condition that Britain refrained from further interference in the ZAR’s affairs, Chamberlain conceded nothing.72

On 8 September 1899 England sent 10 000 soldiers to Natal. Chamberlain reckoned that the Boer forces were only a “paper tiger”, and that this show of force would trick Kruger into returning to the negotiating table. He considered it unlikely that war would break out, but if it happened, the British soldiers would already be in position.73

When Kruger heard about the troops the following day, he accepted that war was inevitable. Jan Smuts, the 29-year old State Attorney of the Transvaal Republic, shared his view. Later that month the press reported that a further 47 000 troops were being sent from England to invade the Transvaal on 28 September. The Transvaal as well as the Free State, which threw in its weight with its natural ally, rapidly started mobilising their forces.74

On 9 October the ZAR issued an ultimatum to Britain: Withdraw the troops who are already here from South Africa, those who are on their way may not disembark, and let there be arbitration. Britain was given 48 hours to respond. The British government, supported by the British public who were indignant about the ultimatum, rejected it.

Emily saw a poster of the ultimatum displayed on Trafalgar Square, and realised that the last hope of peace was gone: “It sounded the death knell of tens of thousands of people completely innocent of its cause and it bore within it seeds of things worse than death for England,” she wrote about this moment on the square.

Behind it she saw a motive for the stoking of the conflict: an “appetite for gold and territory”.75

The Anglo-Boer War76 (also known as the South African War or the Second War of Independence) broke out on 11 October 1899.77 The next day, the first skirmish took place at Kraaipan between Vryburg and Mafeking when a Boer force of 800 men under the command of General Koos de la Rey captured a British garrison that had surrendered after a five-hour-long fight.

Three weeks after the outbreak of the war, the South African Conciliation Committee was launched in England by liberal Britons who opposed the war. The president of the committee was the 67-year-old Leonard Courtney, later Lord Courtney of Penwith, who was a seasoned politician and a former Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons.78 His constituency was Liskeard in Cornwall, not far from St Ive where Emily had grown up. His wife Catherine (Kate), too, immediately became actively involved in the committee. The chairman of the executive was Frederick Mackarness, previously a judge in the Cape Colony and now a Liberal MP. Another prominent member of the executive was the Marquess of Ripon, a politician, while his wife Marchioness Ripon was a staunch supporter of their work.

Emily knew the Courtneys because Kate (née Potter) was the sister of her cousin Henry Hobhouse V’s wife Margaret. Another sister of Kate was the famous social reformer Beatrice Webb. Emily was soon drawn into the work of the committee, which aimed to distribute truthful information about the war and to advocate the necessity of friendly relations between people of Dutch and English extraction in South Africa. They wanted to see a peaceful settlement instead of the “deplorable conflict” that had already started.79 Emily “committed herself wholeheartedly” to the anti-war cause in a country engulfed by “war fever”. Several meetings took place at the London home of Lord and Lady Hobhouse at 15 Bruton Street, Mayfair. At that stage Emily had already been living for a few months in a flat in Chelsea, 21 Rossetti Garden Mansions.80 Her flat-mate was a young medical student from India, Alice Sorabji, whose family were old friends of Lord and Lady Hobhouse. The flat was very close to the Courtneys’ house in Cheyne Walk, where many committee meetings were held.

On 15 January 1900 the committee’s activities were officially announced. The members declared that they were pacifists and totally opposed to the war. Within a short space of time they received 400 letters of support.81 Emily was the honorary secretary of the committee’s women’s branch. The climate in which they strove to bring their views across was one where “[t]ruth and reason were obscured”, and “this excitability” about the war was “fanned by the press and the pulpit”, she wrote.82

“We are glad if we are but a light burning on a rock in the midst of the flood of jingoism – feeling that ours is the side of justice and of wisdom,” Kate Courtney wrote to Emily’s brother Leonard.83 The jingoes that they were up against were a section of the British population whose understanding of patriotism was that of “my country, right or wrong”. A large proportion of the British press supported this prevailing mindset.

