She exposed the horrors of Britain’s secret concentration camps – so why was she demonised?
Emily Hobhouse revealed the truth about Britain’s brutal treatment of Boer civilians during the South African War. She was branded a traitor – but saved a vast number of lives along the way.
In 1900, as the Victorian era drew to a close, a 40-year-old British woman boarded a South African train loaded with 12 tons of relief supplies. She was heading into the middle of a brutal conflict known at the time as the Second Boer War – alone, unarmed and uninvited by the military.
Her name was Emily Hobhouse, and within hours of her arrival, she would uncover one of the most shameful secrets of the British Empire: its network of appalling concentration camps.
A war for empire
The South African War, also known as the Second Boer War, was fought from 1899 to 1902 and pitted the British Empire against the two independent Boer republics: the South African Republic (Transvaal) and the Orange Free State.
Though it was officially framed as a dispute over governance and the rights of British settlers, the war was ultimately driven by imperial ambition, and by Britain's determination to control the region’s vast gold and diamond resources.
The Boers, descendants of Dutch settlers, resisted British expansion fiercely, drawing the empire into a costly guerrilla conflict. British commanders responded with a scorched earth policy, burning farms and removing civilians to camps to try and cut off supplies to the guerrillas.
It was into this landscape – one shaped by war, displacement and censorship – that social reformer Emily Hobhouse stepped, a humanitarian motivated by concern for the human cost of the war.
“When she arrived she didn’t know there were concentration camps because of censorship and martial law restricting the flow of information,” explains journalist Elsabé Brits – an expert on Hobhouse – speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. “But she learned it on the very first day… She was absolutely shocked. She couldn't believe what she was seeing”
The camps, established by British forces to house Boer women and children, were overcrowded, unsanitary and fatally under-resourced. Hobhouse was horrified.
“There was no soap, candles, blankets, natural shade, fresh water or most necessities,” Brits explains. “Temperatures can soar to well above 50 degrees Celsius.”
She portrayed them in terms few in Britain were prepared to hear. “She described the camps as murder to the children,” Brits says. In one instance, Hobhouse physically dragged a British officer into a tent to look at a dying child, saying “You shall look!”.
The report that shook the Empire
Hobhouse wasn’t a government official or a journalist – but she was methodical, principled and unrelenting in her investigations. On returning to Britain, she compiled a 40-page report documenting the conditions she’d witnessed, supported by first-hand testimony from the women in the camps.
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“The report is quite scientific for the time. She asked women 10 questions, so each woman responded to the same questions in order to get a scientific analysis.” Brits notes.
Before publishing, she privately delivered her findings and recommendations to the Secretary of State for War, ensuring they reached the highest levels. The evidence was too detailed to ignore. A formal government commission was launched, and conditions in the camps began to change.
“She single-handedly saved the lives of tens of thousands of women in the British concentration camps,” says Brits.
Branded a traitor
But while her work changed lives in South Africa, Hobhouse's reception at home was far colder. For much of the British press and political class – including the government itself – her intervention was unwelcome, and unpatriotic.
Public meetings turned hostile. Critics dismissed her as unstable, deluded and more. “They called her ‘a peace crank’,” Brits notes. Hobhouse herself pushed back, writing: “To call a woman hysterical because you have not the knowledge necessary to deny her facts is the last refuge of the unmanly and the coward.”
Even senior government figures joined the chorus. Joseph Chamberlain, the powerful and imperial-minded Colonial Secretary overseeing Britain’s involvement in the war, publicly dismissed her, famously saying of her that the empire was not “threatened by a hysterical spinster of mature age”.
A heroine abroad
While her reputation in Britain never fully recovered, Hobhouse’s efforts left a lasting legacy in South Africa. After the war, she returned not to protest but to help rebuild.
“She returned to South Africa to start programs – organising oxen, mules, seed and labour,” Brits explains. She also founded spinning and lace-making schools for Boer women, projects that helped restore both income and dignity. “Not just for economics,” says Brits, “but for emotional healing.”
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In 1913, Hobhouse was invited to unveil the National Women’s Monument in Bloemfontein – a national memorial to the thousands who had died in the camps. She had helped design the statue herself. Thirteen years later, when she died in London, her ashes were returned to South Africa.
“When she died in 1926, she was given a state funeral in South Africa, the first and only one ever held for a female foreigner,” Brits says. “Her ashes were placed behind the three central figures of the monument, one of whom cradles a dying child.”
Hobhouse wasn’t a soldier or a statesman. She had no institutional power. But she had notebooks, conviction and the courage to look – and speak – when others wouldn’t.
“She was a whistleblower during war,” says Brits. “And she was hated as a traitor.”
Elsabé Brits was speaking to Emily Briffett on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
Authors
James Osborne is a digital content producer at HistoryExtra where he writes, researches, and edits articles, while also conducting the occasional interview