Born near Liskeard, Hobhouse was a Cornish campaigner, feminist, and pacifist, best known for bringing British concentration camps in South Africa, built to incarcerate African and Boer civilians during the Second Boer War, to the attention of the British public in the early twentieth century.
She was the daughter of Caroline Trelawny and Reginald Hobhouse, an Anglican rector and the first Archdeacon of Bodmin. Her brother was Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse, a peace activist and proponent of social liberalism, and she is cited as a major influence on her second cousin, the peace activist Stephen Henry Hobhouse.
Her mother died when she was 20 and from then she spent the next fourteen years looking after her father who was in poor health. After her father died in 1895 she went to Minnesota to perform welfare work amongst Cornish mineworkers living there, the trip having been organised by the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury. There she became engaged to John Carr Jackson. The couple bought a ranch in Mexico but this did not prosper and the engagement was broken off.
A year after she returned to England in 1897, Hobhouse was invited to become secretary for the women’s branch of the South African Conciliation Committee, receiving information about the suffering of women and children as a result of British military operation.
At the outbreak of the South African War in 1899, Hobhouse was an outspoken critic of the British government and travelled to Capetown in 1900, intending to distribute supplies to a number of camps in the area. Here, she witnessed the true scale of destruction and suffering in the concentration camps, that she felt could only be rectified through putting pressure on the home government.
She continued humanitarian work in South Africa after the end of the Second Boer War and campaigned against the First World War. She died in 1926.