In February Emily attended the congress of the Liberal Party in London. She enjoyed every minute of it – albeit with an important caveat. “Liberals to the right of you, Liberals to the left of you … with no cold Conservative draught anywhere.” What did irk her, however, was that they were such lukewarm Liberals that they had not invited a single woman to address them.

“Is it not to cut off their best arm?” Emily asked, because the women were the ones who supported the Liberal Party and did the hard work, yet they occupied the subordinate positions.84

She decided that the women should play a more prominent role and organise a big protest meeting againt the war. Kate Courtney agreed with her, and it was decided that a mass meeting would be held in the Queen’s Hall. During the six weeks that they had to prepare for the meeting, Emily’s flat in Chelsea became the headquarters where she and other women worked from 8 am, often to 11 pm, to try and mobilise a general resistance against the war.85 On 24 May 1900 the Orange Free State was annexed by Britain, followed by the Transvaal on 5 June, and shortly afterwards martial law was declared.86 The Boer forces did not regard these annexations as legitimate conquests, and embarked on guerilla warfare to continue the struggle.

Lord Roberts, commander-in-chief of the British forces in South Africa, warned in an announcement that Boers who continued fighting would suffer personal losses. If any railway lines or telegraph wires were damaged or disrupted, the houses in the vicinity of the place where the damage was done would be burnt down.

While this was the start of the scorched-earth policy on paper,87 houses had been burnt from as early as March 1900 on Roberts’s instructions if they had been used to shelter Boer commandos.88 In terms of this policy farmhouses with their contents, as well as barns and outbuildings, were burnt down. Farm animals such as sheep, cattle, pigs and chickens were slaughtered. Farmlands and the veld were set alight, while in some cases entire towns were destroyed. By January 1901 this destruction was taking place indiscriminately, and hundreds of farms in the Free State and the Transvaal were left uninhabitable.89 According to Roberts, it was a punitive measure for continued resistance against the new British regime.

Thousands of women from across the country attended the Conciliation Committee’s mass meeting in London to protest against the war, including delegates of the Women’s Liberal Federation. “Our protest was more largely due to our proud desire for England’s honour and our horror lest her rectitude be marred by an unjust act,” Emily wrote.90

That evening in the Queen’s Hall the women passed four resolutions:

1:That this meeting of women brought together from all parts of the United Kingdom condemns the unhappy war now raging in South Africa as mainly due to the bad policy of the Government – a policy which has already cost in killed, wounded and missing over 20 000 of our bravest soldiers and the expenditure of millions of money drawn from the savings and toil of our people, while to the two small States with whom we are at war, it is bringing utter ruin and desolation.

2:That this meeting protests against the attempts to silence, by the disorder and violence, all freedom of speech, or criticism of Government policy.

3:That this meeting protests against any settlement which involves the extinction by force of two Republics whose inhabitants, allied to us by blood and religion, cling as passionately to their separate nationality and flag as we in this country do to ours.

4:That this meeting desires to express its sympathy with the women of the Transvaal and Orange Free State and begs them to remember that thousands of English women are filled with profound sorrow at the thought of their suffering, and with deep regret for the action of their own Government. God save the Queen.91

It was significant that the last resolution had been drafted by Emily and was read out by her at the meeting. It contained words that were to gain new and concrete meaning in her life in the coming years: “sympathy”, “women”, “sorrow”, “suffering”, “regret” …

She felt strongly that these views had to be placed on record as proof of the attitude of many of her compatriots towards the war.

The meeting attracted widespread attention, especially on the part of the jingo press which, according to Emily, “excelled itself in virulence and inaccuracy” in its reports. Pro-war people wrote the names of the Boer leaders in big, white chalk letters on the pavement outside her flat.92

In July Emily went with David Lloyd George to Liskeard to propagate the objections to the war at a meeting in the town. Lloyd George, a Liberal MP, was also passionately opposed to the war.

The town hall was packed that evening, with many of Emily’s childhood friends in attendance,93 but the rowdy “patriotic” pro-war contingent disrupted the meeting to such an extent that neither of the speakers could deliver a speech.

