Immediately prior to the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War in 1899, foreign (mainly English) immigrants in the Transvaal began to leave, seeking asylum for what they believed would be a short and sharp war. Most chose coastal towns, and many chose East London. The early arrivals were mainly women and children, whose husbands had sent them away for safety. Since they were able to plan for the journey, most brought money with them and were able to take lodgings at East London's hotels and boarding houses.

Once war erupted, however, the Kruger regime evicted thousands more Uitlanders. This group also headed for the coast but, because they were unable to plan for the adventure, they often arrived on board cattle trains in a penniless condition. They were therefore forced to seek charity from the host towns. At East London, this charity was immediately forthcoming. Up to 5000 Uitlander refugees descended upon the port, more than doubling the town's population within a matter of months. The majority were settled in tents at the beach camp near Eastern Beach. Others were accommodated at various other places in the town.

The Boer War unexpectedly lasted some three years, and during that time charity was stretched to its maximum. The Lord Mayor of London responded to the crisis by organising the Mansion House

See also: Read more on this subject South African War Mansion House Fund Eastern Beach

Fund with its distributional headquarters in Cape Town. As many job creation opportunities as possible were also explored, often at the expense of East London's Black labourers. All in all, it was one of the gravest crises to face the port and its inhabitants.

Dr Keith Tankard

Uitlander Refugee Crisis

Uitlander refugee camp at the Eastern Beach Visit the boer war picture gallery

The South African War has traditionally been viewed as a domain of White male involvement. Recently the role of the Black population has been acknowledged but to date little has been written of the part played by women in the conflict. Aside from the occasional isolated individuals, like Emily Hobhouse, it would emerge that women occupied a singularly insignificant status.

Yet, if one explores the humanitarian side of the war, it becomes abundantly clear that women were prominent and, indeed, had a remarkable influence even over their male counterparts. It is the purpose of this article to explore one example of this phenomenon, namely the role played by the women of East London in the Uitlander refugee crisis. What becomes apparent is that even this relatively insignificant community had a major impact on the lives of the Uitlanders not only in their own town but throughout South Africa as a whole.

The Uitlander Refugees

During the decade following the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand, a large population of "Uitlanders" or "foreigners" had gathered in the mining towns of the Transvaal Republic. Many of them were at odds with the conservative Kruger government and encouraged the beating of the imperial war-drums. When the South African War commenced in October 1899, however, they saw the need to flee the country, or at least to send their wives and children to places of safety, until the conflict was over.

So began the first of three waves of refugees, consisting primarily of women and children who were sent out of the Transvaal some weeks before the outbreak of hostilities. It was, at least to some extent, a premeditated action and so they were able to make arrangements, travel to the coast in the comfort of passenger trains, take money with them and establish themselves in hotels and boarding-houses, to holiday at a seaside resort while the predicted short and sharp war was to be waged.

There were, however, other Uitlanders who were either not at odds with the Kruger regime or did not want to leave their homes. Elizabeth van Heyningen, in her pioneering study, points out that Kruger's government actually encouraged them to stay by offering permits to all who wished to make application. When war was declared, however, all those without permits were ordered to leave the republic within eight days. So began the second wave. The majority of refugees who left at that point, van Heyningen says, were ill-prepared and were amongst the most destitute.

The war was not the push-over that the imperial supporters believed it would be. Initially the Boer forces made several successful sorties, besieging the British troops at such towns as Mafeking, Ladysmith and Kimberley. In about April 1900, however, the tide of war began to turn against the Boers and the Kruger government revenged itself by turning out the remaining Uitlander residents. A third group of refugees had now to flee via Delagoa Bay, only to find that places of sanctuary throughout the Cape and Natal were already overcrowded and sympathy for their cause was on the wane.

Most of the refugees headed for the coastal towns, with the ports of Durban, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town and East London being the natural choices, although many also found accommodation at some inland towns, like Pietermaritzburg and Grahamstown. Populations rose dramatically. East London, then a small harbour town with a mere 5000 White residents, doubled its population in no more than four weeks. The result was overcrowding, homelessness and destitution.

