Episode 70 -Queen Victoria dies and Emily Hobhouse travels to a Concentration Camp

General Christiaan de Wet was gearing up for his attack on the Cape Colony. While that only took place in the last week of January 1901, his brother, Piet, whom he hated, was trying to convince the Boers to give up the fight. Remember Piet was the brother who had begun to work with the British after fighting for a year and realised that there was just no way the small group of farmers from Africa would ever be able to beat the grand British Empire. Piet was no alone in his attempts to stop the war. Even the wife of the great Boer General, Louis Botha, became involved in attempts to stop the carnage. But the bittereinders or bitter enders as they were called, were not to be appeased. Still, Piet who had surrendered in August 1900 saw the beginning of the wholesale destruction of Boer farms under orders of Lord Kitchener and he was determined to stop the wanton destruction. it was the death of Queen Victoria on the 22nd January 1901 that resonated around the British Empire as an entire way of life which had been known as the Victorian Era died with her. She was 81. Her end, many thought, had been hastened by the death of her favourite grandson. Prince Christian Victor of Schleswig-Holstein died of the effects of malaria and then typhoid while serving in Pretoria, where he was buried. Queen Victoria had been following the war very closely, as you’d expect, and in the months leading up to January 1901 had knitted eight chunky brown woollen scarves.She made them to personally honour the bravery of eight British soldiers fighting in the Boer War. in this podcast, we also are introduced to Emily Hobhouse who was to become a real bane of the British army in the region, her reports about the treatment of Boer women and children caused the English severe embarrassment and she was hated by rank and file troops of the empire. It was in January 1901 that Emily Hobhouse took a train through the Karoo to Bloemfontein in the Free State in order to test reports that civilians were being mistreated by the British. Hobhouse describes this journey through the semi-desert, where sandstorms and thunderstorms followed one another in an endless cycle.