At least Emily managed to get a few words in: “I think you will agree with me that if her majesty the Queen to whom you have sung, were present now, she would be heartily ashamed of her Cornish subjects. I have a great deal that I am anxious to say to you. Will you sit down for a few minutes and listen to me? It seems a strange thing to me that Cornishmen will not listen to a Cornishwoman.”94

The majority of the audience became even more disorderly, however, and when chairs and other objects where hurled at the stage, Emily and Lloyd George had to beat a hasty retreat.

It was sleeting as I walked towards the hall in Liskeard where Emily and Lloyd George had to face a barrage of insults. It looks like a typical school or church hall which can seat about 800 people. The stage is big and suitable for a town concert.

Up the narrow steps to the stage where Emily sat listening to the jingoes’ songs, chants and shouts … To the side door through which they fled to escape from the riotous mob.

This was the beginning of the end of many of Emily’s friendships. After this day in July 1900 in this hall some of her closest friends and relatives ostracised her.

“There followed a storm of abuse from relatives and acquaintances, some of whom even attacked me in the press. I lost the majority of the friends of my girlhood and it was a great loss. There was a divergence of principle at that time which broke many a bond, and taking up the work publicly I would not escape a painful severance of old ties.”95 Emily increasingly learned from reports out of South Africa that her country’s troops, “contrary to the recognised usages of war, were guilty of the destruction by burning and blowing up with dynamite of farm houses”. The news reached a few newspapers in England, but the Britsh public were still in the dark about the extent of the destruction,96 she wrote. Some letters from soldiers that appeared in the press described the “horrible scenes which, to their honour, they for the most part found most distressing”.97

She was deeply upset about these events, and realised that they confronted her with an inescapable choice. “Thus the constantly renewed picture of women and children homeless, desperate and distressed formed and fixed itself in my mind and never once left me. It became my abiding thought. The thought deepened to torture and by a kind of second-sight such as had often visited me in my life the whole became a vision of vivid reality wherein I saw myself amongst the sufferers bearing relief. I never doubted then that I should go and that, be the obstacles what they might, they would be surmounted.”98

She knew that some might ridicule this “vision”, but she had read in the work of George Eliot that this “second-sight” was a kind of profound knowledge that eventually crystallised into an image of a new, alternative reality.

“Anyhow, explain it as you will, it was a curious and most solemn feeling that possessed me and nurtured in the quiet of the country, it grew into a definite plan when I returned to the solitude of my Chelsea flat. No one yet knew of my intention nor exercised any influence upon me. I thought out my plan.”99

And the plan was to be there – in South Africa. To make a difference there.

To achieve her aim she needed money, and she resolved to start a fund for this purpose. Leonard and Kate Courtney were the first people Emily told about her plan. Courtney paced the room, went to stand in front of the window and expressed his reservations: There was too little information about what was really happening in South Africa. How would the money be raised? How much would be sufficient? Would the government allow it? How would the money be distributed?

Emily tried to answer all the questions. Relucantly, Courtney gave the project his blessing; this was all that Emily wanted at this stage. She was in search of information – the facts about the war – so that she could present it when approaching people for money.

The hardest for her was to finally gain the approval of Uncle Arthur and Aunt Mary. Armed with letters of support from prominent people from the Cape and London, she visited them in Mayfair. While they were sceptical, they supported her nonetheless. They would not prevent her from going, but they did not feel strongly enough about the cause to support her financially. Though Emily had not expected such a response, she resigned herself to it; just as long as she could rely on their emotional support.100

Aunt Mary, who nonetheless agreed to serve on the committee of the fund, used her influence and wrote to Joseph Chamberlain to obtain official approval for the fund. The fund, known as the South Africa Women and Children Distress Fund, was non-political, philanthropic and national in nature, and its object was to feed, clothe, shelter and rescue women and children, both Boer and British, who had been rendered destitute by the war. The membership of the fund included both men and women, she informed him.101

While Emily was working on this project, the first surrendered burghers – members of the Boer commandos who had decided to lay down their arms – and their families were placed in so-called “protection camps” in Bloemfontein and Pretoria in September 1900. According to the British military authorities, this was done to ensure their safety and to make provision for their livestock. Women and children who had nowhere else to go as a result of the destruction of the farms were sent there as well. To the British, therefore, there was no material difference between the protection camps and the concentration camps.102