Destitution

Apart from the early arrivals, now accommodated comfortably in their hotel rooms, tales of distress abounded. Women reported how they and their children had been bundled onto coal and cattle trucks, to arrive at their destination only to find themselves desolate and often penniless in a strange town. It was a pitiful sight, an East London reporter commented on the arrival of another train-load of refugees, to see mothers and little children sitting about on the station in the pouring rain, knowing not a soul and with no accommodation available.

The majority of refugees were solely dependent on charity. Had it not been for immediate rescue by humanitarian institutions such as the St Vincent de Paul Society and the Salvation Army, the plight of those unfortunate people at East London would have been sorry indeed. There was also an initial spirit of philanthropic concern as many refugees who had already found shelter hastened to the aid of others in need. The local townspeople were also found to be generous, with butchers and bakers providing in plenty, housewives contributing milk and vegetables on a daily basis, and the Catholic Convent granting free admission to all Uitlander children.

Relief Committees

Yet the sheer magnitude of the refugee crisis soon dwarfed individual efforts and it became crucial that some sort of official community organisation be undertaken if the situation were not to degenerate into catastrophe. This institutionalised aid took two forms. First, there was the Mansion House Fund started by the Lord Mayor of London but with its distributional headquarters in Cape Town. Then there were the regional charity structures which depended on local, national and international funding.

The Mansion House Fund, Van Heyningen explains, was the Lord Mayor of London's response to a plea for aid from the Governor of the Cape of Good Hope. More than £200 000 were raised in Britain and South Africa, she says, with disbursement of the funds left in the hands of a Central Committee in Cape Town, with the Governor as chairperson. The money was thereupon distributed through local committees in the towns.

At East London, however, it was a group of women who took the initiative in alleviating the distress. By mid-September 1899, still three weeks before the onset of hostilities, the women had become aware that there were already so many refugees in the town that drastic measures needed to be taken. They thereupon called a public meeting and elected a committee to take charge of relief work. Immediately thereafter the organizers approached the Town Council for permission to erect tents on the Beach commonage and gained access to the Agricultural Society's Show Ground building to house nearly 150 women and children. The Committee also undertook the provision of food.

The Ladies Relief Committee soon divided itself into three sections to deal with finance, relief-work and entertainment. The latter group made an energetic start by organising a "grand evening concert" for early October in which local and Johannesburg amateurs performed so as to raise funds. It was soon found, however, that East Londoners were being asked to contribute in so many ways that there was a real fear that the local residents would soon be milked dry. The entertainment committee was therefore disbanded. The other two sub-committees, on the other hand, formed the back-bone of relief-work in the town. While one arranged subscription lists, the other hurriedly sought places in which to accommodate the destitute, and trains were met nightly so that no-one would be stranded on the station.

Mansion House Funds

Yet by mid-October it was clear that the Relief Committee was running into serious difficulty, mainly because local resources simply could not sustain the effort. The amount of distress was on the increase and male exiles were now pouring into the town. Moreover, the demand for tents by both the army and the other frontier towns was increasing daily, which resulted in escalating prices and a critically limited supply.

So severe, indeed, was the strain on East London's resources that many Uitlander men saw immediately that they could not be accommodated and decided instead to volunteer for armed service even though, the Daily Dispatch pointed out, it was "not a workman's war [sic]". One may see daily, the editor wrote, "a pleading wife and children urging the breadwinner to stay with them and live, 'We have lost our little home and work, do not make us orphans too!' "

Nevertheless, because so many males were taking refuge in the town, the relief work could no longer be left solely to the women. It was urgent, moreover, that East London tapped into the central relief network of the Mansion House Fund and, to do this, a male Town Relief Committee was at last formed. Unlike its female counterpart with its team of voluntary workers, the male committee used paid officials and had a separate management board consisting of seven Town Councillors and five other interested people.

The Town Committee, as it came to be called, thereupon undertook to provide shelter, food and, in some cases, the cost of transportation back to England, for all of which subsidy was provided by the Mansion House Fund in Cape Town. While the Ladies Committee continued the work of providing mainly for the women and children, i.e. the greater proportion of the refugees, the Town Committee concentrated on the men, many of whom had arrived with no financial means whatsoever and barely anything "beyond what they stood up in". They were provided with meals and a bed but no money.

