An English translation has been placed at the end.
Met vriendelike toestemming herdruk uit Die Burger. Artikel geskryf deur Engela Kruger. ekruger1@dieburger.com
Dié artikel het in die Die Burger uitgawe van 5 September 2026 verskyn, in die afdeling Jou Wêreld, op bladsye 6–7. Dankie, Engela, dat jy so ruimhartig is en jou werk deel.
https://www.netwerk24.com/stemme/aktueel/een-van-emily-se-kinders-20260819-0912
In 1901 het Emily Hobhouse vier meisies uit die Bloemfontein-konsentrasiekamp gekies om op haar eie koste skool toe te stuur. Een van hulle was Engela Jacoba van Rooyen (1886–1979) van Bornmansdrift in die Ladybrand-distrik, wie se moeder enkele maande later in die kamp oorlede is. Engela is daarna as onderwyseres aan die Bloemhof-seminarie op Stellenbosch opgelei, het in 1912 met Gert van Graan van Brandfort getrou en die ouderdom van 93 jaar bereik. Haar agterkleindogter, Engela Kruger, het die verhaal saamgestel uit familiefoto’s, ‘n poskaart van die rugbyspeler Paul Roos, die kampregisters en Hobhouse se eie briewe.
Klik op die prent hieronder om dit in ’n ligkasaansig oop te maak. Dubbelklik daarna op die prent om dit te vergroot sodat dit makliker lees. Gebruik die linker- en regterpyltjies in die venster om tussen die prente te beweeg. Druk die Esc-sleutel of gebruik die terugknoppie om na hierdie bladsy terug te keer.
Reprinted with kind permission from Die Burger. Article written by Engela Kruger. ekruger1@dieburger.com
The article appeared in the 5 September 2026 edition of Die Burger, in the section Jou Wêreld, on pages 6–7. Thank you, Engela, for your generosity in sharing your work.
https://www.netwerk24.com/stemme/aktueel/een-van-emily-se-kinders-20260819-0912
Please refer to the Afrikaans article above to view the photographs and laid-out article. Then double-click on the image to enlarge it so that it is easier to read. Use the left and right arrows in the window to move between the images. Press the Esc key or use the back button to return to the article page. Captions have been written at the end of this English translations to aid you.
One of Emily’s ‘children’
In 1901 Emily Hobhouse took a child from Ladybrand out of the Bloemfontein concentration camp. Her name was Engela Jacoba van Rooyen. This is her story.
She was 13 when the Anglo-Boer War broke out in October 1899, and 14 when it changed her life irrevocably.
Engela van Rooyen was born on 19 March 1886. She was the thirteenth of 16 children of Johannes Cornelis van Rooyen (1843–1918), a farmer and racehorse breeder of the farm Bornmansdrift in the Ladybrand district (today the Clocolan district) of the then Orange Free State, and his wife, Gertruida Sophia Ferreira (1846–1901).
On 13 June 1886 she was baptised in the Dutch Reformed (NG) church in Ladybrand.
After the war broke out, two of her older brothers were captured by the English at Fouriesburg on 30 July 1900 and sent to Ceylon (today Sri Lanka); a third brother was banished to Bermuda.
Her father remained on commando and was never captured; her uncle, Chief Commandant Ignatius Stephanus (Naas) Ferreira, was killed at Paardeberg on 18 February 1900.
On 1 January 1901 Engela (camp number 105751) was admitted to the Bloemfontein concentration camp together with her mother, her sister Anna Christina and her brothers Ephraim Herbert and Innes Eksteen. The departure dates of Anna, Ephraim and Innes were never entered in the register. They survived.
In February 1901 Emily Hobhouse, who had arrived in Bloemfontein on 24 January, decided to take four girls out of the camp and send them, at her own expense, to the Oranje Vrij Staat Dames Instituut (later Eunice School) in Bloemfontein.
Engela was one of the four.
The camp register confirms that Engela left the camp on 23 February 1901 – ‘destination Bloemfontein’. She had spent seven weeks in the Bloemfontein concentration camp.
On 6 July 1901 her mother died of pneumonia in the camp. She was buried in the war cemetery, where the camp memorial wall now stands at the Memoriam cemetery, and her name is one of those on a memorial wall on the site near the Women’s Memorial.
On that day Engela was at school in Bloemfontein, a few miles from the camp.
There is no information on what became of Anna after she left the camp. Ephraim died in 1958 on the farm Slagternek near Excelsior, and Innes in 1949 on De Rust near Clocolan; both grew up in the district and farmed there.
The other brothers in Ceylon returned after the peace. Petrus, the 18-year-old on the ship Mongolian, died in 1904 at the age of 22.
In August 1903 Engela’s father remarried at Winburg, to Hester Lauretta van Rooyen of the neighbouring farm Kluitjieskraal. Three children were born of this marriage. He died in 1918 at Bornmansdrift and was buried on the farm; she died in 1950 and was also buried on the farm.