The British also referred to the camps as “refugee camps” because the term implied that the wives and children of men who were still in the field went there voluntarily, but this was not the case. In reality, they were taken there by force so that they could no longer support their fighting menfolk. Another reason was that the British believed the Boers would lay down their arms once they realised that their families were interned in the camps.103

Emily worked for six months to solicit support for her project among influential people in Britain and South Africa. She wrote as follows about the reaction of some: “The chilling attitude of some accounted most saintly, the lack of imagination in others whose known gifts pre-supposed imagination – the feat of those with big reputations lest those should be marred – all left an indelible impression on my mind.”104

Her brother Leonard warned her of diseases in South Africa, but Emily was undeterred. “For me life has no attraction,” she replied. “The Boers are already dying.” What about all the gossip about her? “I get that in England and am by long use too tough to mind it anymore.”

You are going too soon, Leonard cautioned. Destitution and starvation do not wait for opportune political moments,105 Emily retorted.

How would the Cape women view her plans? She wrote to Caroline Murray (née Molteno), wife of Dr Charles Murray, who was sympathetic towards the Boers. She had met the couple when they were on a visit to London. Emily informed them that she was intent on coming to help the victims of the war, even though some were of the view that such assistance would cause the government to neglect its duty towards the women and children. Maybe such aid would “soften the hearts of the sufferers towards us a little bit”, Emily hoped.106

Caroline’s brother, Percy Molteno, her sister Betty and her brother John Charles, a member of the Cape Parliament, were also involved in anti-war activities.

By the end of November 1900 Emily wrote to Caroline that she would soon be leaving for the Cape, and thanked her that she could stay with them in Cape Town. She was relieved that her departure was finally at hand – she could not wait for it to happen.107 She had raised £300 for her fund; a reasonable sum, but small compared to the need that had to be relieved. To Emily, however, this mission was nothing less than a calling:

“Deeply I had felt the call. Passionately I resented the injustice of English policy. Wholeheartedly I offered myself for relief to the distressed. Carefully step by step I prepared the way. Sternly I economised and saved. Greatly I felt the wrench and anxiety for my aged relatives. But never did the vision fade of those desolate women and children, nor the certainty that I must go to them.”108

To save money, she travelled second class on the Avondale Castle that departed for the Cape on 7 December.

The month before, Horatio Herbert Kitchener had been promoted to commander-in-chief of the British forces in South Africa after serving as Lord Roberts’s second in command. Kitchener, who had just been promoted to the rank of general, had recently returned from the Sudan where he had been the governor general; two years earlier he had won a celebrated victory at the bloody Battle of Omdurman in Khartoum in which about 10 800 Sudanese and 48 British soldiers died.

Kitchener, a 50-year-old bachelor, was known for his antipathy towards women. After the death of his fiancée in his younger years he apparently allowed only unmarried men in his inner circle and never granted audiences to women.109

While Emily was still at sea, Kitchener issued a memorandum to his officers. The women and children that were sent to the concentration camps had to be divided into two categories: the families of surrendered and neutral burghers; and those whose husbands, sons, brothers or fathers were still fighting. The latter group would be known as “Undesirables”. Preference had to be given to the first category in all respects, he ordered.110

Emily read books about South Africa and learnt as much “Boer Dutch”, as she referred to the emerging Afrikaans language, as possible. She had received lessons in London and had already developed a liking for “the Taal” because it was capable of conveying such humour, tenderness and poetic sentiments.111

She was travelling on her own – a 40-year-old woman headed for a hot, dusty region of the world that was completely unfamiliar to her, radically different in all respects from her own country.

Furthermore, a region where a war was raging.

Two days after Christmas Day 1900 the Avondale Castle sailed into the Table Bay harbour. The resolute woman who arrived in South Africa was intellectually cultivated and held strong views on many issues, especially where moral values were at stake. She was a tireless writer of letters and petitions in elegant, contemporary, often dramatic English that attested to a wide vocabulary with liberal use of quotations from writers and poets.

She had pale blue eyes and fair112, wavy hair that she combed away from her forehead and wore loosely gathered at the back. While her hair had distinct waves, it was not curly. Here and there her hair was already tinged with grey.

