They were not always welcomed; both inmates and administrators often resented their presence. At the Bloemfontein camp they were treated to a noisy demonstration:
Women threw large portions, which had been newly served out, of good though thin meat, into the wide roadway of the camp. It would have made very good broth or stew. We supposed that this wicked waste was a sort of bravado for the purpose of showing us how discontented they were; but we took it as proof that, at any rate, the people in the camp were not short of food.1
When they had finished their work the women of the Ladies Committee wrote a report in clear, objective prose that indicated how thoroughly they had grasped the problems. They did not consider the morality of, or the advisability of, establishing or maintaining the camps—this was outside the scope of their mission; they devoted themselves to the problems which their existence presented. As to the causes of the high mortality rate, they properly discussed these under three headings: those under the control of the inmates, those under the control of the administrators, and those caused by the nature of the war itself.
Although generally praising the work of the medical staffs, the women did not hesitate to point out exceptions and to detail slack and negligent practises that had caused deaths: scarlet fever and diphtheria cases in the same hospital tent with other patients, for example, and children with measles sent to camps which had previously been free of the disease. Most administrators too were praised for doing their best under difficult conditions, but not all, and they recommended the removal of several superintendents. Men possessing all the qualifications needed were, as the committee recognised, difficult to find:
The Superintendent required rare mental and moral gifts. He had to control thousands of people unaccustomed to discipline. He had to be just, strict, kind, inexhaustibly patient. He required a knowledge of sanitation, enough of the engineer to use the water supply to best advantage, he had to be interested in education, able to enlist the cooperation of doctors, nurses, everybody. He required business training and some of the aptitudes of a grocer and corn factor. If he could add to these a practical knowledge of gardening and half-a-dozen industries, such as brickmaking, tanning, carpentering, he would be ideal.2
The committee did not hesitate to give its recommendations for improvements in camp administration. It was all very well for the army to put sixteen men in a bell tent, for soldiers were always moving on, but in a semipermanent camp more than five in a tent was overcrowding. They criticised the location of some camp sites, the bad water, the laziness and inefficiencies of some of the administrators, the lack of supplies, et al.
At the Howich camp they found that although there were twenty-six cases of scarlet fever, no attempt had been made to isolate them. At Potchefstroom the committee found much to criticise during their four-day stay. For the 4,900 inmates of the camp there were only 65 latrine pails for women and 23 for men, and the “accommodation is inconveniently high for little children”; also, “screens in front of the latrines do not sufficiently protect all the occupants.”3 The mortuary was used as “a receptacle for soiled linen, which lay upon the floor.” Half of the inmates had no bedsteads of any kind. The sheets of typhoid patients were “neither boiled nor disinfected”; they were not even washed in hot water. Worst of all: “The drinking water for patients is neither boiled nor filtered.” Nearly a third of all the patients who entered the hospital died there.
At Merebank camp they found that the camp contained 5,154 people (534 men, 2,145 women, and 2,475 children) but only one bath house with ten baths for women, two for men, and two for boys. The camp was badly situated: “It is a swamp, and unless it can be drained, it will continue to be hopelessly water-logged. We earnestly deprecate the continual sending of large drafts of people to Merebank in its present condition.” 4 There was much overcrowding: “Such crowding would only occur in the poorest slums in England,” the ladies reported. In the three months preceding the committee’s visit, 112 persons had died, all but seven under twenty years of age. The camp had a bad rationing system, there was a lack of beds or kartels, and there were not enough doctors, nurses, or administrative personnel. “The Merebank camp is in a peculiar position,” said the ladies in their report, “from the fact that, morally, undesirable people have been sent there from a number of Transvaal camps.”5 They were much occupied with morals.
When military camps were located next to concentration camps they were made mutually out of bounds, but iron bars and bolts will scarcely maintain a separation of the sexes when they are in proximity. The ladies learned that at Harrismith three women had “absented themselves all night, it is feared for immoral purposes.” At Vereeniging the superintendent told them that three times he had found soldiers in his camp and that a few women “who were more than suspects” would be sent to Natal, where “the authorities would be warned of their characters.” At Heidelberg the superintendent said he had had some difficulties with soldiers “knocking about” but that he had put a stop to it.
Recalcitrant women were disciplined by having their rations docked, by being put in wired-in enclosures, or by being sent away. All camps had special enclosures for unruly and obstreperous people—“If women cannot govern their tongues they are put there.” Those regarded as “incorrigibly filthy” were also put in these enclosures sometimes, or in special “dirty lines” that were known as “Hogs’ Paradise.” David Murray, superintendent of the camp at Belfast, was in the habit of placarding the camp with the names of women he considered “incorrigibly dirty,” and this, he said, “has had a very good effect.” Withholding of passes or of sugar, coffee, or meat was a common punishment—“You can reach these people through their stomachs,” said R. L. Cowat, superintendent of the Mafeking camp.