Engela later went to Stellenbosch, where she was trained as a pupil teacher at the Bloemhof Seminary. According to Engela’s youngest child, Ida, Hobhouse arranged bursaries for the children who had been taken out of the camp.
Bloemhof and Paul Roos
The Bloemhof Seminary in Stellenbosch was founded in 1875 as a branch school of the Huguenot Seminary at Wellington. Besides the ordinary classes, it offered the Cape education department’s pupil-teacher course: three years of at least ten hours a week in front of a class, an examination every year, and at the end the third-class teacher’s certificate. The pupil teachers, of whom Engela was one, were often still senior pupils themselves.
She would have qualified as a teacher in 1907 or 1908.
Research shows that Bloemhof was still an English school at the time; Afrikaans would become the medium of instruction only in 1925.
A Free State camp child who learnt to teach in English received her training at the very centre of the Afrikaans language struggle. And she received post from a friend, the rugby legend Paul Roos (25). He, too, was a teacher at Stellenbosch.
Five years earlier she had sat in a tent on a koppie outside Bloemfontein. Now the most famous rugby player in the country was sending her a postcard from Melrose House about his ankle.
At Stellenbosch she also met her future husband.
In 1964, when she was 77, she wrote down a recollection and signed it ‘E.J. v. Graan, Smalstraat 3, Brandfort’. In it she writes: ‘I first met the son in Stellenbosch where we were both studying.’
It is not known what her future husband studied. Gerhardus Jacobus (Gert) van Graan of Brandfort was a year younger than Engela.
‘After having completed our studies we both returned to Brandfort – I to teach and Mr. G.J. v. Graan jr. to his father’s farm “Keerom”.’
On 24 December 1912 she and Gert were married in the house of F. Victor in Brandfort. The marriage register gives his occupation as ‘farmer’ and his address as Keerom. One of the witnesses was her eldest brother, I.M.S. van Rooyen – Ignatius, who had been in Bermuda. A year after the wedding, on 16 December 1913, the National Women’s Monument outside Bloemfontein was unveiled. Among the photographs used for this research is one of that day: girls filing past the monument in a row.
Engela’s mother is one of the approximately 26 370 for whom the monument was erected.
In front of the NG Moedergemeente (mother congregation) in Brandfort a marble angel has stood since 1900 for the women and children who died in the town’s own camp. Engela must have walked past it for almost fifty years.
Three children were born of the marriage: Gerhardus Jacobus (1914–1987), Johannes Cornelius (Hansie) (1918–1965) and Gertruida Sophia (Ida), later Griesel (1919–2012), named after her grandmother who had died in the camp.
After the death of her father-in-law in 1927, the family farmed on the farm Irene near Brandfort. Later she lived at Smalstraat 3, Brandfort, with Ida.
She died in Brandfort on 10 October 1979 at the age of 93.
Smalstraat 3
This is where my first memories of my great-grandmother lie. She was frail and small, and in a wheelchair.
I knew that she, like my mother, also Engela (Kruger), was a highly regarded teacher who loved children. It is said that Gert was the love of her life. I was too young to remember whether she told stories of her childhood. I do, however, remember the day of her funeral, because my cousin David and I had to stay at home.
Only decades later did I hear about Hobhouse from Ouma Ida, and years after that, with David’s help, I discovered all the photographs of the family in my uncle Johan’s family albums.
Her granddaughter Heloise Pretorius of Hopetown remembers her as a very clever woman: ‘Ouma was a formidable woman, a fiery Sap of the Free State.’
It struck me as strange: how could a child whose mother had died in the concentration camp later be well disposed towards the British? My research led me to the answer.
‘After the Peace of Vereeniging (1902), Louis Botha and Jan Smuts – themselves former Boer generals – believed that reconciliation between Boer and Briton was the only way forward. They held that continued hostility would harm South Africa, and worked actively to forge Afrikaans and English speakers into a single South African nation (the “one-stream policy”).’
Her only other surviving grandchild, Dan van Graan of Stilbaai, says of his grandmother Engela: ‘She was a good person with sound principles, an artist of stature, loving and gentle. I was very fond of her.’
Everything comes together
The story reached me in fragments: a postcard, a few photographs, a small wooden box, an account of Hobhouse having paid for Ouma’s schooling. In January 2022 I found her in the University of Cape Town’s camp database, and Prof. Fransjohan Pretorius helped to fit some of the puzzle pieces together. Elsabé Brits sent the pages of Hobhouse’s typescript from the Free State Archives, with Engela’s name on page 39.
Jan de Bruin, retired and associated with the Genealogical Society of South Africa (Gauteng North branch), traced the 1912 marriage register, the baptismal registers, the death notices and the map of the Ladybrand district on which Bornmansdrift lies between Schaffhausen and Mequatlingsnek. The War Museum’s prisoner-of-war cards followed the brothers to Ceylon and Bermuda. The school where she was trained, Hoër Meisieskool Bloemhof, included her story in its 150th-anniversary commemorative book in 2025.
Without them this article would not have been possible.