Emily, who was 1,72 m tall, had a proud and straight bearing; she was poised, well dressed and conscious of her social class. She was by no means “dumpy”,113 but rather of “slight” build, with a distinctive slightly aquiline nose.114

Emily was overwhelmed by the beauty of Table Mountain and the “rosy gold of early dawn”. The ship had arrived at four in the morning, but the port was so crowded with vessels that tugboats had to transport the passengers to the shore. Impatient to land, Emily took the first one she could find.

Owing to the war there was a confusion at the port during which Emily lost her luggage, which was only returned to her two days later. She stayed at the home of Caroline Murray and her husband Charles in Kenilworth where various friends and acquaintances came to welcome her, among them Mary Sauer (née Cloete), wife of the Cape politician Jacobus Wilhelmus Sauer.115

In the late afternoon, Emily sat eating figs and apricots on the stoep with a tame meerkat on her lap, “as if I had known it always”. She had devoted most of her time aboard the ship to learning “Boer Dutch” from other passengers.116

Now the next challenge awaited her: How would she get to the north of the country? Accommodation would not be a problem, as she had received numerous invitations to stay on farms. Meanwhile she had received news of 4 000 women and children “in some kind of ‘Refugee Camp’ in Johannesburg”. People informed her that another 600 farmhouses had been burnt down in the past week.117 This was the first time Emily heard of the existence of concentration camps (although this term was not yet in general use).

During the first days of January 1901 she began to get a picture of women and children who were being placed in “refugee camps”. “Terrible anxiety existed with regard to these camps” among people at the Cape who were concerned about the fate of relatives in the Free State and the Transvaal, “but there were no clear knowledge of their condition. In England we heard nothing of the formation of such camps. More than ever I felt I must get to them.”118

At the homes she visited, she met women who had been deported to the Cape after their homes had been burnt and they had lost all their possessions. The stories she was told were “humiliating and heart-rending”, and having to listen sympathetically for hours on end was more than what she had thought humanly possible, she wrote on 6 January (1901) from Schoongezicht, the farm of the politician John X Merriman. “Perhaps in due time I shall grow hardened to it.” What was even more perturbing: “The main fact learnt was that in many places large camps were now forming where women and children were crowded.” No one knew how many camps there were, “but they are on the increase”.119

Emily wrote to Sir Alfred Milner, the 48-year-old bachelor who was now the governor of the Transvaal and the Free State as well as of the Cape, and still the British High Commissioner, and requested a personal audience with him. Her first attempt was unsuccessful when Milner’s secretary indicated that “the condition of women and children” would not get her close to the important man, and she would have to wait. Sooner than she had expected, however, she was invited to lunch on 8 January 1901.120

She had letters of introduction with her from her aunt Lady Hobhouse and her cousin Henry Hobhouse V121, a British MP. Henry and Milner had been friends since their student days at Oxford. 122

But Emily was “in a blue funk” about the meeting, fearing that she might fail to put her case convincingly to Milner.

“I was well-nigh sick with terror lest I should prove incompetent for the ordeal. And as usual with me in moments of mental or emotional strain my heart beat so violently I could not breathe. If I failed in my presentment of the cause, the scheme for which I had toiled for months would fall on the ground and countless lives be lost that might be saved.”123

On her solitary train journey from Kenilworth to the governor’s residence Government House (the later Tuynhuys) in Cape Town, she searched for something in her handbag from which she could draw comfort. In the bag was a letter from Kate Courtney, with a message her husband had written at the bottom: “I add two words, be prudent, be calm …”

It put Emily in a somewhat calmer frame of mind, but this was short-lived; she had hoped to speak to Milner in private, and now discovered she was lunching with him and eight other men, none of whom she knew.

Milner stated his discussion with Emily during lunch in the company of all the other men, but she cut him short and implored him “to give me a few minutes afterwards.”

When Milner demurred, saying that he had too much work, Emily pleaded that “this was part of the work and of great importance”. Milner then “promised me fifteen minutes, not more”.

After lunch they sat down on a sofa in his living room and embarked on an animated exchange of views.