High on the list of procedures to be investigated the Ladies Committee had placed provision for the care of orphans, and in every camp they visited they inquired about this. Camp after camp reported that there were no provisions and none were needed; here at least no problem existed. “Orphan children were almost invariably taken by their relatives. ... Boers are very good about this.” In only one camp, Middelburg, was there a need for an orphanage, and even here only 22 out of 186 orphans in the camp had no one to care for them.
The Ladies Committee made a number of sound recommendations. They praised the efforts to start schools in some camps, but noted that more and better teachers were required. They advised that “more hospital accommodation, improved equipment and increased staff are needed.” They recommended an increase in the weekly meat allowance to five pounds for each adult and three pounds for each child. They also recommended the fencing of all camps and more controls: “restrictions of free ingress and egress are desired from the point of view of health and morals.”
The Ladies Committee did not confine itself to generalisations but made specific recommendations for each camp they visited. When the Standerton camp was visited on 23 November it contained 620 men, 1162 women, and 1,251 children. There were no bathrooms and no receptacles for rubbish. “The camp is soaked with enteric and the water is bad.” The boilers for boiling water were inadequate. About the only good thing they had to say about this camp was that coffins and shrouds were provided free. They recommended that the hospital be doubled in size and that the superintendent, a Mr. Wingfield, be sacked, as “he has no grasp of the importance of sanitation.”
At the Aliwal North camp, which also contained a number of “loyal” burgher families, conditions were so bad that the ladies’ recommendation was simply: “Remove the Superintendent, and thoroughly reorganize the camp.” There was only one latrine to every 177 women and children and “the smell was abominable.” There was a shortage of most necessities: tents, blankets, mattresses, slop buckets, medicines. “It was the worst [ration] system, or rather want of system, we have seen in any camp.” Worst of all was the hospital accommodation: in August 1901 there were 710 cases of measles and nearly a quarter of those afflicted died.
The la
dies’ criticisms were not confined to the camp administrators; the inmates themselves came in for their share. The committee concluded that “a large number of deaths in the concentration camps have been directly and obviously caused by the noxious compounds given by Boer women to their children.”
As the notion prevailed that it was wrong for people to be given anything for nothing, the Ladies Committee noted with approval that in most camps an account was kept against every family for all rations, clothing, and supplies issued “with a view to recovering the value when the war is over,” and they were quite incensed that men in the camps did not always perform satisfactorily the work they were paid to do: “It is in itself a demoralising influence to receive all the necessaries and some of the luxuries of life from the Government as a free gift, and this demoralising influence will be intensified if men are allowed to receive wages and neglect the work they are supposed to do in exchange for them.”6
Though the ladies’ views were not those embraced today by welfare states, they were acceptable at the time, and on the whole their report was a fair one, accurate and honest. Certainly it was not the whitewash many had assumed it would be, and it brought about many improvements, but it did not still the outraged voices of the antiwar faction in Britain or the European and American critics of the war. In the House of Commons Campbell-Bannerman described the camps as “an offense against civilization, as a military mistake, and as a political disaster.” Lloyd George used even more violent language, comparing the British government to Herod, for the British, he said, were trying “to crush a little race by killing its young sons and daughters.” He looked to the future, and in passionate language he spoke of the bitterness and hatred which the death of so many children would create: “At this rate within a few years there will not be a child alive on the veld.... A barrier of dead children’s bodies will rise up between the British and the Boer races in South Africa!”7
The French, Austrian, Dutch, and Scandinavian press accused Britain of waging a war of extermination. In the Transvaal itself the representatives of a number of countries, even Turkey (recently involved in massacring Armenians), protested the continuance of the camps. In the United States there was such a groundswell of indignation that the camps became an embarrassment to the American government, officially friendly to Britain, but John Hay in a letter to H. C. Lodge wrote: “The Boer women and children are in the Concentration Camps simply because their husbands and brothers want them there, and as to the war with all its hideous incidents and barbarities, it will stop the instant Botha and De Wet wish it to stop.”8
It was true that the burghers preferred to have the British take care of their families rather than be burdened with them and with the now impossible task of providing for them as long as the fighting continued. Most of the camps were practically undefended, and it would have been a simple matter for the fighting burghers to rescue their women and children had they chosen to do so. There were, in fact, several attacks made on camps, but in no instance were any of the women and children taken away.
Young Commandant Willem Fouché, operating in Cape Colony, heard that the administrators of the camp at Aliwal North were traitors from the Orange Free State. On 17 July 1901 he led an attack on the camp, killed two Bantu, and carried off four of the alleged traitors; he also tried while there to drum up some recruits, but out of 689 men in the camp only 5 elected to join him. On 15 September 1901 the Belfast camp was raided, apparently only to get supplies, but the attack was repulsed; one woman and two children were wounded. In December about 800 Boers captured the Pietersburg camp, and J. E. Tucker, the superintendent, and his staff were made prisoners. After a gay, all-night party with wives, sweethearts, friends, and relations the burghers released their prisoners unharmed and rode off into the sunrise.
