is a tiny village named after Saint Yvo, a bishop who helped convert the English from paganism to Christianity in 1201.3
Emily kept a list of destitute families whom she visited and tried to assist.4 Among other welfare work in the parish, she founded a library and visited the sick on foot because there was no doctor.5 But these activities were not enough for her; she had a yearning to do more, to make a greater difference.
Emily Hobhouse had been born on 9 April 1860 into a position of privilege as a member of the Victorian English upper class. On both sides of her family distinguished people had left their mark.
Her mother, Caroline (born 1820), was a daughter of Sir William Lewis Salusbury Trelawny, the eighth baronet, heir to Harewood House in Calstock, Cornwall.
The first Trelawny who held the title had been made a baronet by Charles I. On Sir William’s death in 1857 he had left a substantial inheritance to his children and his wife, Patience Christian Carpenter. Caroline, Emily’s mother, inherited £10 000 – an enormous sum at the time.6
Caroline, an attractive brown-haired woman with blue eyes, was someone of “distinguished bearing, combined with quick parts and a natural manner of extreme charm. She applied her unusual abilities to the education of her children, shewing herself an indulgent and devoted mother,” Emily wrote about her mother.7
The Hobhouse family’s history can be traced back to 31 August 1686 when John Hobhouse rented a house near the port of Minehead on the Bristol Channel in Somerset. He was married to Anne Maddox, and three of their sons were Henry, Isaac and Benjamin. The family became established in the area, and in 1708 Henry Hobhouse opened a shipbuilding yard in Minehead while his brother Isaac started doing business with merchants in the colony of Virginia in North America. From Bristol the family became involved in shipping as shipowners and merchants, and the males became full citizens who were entitled to vote.8
The firm of Isaac Hobhouse and Company, which accepted Henry Hobhouse I – a son of Benjamin – as an apprentice in 1729, opened the doors of wealth to the family. Isaac traded between Bristol, the west coast of Africa, the West Indies and the “plantation colonies” in America.9 He acquired a large fortune from his commercial interests, which included the slave trade. The ship Greyhound, which belonged to Isaac’s company, transported slaves from West Africa to Virginia, whereafter it would return to England laden with goods.10 In a letter to Isaac reference is made to a ship that “arrives well slaved, I hope shall make a pleasing acc of ’em”.11
This connection with the slave trade was not kept hidden from the family – Emily, too, was aware of it. The family estate and mansion, Hadspen House in Somerset near the village of Bruton, had been purchased by Henry Hobhouse II, an Oxford-educated barrister, in September 1785.
Emily’s paternal grandfather Henry Hobhouse III (1776-1854) and his wife Harriet Turton (1780-1838) had both died before her birth. Henry III had studied law at Oxford like his father, and had been a solicitor to the Treasury and Under-Secretary at the Home Office in London under Sir Robert Peel. He had also served as a magistrate in the countryside.12 By this time the Hobhouses were already a distinguished family.
Emily’s father, Reginald (born 1818), was one of a family of four sons and four daughters. The boys were all educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. Owing to their good education, the boys Henry IV (heir to the Hadspen estate and manor house), Edmund and Arthur all had successful careers.
On completing his studies, Reginald – according to Emily a reserved, humourless, conservative man – became the Anglican rector in the parish of St Ive thanks to Sir Robert Peel, the prime minister for whom his father had worked. (St Ive should not be confused with St Ives, pronounced “eyeves”, on the far southwestern coast of England.) Before his marriage to Caroline, he had lived alone for seven years in a cottage opposite the 14th-century church. The couple had a big rectory built for them about a hundred metres from the church.
Emily was the fifth of six surviving children, and the youngest daughter. The children were Caroline (“Carrie”, born 1854), Alfred (born 1856), Blanche (born 1857), Maud (born 1859), Emily (born 1860) and Leonard (born 1864).
She and her sisters were educated at home by governesses. Mary, Lady Hobhouse, the wife of Emily’s uncle Arthur, Lord Hobhouse, disapproved of one of their governesses. The woman had made Emily stand on a chair as punishment and when Lady Hobhouse heard about this, she gave the governess notice.13
Emily wrote about her earliest memory from those days: “I do not know if the sense of having an ego of one’s own comes to others at a given moment, or grows imperceptibly, but it was when I was three or four years old that I learnt this. I was sent to see the time … I suddenly realised the clock was not me and I was not it but outside it and different … It was a curious revelation.”14
The curate at the church in St Ive, St Aubyn Rogers, had a soft spot for the children, who called him “Old Rodge”. He tilled a private plot for each of them on the premises of the rectory so that they could plant their own vegetables. He made them garden tables and chairs as well as bows and arrows to shoot with, and joined them in games of hide-and-seek. He took his meals with the family and flicked breadballs at Emily that she would catch in her mouth.
On one occasion, he and Emily played a game of badminton that lasted for two hours – to her father’s frustration, as they were making a noise under his study window. By her count, their tally was 2 000 strokes.15
To Emily, Rogers was like a father; her own father had been sickly since she was six years old. “Old Rodge was everything to us, and my devoted slave in particular.” He was a part of the happiest times of her life.16 In summer they went to the seaside for holidays or visited the Hobhouse family home Hadspen in Somerset.
At a young age Emily acquired the nickname “The Missis”. The name was thought to have originated from a Valentine card she received fom the family at the age of seven, which carried the message: “Wherever I am, I will always be the missis.” Everyone thought that it suited her, and “Missis” remained a nickname throughout her life.17
At the age of eight Leonard went to the prestigious school Eton, like the rest of the boys of the family, while the girls had to be content with inferior home education. Although they had a well-stocked Victorian home library in which Emily immersed herself, and she was taught skills such as sewing, singing, playing the piano and even how to speak French, this was not enough for her. An education of this type was the norm for girls of her social class but she wanted more. She yearned to study further and, like her brothers, equip herself for an occupation.
Emily turned 15 and stood on the threshold of womanhood, but she found life perplexing. “I looked in vain all my life for someone to talk to, and discuss things with, and explain things, but no one had time – the governesses were shallow and incompetent and I was but one of ‘the little ones’ and of no account.
“I envied the boys the special tutors they had, people whose brains they had the right to pick; of whom they might ask questions. I never had anyone to cut my mental teeth upon.” So school lessons always bored me because they were (as taught to us) so superficial. They never told me the thing I wanted to know. If you asked, you were told: ‘Little girls should not ask questions.’”18
At 16, Emily was sent to a finishing school in London where Maud was already a student. Blanche was also there, but had become very ill. The finishing school did not offer the kind of education Emily desired. She was eager to learn, but instead she was given horse-riding lessons and too little food. What they did teach her there was how to entertain and be a good wife to a husband some day. It left Emily bitter.
Her inadequate education “has been the root cause of many of my mistakes,”
