Agent of Peace
Authors: Jennifer Hobhouse Balme
To my Grandchildren
May they have a good life and have the courage to do what is right for the benefit o
f
humankind
JENNIFER HOBHOUSE BALME is the grand-niece of Emily. She worked in the publicity department of the WRVS for many years. On her father’s death she inherited a trunk of Emily’s papers, on which this book is based. She is the author of
To Love One’s Enemies: The Work and Life of Emily Hobhouse
, published by the Hobhouse Trust. She lives in British Columbia.
ONTENTS
6. Emily’s Journal: Wartime Journey across Germany
7. Emily’s Journal: Into Belgium, June 1916
9. Emily’s Journal: Disaster and the Return to England
13. August 1916 – Cloak and Dagger
14. Belgium, Peace and the Push Back
OREWORD
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It is a great honour to write the foreword for Jennifer Hobhouse Balme’s book
Agent o
f
Peace.
Jennifer Hobhouse Balme is not only the grand niece of Emily Hobhouse, she is the greatest and the most important of all the Emily Hobhouse researchers and holds the Hobhouse papers. Her first book,
To Love One’s Enemies
, is proof of her thorough research.
Emily Hobhouse is probably best known in South Africa because of her enormous involvement with the Boers who had been interned in the concentration camps during the Anglo-Boer War.
British officials found her a nuisance and sent a Ladies’ Commission, instead of her, to the concentration camps. The living conditions became slightly better. After the war, Emily Hobhouse carried on to help, and founded spinning, weaving and lace schools for South African women.
When she came back to Britain, there were the first signs of an upcoming war. During the First World War, Emily Hobhouse joined the International Women’s League for Peace and Freedom and she worked for more than three months in Amsterdam. She travelled with a German escort from Switzerland to occupied Belgium to investigate the conditions of the Belgian non-combatants. She also reported on the state of destruction of every Belgian town she visited. She was forbidden to speak to the Belgians or to travel into the war zone. From Belgium she travelled to Berlin and met the German Foreign Secretary, Gottlieb von Jagow. She also enquired into the food and health situation in Germany. In Ruhleben, she visited the civilian internees camp and found, unlike in South Africa at the time, no raging sicknesses, no starvation and no deaths. The trouble in the camp was primarily mental – captivity was having a depressing, even maddening effect on many men.
When she returned to England, Emily Hobhouse wanted to lay her information before the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey. She had three main objectives: to get peace talks moving, to obtain the release of civilian internees and to get better food and supplies to the Belgians. However, Sir Edward Grey did not want to talk to her. Instead she was questioned by Scotland Yard.
In this book, Jennifer Hobhouse Balme publishes, for the first time, documents of that time. The reader finds most interesting letters relating to the peace movement, journal entries and a short diary by Emily Hobhouse herself.
It is a fascinating book to read.
Birgit Seibold
Ludwigsburg,
Dr Birgit Seibold was born and still lives near Stuttgart, Germany and specialised at Tübingen University on the effects of British colonisation in Africa. She is the author of
Großbritannien und die Kolonialisierung Swazilands
(Great Britain and the Colonialisation of Swaziland) and
Emily Hobhouse and the Reports on the Concentration Camps during the Boer War 1899
–
1902
. She is currently working on her new project, another book on Africa.
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In the preface to
To Love One’s Enemies
, I explained that I gleaned most of the information that I used from a trunk of papers I inherited from my father, Emily Hobhouse’s nephew. This trunk was the treasure chest that enabled me to expand on official sources to provide an interesting narrative. The book covered Emily Hobhouse’s work in the Anglo-Boer War 1899–1902 and also her life in a more general way. The aim, which I believe was accomplished, was to show that Emily Hobhouse did not exaggerate the condition of the camps, which were set up by the British Army for the families of Afrikaner nationals fighting to retain their independence, and that, in trying to improve conditions, she was not a traitor.