There was one—perhaps only one—beneficial result of the concentration camp system, a result which was to have an enormous effect on the future of South Africa. In January 1901 Milner appointed E. B. Sargant as educational adviser. Taking several boxes of books, he went to the Norval’s Pont camp, collected such teachers as he could, acted as headmaster himself, and began lessons in English for all children whose parents would consent to it. The experiment was a success, and other schools were soon begun.
By May 1901 there were 1,800 children attending such schools in the Transvaal and 2,000 in the Orange Free State; by the end of the year there were 32,500—far more Boer children than had ever before been in school. Sargant was appointed commissioner of education for both new colonies, and he sent out an appeal for good teachers. From more than 2,000 applicants, 200 of the best qualified were selected from Britain and another hundred from Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
It was dark when Margaret Hulburd with several other young English and Scottish women, all tired and hungry, descended from the train at the Irene camp. They were a contingent of Sargant’s “lady teachers” sent out (accompanied by a chaperone) to teach school in the concentration camps. It had been a long, hot, dusty journey from Cape Town, and Miss Hulburd had not been impressed by what she had seen from her carriage window as the train crawled up country in the heat of a South African summer: the veld was brown, dry, and monotonous, there were the innumerable blockhouses beside the tracks, and everywhere the carcasses of animals in varying stages of decay.
The tents to which the young women were assigned seemed “terribly unsafe places to sleep in. Only a canvas flap and a thin cord between us and a possibly attacking enemy!” Nevertheless Miss Hulburd brushed a frog from her pillow and slept soundly. Once adjusted to her new life she found the camp and its surroundings beautiful. Nearby was a stream bordered by mimosa in full bloom, giant willows with drooping branches, and eucalyptus trees; she was pleased that destiny had placed her “in such a pleasant spot.” The Irene camp, located between Pretoria and Johannesburg, was the largest in the Transvaal with some 7,000 inmates. By the time Miss Hulburd and the other teachers arrived the greatest evils had been corrected; it was no longer the place that Emily Hobhouse and the Ladies Committee had seen. It was by this time laid out in neat blocks of about twenty-five bell tents each; wide roads marked with whitewashed stones divided each block. At least two brick ovens for baking bread were provided for every line of tents. Margaret found that “the rules for cleanliness are most stringent” and the whole arrangement “so cleverly organized. The system is perfect in every way.” A large church had been built, and here, as by this time in every other camp, there was a Dutch Reformed Church predikant.
Some camps had brick or stone schoolhouses by the end of the war, but at Irene the classrooms were large store tents arranged to form three sides of a square, the centre being used as a playground. Here at eight thirty daily came 4,200 boys and girls from five to twenty years of age who formed up in lines according to their class, the boys in their patched but clean clothes, the girls in their frocks and stiffly starched sunbonnets. When a bell rang they stood, arms folded and eyes closed, for a short church service. This was followed by a song in English—“We Are But Little Children Weak” or “All Things Bright and Beautiful”—and a few prayers in Dutch; then, led by their teachers, they marched off to their classes.
In addition to academic work there were courses in needlework and knitting for the girls and manual training for the boys. Margaret Hulburd found the children “decidedly docile and amenable to discipline.” When a concert, to be concluded by the schoolchildren singing “God Save the King,” was planned for the camp, the headmaster carefully explained that in England it was customary for all entertainments to close with the national anthem, but he went even further and asked that all the children obtain their parents’ permission: 94 percent gave their consent. This was not the case at all camps. Earlier, at Bloemfontein, a Boer teacher refused to conduct a singing competition held on the King’s birthday.
At Irene there were also classes in English for adults, and Margaret Hulburd wrote home: “It is odd to see quite old men with grey beards and st
out, elderly matrons sitting patiently and seriously spelling out the easiest words and learning the alphabet like little children.”9
For the children who survived the diseases that swept the camps this chance to acquire some education was an excellent thing. Young Boers on scattered farms rarely had an opportunity to study. There was, of course, opposition on the part of some of the inmates to classes in English; they accused the British of trying to anglicize them—which indeed they were—but most Boers, as is common among pioneering folk, had a great respect for education, and an education in English was better than no education at all. For the students, most of whom would spend the rest of their lives under the Union Jack, it was an invaluable acquirement. But learning English did not always succeed in changing the political views of the children. Isie Malan, in school at the Belfast camp, wrote as her first school paper: “I will try to learn English that I can say to the Kakky, hands up. I am twelve years old. This is my first English writing.”10
It was not easy for Boers and Britons to overcome their feelings of distrust, suspicion, and dislike for each other while the war was still in progress, yet in at least one instance love bloomed: Wim Hopford, an inmate of the Volksrust camp, and one of the English teachers fell in love and were married, but life was not easy for the couple and Hopford wrote:
Strange to say, this conquest in love cost me nearly all my friends. The refugees could not understand my falling in love with an English girl, and the girl’s English friends could not appreciate her attachment to a fellow who might be nice enough in some ways, but who was, after all, a nondescript Boer refugee.11
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