Stephen Hobhouse

Stephen Henry Hobhouse
Born 5 August 1881
Pitcombe, Somerset, England
Died 2 April 1961 (aged 79)
Nationality English
Alma mater University of Oxford
Occupation peace activist
prison reformer
religious writer
Spouse(s) Rosa Waugh

Stephen Henry Hobhouse (5 August 1881 – 2 April 1961) was a prominent English peace activist, prison reformer, and religious writer.

Family

Stephen Henry Hobhouse was born in Pitcombe, Somerset, England. He was the eldest son of Henry Hobhouse (1854–1937), a wealthy landowner and Liberal MP from 1885 to 1906, and Margaret Heyworth Potter.[1] Both sides of his family included a number of reformers and progressive politicians:

Education and formative years

Stephen Hobhouse was brought up as a member of the established Church of England.[3] He was educated at Eton, where he won prizes in both academics and sports, and at Balliol College, Oxford.[4]

The Second Boer War broke out when he was 18. He originally supported the war but his views were soon challenged by his cousin Emily. "Thus, no doubt, it was that my mind was prepared for the awakening". What he regarded as an awakening came from a 1902 reading of a pamphlet by Leo Tolstoy. This tract had a profound influence on him and he became an ardent lifelong pacifist.[5]

He worked as a civil servant for seven years in the Board of Education.[6] During the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, he resigned his post to go to Constantinople as a volunteer with a Quaker relief mission that helped refugees.[7]

Marriage

In April 1915, Hobhouse married Rosa Waugh (1881–1961).[1] He met her at a dinner party for Christian activists. She was also an activist, and spent three months in jail for distributing pacifist pamphlets.[4] Rosa was also a prolific author on her own.[8] Together they wrote a biography of Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy.[9] Both Hobhouses were firm believers in homeopathy, and Steven even translated articles for the Homeopathic Journal.[10]

As eldest son of a wealthy family, Stephen stood to inherit a large fortune, but, influenced by Tolstoy here too, he renounced his inheritance. He and his wife adopted a lifestyle of poverty, living in Hoxton, then a slum district in East London.[11] At the same time they joined the Quaker Society of Friends and became active in Quaker service.[3]

Pacifism and prison

Hobhouse was conscripted in 1916. He was granted an exemption at a tribunal in August 1916, conditional upon him joining the Friends Ambulance Unit, but, as an absolutist or unconditionalist conscientious objector,[3] refused to accept the decision or to appeal against it. He ignored a notice to report to a barracks, was arrested by the civil police, brought before a magistrates' court, and handed over to the military. He refused to put on military uniform, was court-martialled and sentenced to imprisonment with hard labour.[2]

Hobhouse was placed in solitary confinement because he refused to obey the "Rule of Silence" forbidding prisoners to speak to one another.[12] He wrote to his wife: "The spirit of love requires that I should speak to my fellow-prisoners, the spirit of truth that I should speak to them openly"[13] By mid 1917 his health, after 112 days in jail, followed by a second jail sentence, was declining rapidly.[14] (His health had always been frail: he had had nervous breakdowns and scarlet fever.[7]) His wife was very angry about the treatment he got in prison. Some said that he never recovered his health entirely.[8] In 1917 Hobhouse wrote:[12]

Nearly every feature of prison life seems deliberately arranged to destroy a man's sense of his own personality, his power of choice and initiative, his possessive instincts, his concept of himself as a being designed to love and serve his fellow-man. His very name is blotted out and he becomes a number; A.3.21 and D.2.65 were two of my designations. He and his fellows are elaborately counted, when-ever moved from one location to another, in the characteristic machine-like way. He is continually, of course, under lock and key, ignored except as an object for spying.

His mother, Margaret, was a supporter of the war — a war in which three sons served and the youngest Paul Edward was killed in March 1918.[15][16] But she was determined to save Stephen's life and to draw attention to the predicament of the roughly 1350 war resisters then in prison.[17] She maintained that "absolutists" like Stephen should either receive a King's Pardon or be released into civilian life. She produced a pamphlet, I Appeal unto Caesar: the case of the conscientious objectors, with an introduction by the eminent classicist and public figure Gilbert Murray, publicising the plight of the conscientious objectors. The pamphlet sold over 18,000 copies.[18] Recent research by Jo Vellacott has revealed that the appeal's author was actually Bertrand Russell.[19][20] Margaret conducted an active campaign, aided discreetly by the influential Alfred Milner, who was a family friend.[21][22] His case was first raised in Parliament on 9 July 1917.[23] The campaign eventually prevailed, and in December 1917 Stephen Hobhouse, along with some 300 other COs, was released from prison on grounds of ill health.[24]

In prison Hobhouse met Fenner Brockway, a "fiery socialist" and fellow anti-war activist. After the war, they wrote English Prisons Today, sponsored by the Prison System Enquiry Committee.[25] This book, which appeared in 1922, was a critique of the whole English prison system[8] and initiated a wave of prison reform which has continued to this day.[26]

Writings

Hobhouse wrote many books on prison reform, Quakerism, and religion. Selected works include:[27][28]

References

Notes
Sources

External links