Emily Hobhouse was in fact a remarkable and fearless woman. In the middle of the First World War she managed to visit occupied Belgium and Germany. A chance meeting with the German Foreign Secretary, Gottlieb von Jagow, led her to believe that peace talks were possible. She wrote a Journal about her trip but, because of the scope of
To Love One’s Enemies
and the length of the Journal, I was unable to include it in that book. There was also extra information, some on small scraps of paper, which had to be studied
.
It is for this reason I have come up with this book,
Agent o
f
Peace
, and its sequel,
Living the Love.
Agent o
f
Peace
provides the background for Emily Hobhouse’s own Journal and describes her efforts to bring about a negotiated peace. Emily Hobhouse was a pacifist with an overriding belief that international disputes should be solved through dialogue. Unlike many of her compatriots, she had seen war at first hand and knew what devastation and misery it could cause. She was an English patriot whose actions went against the times. England, and its ideals, was the great love of her life.
Her efforts have been studied by myself and others. In particular I would like to commend Diane Clements Kaminski who wrote her PhD thesis on Emily Hobhouse, and Birgit Seibold who, although her PhD thesis only covers the Anglo-Boer War, had many ideas on fields for research. Dr Seibold has been especially helpful with her work, and insights, into the German Official Archives – she has also provided help with translations. Without her, this work could not have been produced. I would also like to thank Lord Newton for his help and for introducing me to his grandfather’s diary.
Emily Hobhouse lived in the days when the telephone was in its infancy and our modern reliance on technology did not exist. She and her friends were letter writers. It has been the greatest help to be able to find the letters she wrote to her brother, Leonard (L.T.) Hobhouse, and to some especial friends in South Africa and elsewhere. Most notable amongst these were Mrs Isabella Steyn, wife of the former President of the Orange Free State, South Africa, and General Jan Christiaan Smuts who held many important posts in both the South African government and also with the imperial government in London. Letters to Jane Addams in the United States and Dr Aletta Jacobs in the Netherlands are also included.
I would like to express special thanks to my family and also the many people who have helped with typing and vetting the manuscript, especially Sarah Walker. I would also like to thank Giordano Venturi, for help with the Italian translations.
In the letters that are reproduced in this book, I have maintained the abbreviations ‘wh’ for ‘which’, ‘govt’ for ‘government’, ‘cir
es’ for ‘circumstances’ but have written out ‘and’ for ‘&’ as the latter always seems clumsy.
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orn in 1860, at a time when women had no status and were expected to be good, obedient and pure, Emily Hobhouse was the youngest of four girls. Her brother, Leonard (L.T. Hobhouse, the noted sociologist and thinker), was four years her junior. Her father, Reginald, was rector of the small Anglican parish in east Cornwall and was later appointed as one of the two archdeacons for the Cornish diocese.
The girls were educated at home and as they grew up, besides sports, art and music, their time was given over to good works, but when their mother died all the fun went out of the house. Their father became reclusive and Emily, as the last remaining girl at home, found the life of a Victorian spinster more and more repressive. Her only outlet was visits to her uncle and aunt, Arthur and Mary Hobhouse. They asked her to be hostess for them when they were in the country. With her quick wit and sweet singing voice she was an asset to any party. Arthur Hobhouse had been in India as the law member of the Governor General’s council. He was now a peer of the realm and a member of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the highest court of appeal in the British Empire.
When her father died in 1895, Emily wondered what she could do. Through the wife of Edward Benson (their former bishop in Cornwall who had become Archbishop of Canterbury, the senior bishop in the Anglican Church), she went to Minnesota to carry out welfare work for the Cornish miners who had emigrated there. She found they were doing well, but there was plenty of work helping other miners – for example, she visited the sick and those in prison, started a library and organised entertainments. She also fell in love and became engaged to be married. With plans for her fiancé to follow her, she went to Mexico to purchase a ranch where they could grow coffee and pineapples. Unfortunately the relationship came to nothing. She returned to London to study child welfare and try her hand at writing.
Emily was always interested in current affairs and
The
Times
was delivered daily, even in Cornwall. This she read at meals to her austere father but she had to be careful not to let him know of her Liberal views. He was a staunch Conservative, although Arthur and her brother Leonard were Liberals who believed in the rights of small nations.