“We went at it hammer and tongs for an hour.” She made sure that Milner was left under no illusion about the spirit of the Boer women, as she had met many of them: “How do you think will you govern thousands of Joans of Arc?” she asked.

She also requested rail trucks to take her relief supplies of food and clothing along to the interior, and asked that she be allowed to be accompanied by an Afrikaner woman.

Surprisingly, Milner acknowledged that the scorched-earth policy was a mistake. He had seen women being transported in open railway trucks, and it had left him “uncomfortable”. “Finally he agrees to forward my going around to the camps as a representative of the English movement and with me a Dutch lady whoever I and the people here like to choose as a representative of South Africa …” There was a condition, however: Lord Kitchener, overall commander of the British forces, would have to agree.124

Emily did not have much hope of obtaining Kitchener’s approval. The chances were slim that the “Butcher of Khartoum”, and a “women-hater” to boot, “may welcome two women because of the difficulty he has created for himself of dealing with thousands”.125

On leaving Government House, Emily felt “as if wings were attached to my feet”, convinced that she and Milner had parted as friends. “Everyone says he has no heart, but I think I hit on the atrophied remains of one. It might be developed if he had not, as he says he has, made up his mind to back up the military in everything. He struck me as amiable and weak, clear-headed and narrow.”126 While awaiting Kitchener’s response, Emily collected evidence from northerners who had managed to reach the Cape Colony. She also met eminent people such as the church leader Dr Andrew Murray, the chief justice Sir Henry de Villiers and his wife, and Sir William Bisset Berry, the speaker of the Cape Parliament.

On 17 January Emily received a letter127 from Milner informing her that Kitchener had agreed per telegram that she could travel to the Free State, but on certain conditions. Two of these were that she could only go as far north as Bloemfontein, and that she preferably did not take a “Dutch lady” along. This was bad news, as Emily had hoped to travel with Mrs Elizabeth Roos, a well-known community leader, who would act as interpreter in interviews with Boer women and assist Emily in locating certain towns and places.128

In Kitchener’s telegram he referred to the “Dutch Refugee women kept out of their homes by the Boers.” In terms of his logic, the situation was very simple: as soon as the last Boers surrendered, the war would be over and everyone could go home – the women and children too. Hence the converse was also logical, albeit that he would not have admitted it openly: As long as the Boers refused to surrender, their wives and children would have to bear the brunt.

Emily preserved the telegram carefully, not because of its contents, but because of the access it gave her. At the top she wrote: “This was Kitchener’s telegram which I carried everywhere in the camps.”

She decided to pay Milner another visit. Couldn’t something be done to make it possible for her to also visit other camps that were further north? she inquired.129 Milner agreed to make a rail truck available for the relief supplies she wanted to take along, but this was the most he could do; Kitchener had the final say.

She set about purchasing food, clothing, blankets and other necessities, but the prices were high and she had only the £300 she had raised in England. To Leonard she wrote that she had bought six tons of clothing and six tons of food, but this would still not be enough. She hoped that the Conciliation Committee could send more money, as “it will be horrible to be up there with empty hands which would be the case in a very few weeks …”130

From early in the morning to late at night on Monday 21 January Emily packed the rail truck at the Cape Town station, but it saddened her that the goods she had managed to buy left it barely half full. In the meantime she had met Charles Fichardt131 from Bloemfontein who was in the Cape “on parole” (which meant that he had undertaken to return to Bloemfontein). He offered that she could stay at his parental home in Bloemfontein when she arrived there.

The following evening, a large group of new friends came to see Emily off at the Cape Town station. They had packed a food basket for her that included a kettle, jam and bread, as well as fruit.

She was venturing on her own into the unknown, a depressing world of conflict and destruction.

Regarding the goodbyes at the station and the nocturnal train journey, Emily wrote: “It was a glorious night. Their kindness had been unceasing and I felt I had in them a solid background in case of need. But as the train moved off towards the strange, hot, war-stricken north with its accumulations of misery and bloodshed I must own that my heart sank a little and I faced the unknown with great trepidation, in spite of the feeling that the deep desire of months which had laid so urgent a call upon me, was indeed finding accomplishment.”132

The journey she had embarked on would change her life dramatically.