The monument
Of the four girls whom Hobhouse took out of the camp in 1901, I know about great-grandmother Engela: she finished school, became a teacher, raised a family and lived to the age of 93. Hetty and Lizzie Botha were probably the daughters of Petrus Johannes Botha and Engela Stegmann of Philippolis, aged 14 and 18 in 1901; what became of them has yet to be researched. Eunice Ferreira contracted typhoid the day after her arrival; she survived.
Hobhouse died on 8 June 1926.
I do not know whether Engela van Graan, then aged 40 and with three children, was in the crowd that day in 1926 when Hobhouse’s ashes were placed in a niche of the Women’s Memorial.
But this I do know: she led a full life because an Englishwoman decided to begin with four girls.
I bear her name with pride.
■ Hobhouse’s funeral is commemorated in October at the Women’s Memorial in Bloemfontein.
■ Kruger is Die Burger’s content editor in Cape Town. ekruger@dieburger.com
Sidebar – Hobhouse: ‘I will only begin with four girls’
Emily Hobhouse arrived in Bloemfontein by train from Cape Town on 24 January 1901 to see, on behalf of the South African Women and Children Distress Fund, what was becoming of the Boer women and children. She visited the Bloemfontein concentration camp that same week.
In a letter to her aunt, Lady Mary Hobhouse, she writes about a plan that she was not sure the committee in London would approve:
‘I wonder if the committee at home will think me wrong or right in proposing to spend some of the fund in the education of some of the highest class girls in the camp. The thing is this: Dr. Andrew Murray’s daughter Miss Murray was head of the “Dames Institutes” here. It is a large place where the elite of the country girls were always educated. Of course everything was upset or destroyed there, but now Miss Murray has been asked by Government to come back and try to begin work again … I suggest taking some girls out of the camp here and paying their schooling for say six months, say £25 for six months tuition, board and lodging inclusive. As I am not sure you will approve (please ask the Executive) I will only begin with four girls. The mothers cannot bear to see their girls month after month idle in these camps. The life tends to be very demoralizing and this camp in particular is quite bad for young girls. We all feel that I can rig them out with clothes from my stores.’
On page 39 of the same typescript, in a letter of about 25 February, she gives their names:
‘The four girls selected for the Institute are: Hetty Botha, Lizzie Botha, Engela van Rooyen, Eunice Ferreira, aged 14 to 18 years. The day after her arrival Eunice developed typhoid and we must send her to the Volk’s Hospital and select another girl in her place. Mrs Botha, mother of the above girls, is my great help and stand by in the camp. She was née Stegmann, of an old Cape family. Her husband was Landdrost of Philippolis and she has of course lost everything.’
Sidebar – The postcard
A treasured item in the family’s collection is a postcard addressed to ‘Miss Engela van Rooyen, Bloemhof Sem., Stellenbosch’, with a Transvaal halfpenny stamp. The picture side shows ‘Mr. Geo. Heys’ Residence, Pretoria’: Melrose House, where the Peace of Vereeniging had been signed four years earlier, ending the war. The writer was Paul Roos, the Springbok captain. The text begins in the middle of a sentence, because the first half was on a previous card:
‘… left. I suppose you had a fine time. I would have had a ripping time if I did not sprain my ankle against “Mines & C.S.A.R.” which of course kept me from playing the rest of the matches & also from enjoying myself, but I hope my ankle will be alright by the time we play …’
Photo captions
Engela van Rooyen, 1910.
Engela’s mother, Gertruida Sophia, and father, Johannes Cornelis, with two of their children. On the father’s lap is Ignatius and on the mother’s lap Gertie.
Wedding, 24 December 1912. Back: Ignatius van Rooyen (Engela’s brother), Gert van Graan (bridegroom), Engela van Rooyen, Justus van Rooyen, Minnie van Rooyen (later Malherbe). Front: Bermuda van Rooyen (later Becker), Vincent van Rooyen (brother) and Stephanus van Rooyen (brother). Photos: Johan Griesel collection.
Engela (back row, left) in the Bloemfontein concentration camp. Photo: colourised by Tinus le Roux.
Four generations, 1975. Front: Ida Griesel, baby Engela Kruger (the writer of this article), Engela van Graan and, behind, Engela Kruger senior.
Follow the link (QR code) for more photographs.
Engela, her husband and their eldest son, Gerhard. Photo: Johan Griesel collection.
Ida, Hansie and Gerhard van Graan. According to Ida, Hansie was very unhappy about this photograph because his mother, Engela, had put Ida’s shoes on him for a joke. Photo: supplied by Engela Kruger.
‘Third-year teachers, Bloemhof School, Stellenbosch 1907.’ Engela stands in the second row from the back, second from the left. Photo: Johan Griesel family collection.
This photograph’s caption reads ‘Pappie en mammie’ (Daddy and Mummy): Engela and her husband, Gert, in later years. Photo: Johan Griesel collection.
One of Engela’s charcoal sketches: a river with deer drinking, in the romantic European style. Photo: Engela Kruger.