Problem of the Uitlander Men

The arrival of the men complicated the relief work in other ways. The Ladies Committee had been established to care for the initial influx of women and children but, as husbands began to join their wives, it found itself having to provide for the entire family, with the women continuing to make the claims. Furthermore, many of the refugee families who initially had their own financial resources, began to find that their funds were dwindling and, by November 1899, had to fall back on charity. The number of cases therefore increased rapidly as the year neared its end and the Ladies Committee found itself paying not only for food but often the rent.

Another point needled the members of the Ladies Committee. They regarded many of the Uitlander men as lazy and living on charity when jobs were in fact available. Their argument was fundamentally correct, as a glance at the municipal employment scheme will show. Because of the enormous unemployment problem, the East London Town Council had attempted to provide work where it could. Although the municipality was already feeling the financial strain of having to supply facilities for both refugees and imperial troops, it nevertheless attempted to employ as many refugees as possible without any further financial outlay.

To achieve that objective, the Council resorted to its tried and tested (and usually failed) scheme of dismissing its African workforce to make work available for Whites. In November 1899 most of the Black labourers were retrenched, and extra work was created by setting Uitlander men to dig at the proposed site of a new dam on the Buffalo River. It quickly became apparent, however, that the scheme was financially unsound because expenditure on public works more than doubled through increased wages to refugees and, as the Mayor pointed out, the town simply did not get the return expected. In short, the Uitlanders were not as hard-working as the Black labourers and the scheme had to be abandoned.

Because the Uitlander men were drawing on funds which had been ear-marked for the women and children, the Ladies Committee attempted to seek other solutions. Indeed, several members of the committee tried to pressurize the men into volunteering for the armed forces so as to remove them from their lists but usually their actions were blocked by the wives who refused to allow their husbands to go to the front.

Ultimately the matter was referred to a meeting of the committee in February 1900, during which debate the men were referred to as cowards. Because the minutes of this meeting were reported in the Dispatch, the remarks produced a storm of protest. One writer berated the Committee's accusation as "ridiculous". Not every refugee was a "fighting man", he said, and demanded to know whether the committee women would allow their own "dear husbands" to go to the front if placed in similar circumstances.

A second letter was harsher in its protestation. It seemed, the writer stated, that the members of the Ladies Committee had mistaken "the duties of their vocation", were now insulting the refugees' manhood and dispensing their gifts in such a way as to be thrown at them "like a bone is thrown to a dog". Had it come to that, the correspondent demanded, "that these dispensers of other men's bounties are to use their power ... in a tyrannical and oppressive manner. The natural protectors of the women and children to be forced to go to be shot may be, and their helpless wives and children forced into barracks and ... fed with soup to be consumed on the premises lest ... the husbands thus condemned to starvation should partake of it."

Reduction in Funding

Despite the vehement protests from some of the Uitlander men, the Ladies Committee was able to bite and not merely bark and it did so by making use of the husbands, some of whom sat on the Town Committee. Soon the male group, undaunted by the flurry of correspondence in the press, approached the Central Relief Committee of the Mansion House Fund to enlist its support to strike the Uitlander men off the lists because of the shortage of funds.

A "good many refugees" had already gone to the front, the men argued in support of their wives' sentiments, but others had no wish to go "in any capacity, and were living in idleness". Yet East London could not act unilaterally as it would give the town a bad name if the other centres did not do likewise. The request had the desired effect and in March 1900 the Central Committee in Cape Town instructed all centres to strike able-bodied men from their lists from the end of that month.

The result was a dramatic decrease in the number of men drawing aid at East London, from 724 in March 1900 to 460 in April. The discontinuance of funds, however, also had a salutary effect on many of the Uitlanders, forcing the men into concerted action. Almost immediately the chairperson of an Uitlander Committee appealed to East London firms to provide employment for such men who could no longer acquire aid in any other form. Most of them, he stated, were miners who would be prepared to do any labouring work.

A public meeting of Uitlanders was held soon afterwards in an urgent attempt to solve the sudden unemployment crisis. A sub-committee thereupon drafted telegrams to both the Prime Minister and High Commissioner Milner appealing for the creation of jobs. Their efforts met with success. Many of the men were suddenly employed on public works while others were engaged to break rocks at Mooiplaats, some ten miles outside East London which, it was agreed, would be a good opportunity for the miners to keep in training.

