Episode 95 - A Concentration Camp Commission & Maxwell has a brush with dynamite under a skirt

The Anglo-Boer War

It’s mid July 1901 and it's a Southern Winter. We will also hear how the commanding officer in Pretoria, General Maxwell, meets a Petticoat commando member Johanna van Warmelo who unknown to him, is carrying explosives during their meeting. There’re awful resonances here with contemporary events. For example, Lord Kitchener writes in the London newspapers in 1901 that the Boer women and children are relatively healthy and well, and that the hygiene of the camps is at acceptable levels. Meanwhile, disease is killing hundreds, and eventually, thousands a month. Kitchener had written that the families in the camps “..had sufficient allowance, and were all comfortable and happy…” Emily Hobhouse the British humanitarian had visited these camps and she wrote in her diary how Kitchener’s claims were shocking because she knew that the people in the tented camps were ..” all miserable and underfed, sick and dying…” She realised that the British public was being sold lies. This brought her to an important decision. There was no way that Hobhouse supported the Boers political ambitions - those of remaining independent. Her report to the House Committee and eventually made public in late June was delivered purely on the belief that the reasonable government would respond to what was her obviously neutral description of how badly the camps were being run. Instead, she was fobbed off by the political establishment and it dawned on Emily Hobhouse that her personal sympathy for the Boers was being confused with political support. “It was no question of political sympathy” she wrote in a letter at this time “… on that score I always maintained a negative attitude…” It was now she was to make a telling decision. Her approach of working with government to find a solution had led to nothing. Worse, she was now aware that the censorship imposed by the British army in South Africa meant that the families in these camps were going to be facing an increasingly awful future in the frigid Highveld winter. She was going to fight the government in their own back yard, in London. The gloves were well and truly off.