Although the crisis began to ease somewhat after May 1900, the unexpected duration of the war affected most of the refugees. Even some of the wealthier ones who had booked in at hotels and boarding houses were now forced to resort to charity. Financial support via the Mansion House Fund also began to dry up as urgent attention had to be given to the war-wounded and to the growing numbers of widows and orphans.

Natural Hardships

Apart from the question of financial distress, the Uitlanders could also not have arrived at East London at a more inopportune moment. The town had already outgrown its water supply and a major drought was causing the worst water-crisis in its history. Sanitary conditions too were at a low ebb, with an inadequate night-soil removal system and no arrangements whatsoever for the removal of "bedroom slops" or urine. The massive influx of refugees greatly exaggerated these problems, making disease a constant reality.

The worst circumstances were at the Beach Camp where there was regular overcrowding and the sanitary arrangements were even poorer than in the town. By February 1900 more than a thousand refugees had been accommodated there but the water supply was restricted to a single tap. Furthermore, the drought had reduced the supply to a trickle, while strict municipal rationing made the water available for only two hours twice a day. Sanitation at the Beach Camp was also so alarming that by January 1900 major illness was occurring, especially vomiting, diarrhoea and outbreaks of typhoid.

As the war dragged on, the refugees living under canvas became hard-pressed in other ways. Their tents slowly degenerated with age, developing holes which had unfortunate consequences when the drought ended in 1901. The refugees were also particularly susceptible to East London's constant gales which on occasions uprooted the tents, leaving the people soaked and their possessions strewn over the commonage. In some cases, babies died from the sudden exposure.

The War Ends

At the beginning of 1902 the war was in its final stages and being waged only in the country districts of the Transvaal. Johannesburg and Pretoria were securely in British hands. Arrangements at last began to be made to repatriate the refugees. Lists were drawn up by the office of the High Commissioner to grant permits to those who were to be allowed to return but which produced further insecurity. The lists were based on those submitted by the Town Relief Committee of people who were drawing aid. Many refugees, however, had managed to look after themselves and had not found it necessary to submit to charity. The latter now found themselves without permits and so could not leave East London to restart their businesses until the legal muddle was sorted out.

Early in February 1902, however, the first trainloads of refugees left East London. Two special trains were arranged, the first to carry Uitlanders from the Beach Camp and the second to take refugees from the town. It was an emotional leave-taking, with everyone in "the best of spirits" at the prospect of returning home after 28 months in exile. The first train steamed out of the station at 8.30 p.m. on 10 February "amid ringing cheers from the passengers and the spectators". The following train left at 9.00 p.m. Passengers from both trains were then treated to another rousing farewell from large crowds of townspeople along the rail route through the town.

Conclusion

The South African War was not a women's war. When one explores the peripheries of the contest, however, one does find women in ever-active humanitarian roles. As house-wives, they were the first to respond to the daily needs of the increasing catastrophe about them. They were the first to make an organised effort to deal with the situation when it rose beyond the means of individual charity. Finally, they lent support to and at times even dominated their male counterparts in the Town Committee and Mansion House Fund. At all times the Ladies Relief Committee remained the backbone of relief work at East London.

On the other hand, there was the darker side. Soon after the refugees had begun to pour into the town, landlords made the most of the overcrowded rooms to more than double the rents and several of the larger boarding-houses hastened to raise their tariffs, a circumstance not unique to East London. It is not clear who these landlords were or which boarding-houses were involved but Kelsall's General Directory of East London listed 20 boarding-house keepers in 1899, of whom no less than 14 were women. This, however, does not paint the full picture because, as the town became congested, many people began to take in lodgers, either from a sense of humanitarian sentiment or out of pecuniary interest.

It is also clear that many of East London's entrepreneurs exploited the situation ruthlessly, so much so that the post-war depression was slow to affect the business sector and most of the finest buildings in the town were erected immediately after the war. An example of this was the new suburb of Belgravia which was opened up in 1901.

See also: South African War Mansion House Fund Anne Bryant Gallery Eastern Beach

Such houses as today's Anne Bryant Art Gallery are therefore stone memorials of East London's immediate post-war affluence. While many women at East London, therefore, were performing sterling work in relief aid for the destitute, many of the town's residents were exploiting the situation for their own gain.

Dr Keith Tankard