The Woman Who Disliked Kids, and Saved Their Lives Anyway
ANNETTE TELLS TALES The founder of Save the Children was an unlikely savior: A reminder that labels stop us from learning,
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Note from Annette
“Do you really find labels helpful? I find the minute I sum up something, give it a name, and put it in a box, I’ve stopped trying to understand it, and that will never do . . .”
—The Professor, in Annette Laing’s Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When (Snipesville, Book 1)
Today’s Annette Tells Tales post, for a change, is not based on a work of academic history, written mainly for scholars, but on a very readable biography, author Clare Mulley’s The Woman Who Saved the Children. It’s very cheeky of me to write an Annette Tells Tales post interpreting any of Clare Mulley’s work, because unlike academics, she doesn't need the help: Clare is an international bestselling author whose books have all been optioned for film or television. Her runaway hit The Spy Who Loved introduced the world to Krystyna Skarbek (aka Christine Granville), a Polish noblewoman who served as a British secret agent during World War II, and whose staggering exploits would put James Bond to shame, if Bond had existed.
The Woman Who Saved the Children was Clare’s first book. It's about Eglantyne Jebb, a very different sort of woman from Krystyna Skarbek. At least, that’s what I used to think.
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The Woman Who Disliked Kids, and Saved Them Anyway
Intro: A Crime For Which We’re Still Being Rewarded
Nobody should have been too shocked when, on this particular day, a few months after the end of the First World War, the police arrested two protestors on London’s Trafalgar Square. Trafalgar Square, this large open space in the heart of the city, is the gathering place of national protests. Yet the arrest of two women, whose voices, bearing, and clothing attested to their privileged status, still turned heads.
Just a few years earlier, ladies like these were often arrested. They were prominent among the radical women’s rights activists known as suffragettes. The suffragettes’ campaign for the women’s vote included smashing store windows and slashing a painting in the National Gallery. Their actions, as they intended, regularly landed them in court and prison. But still. Arrests of posh ladies were still a novelty in 1919.
As the police escorted the two away, we wonder what outrage they had committed? Surprisingly, the charge was only that they had been handing out leaflets to passersby. They had given away about 800 handouts before they were apprehended.
Headlined STARVING BABY, these small handbills featured a large photo from Austria of a horrifyingly emaciated child, with the head of a two and a half year old, and the body of a small infant. The leaflet hinted at the cause: Not parental neglect. Not natural disaster. Rather, the culprit was British government policy. And that policy was now the responsibility of every citizen in the democracy that Britain was fast becoming in 1919: Now, not only working men, but even a few elite women, as 1918, the previous year, had finally got the vote.
The child was starving because of the British blockade. British Navy ships, for several years now, had prevented imported American goods, including food, from reaching central Europe. The blockade had been an effort to force an end to the Great War, what we now know as the First World War, by starving Germany and its allies. Even historians’ most skeptical estimates since then have shown that hundreds of thousands of civilians died as a result.
But one thing makes no sense: The war had ended the year before, 1918, and yet the blockade was still going on. By starving the populations of Germany and its allies, the British and French hoped to force these governments to accept punishing conditions for peace in the Treaty of Versailles that would officially end the war.
Meanwhile, British humanitarians like Eglantyne Jebb and Barbara Bodichon Ayrton Gould, the two arrested women, saw things very differently than did their own government. They were reading reliable and absolutely horrific reports of children dying in the streets. Of children being carried into empty hospital buildings, and laid in rows on the floor to die. Of grandparents committing suicide so that there would be more food for the young. Of starving mothers, unable to feed their newborns, killing their babies to spare their suffering.
The goal of the leaflet that Jebb and Gould were handing out in Trafalgar Square was to spur British citizens to outraged action, to convince them to press for an end to this atrocity. “There are millions of such children starving today,” the leaflet proclaimed. Yet that’s a very spare description of the problem. The photo had the most impact.
The two women were brought to trial. Gould demanded to be punished with a jail term, rather than a fine, to generate sympathy and support for the cause. That was a tactic she borrowed from the pre-war suffragettes, which is no surprise, since Gould had been a suffragette, breaking windows and enduring imprisonment for the right of women to vote.
Eglantyne Jebb, meanwhile, claimed full responsibility for the leaflet. But she argued that the wartime law which silenced all protest and even criticism of the government, and under which she and Gould were charged, was no longer valid in peacetime. Neither was the blockade, she said, now that the war was over.
Jebb was found guilty, given a stern lecture, and fined £5 (five pounds), which is equal, maybe, to £2747 (about $3700) today, at least according to the Bank of England's web site. Conversions like these are always dodgy guesswork. But I can safely say that Jebb’s fine was, as we might say, a chunk of change. Mind you, Jebb could afford it. No worries. Anyway, in real terms, she actually won her case, big time.
Here’s why. Breaking the law for personal benefit was one thing. Bravely standing up for a righteous cause was another. That’s why Jebb’s punishment was not what it appears to be. The fine was the least the magistrate could have imposed. The policemen at court were pleased to drink tea with Miss Jebb during lulls in the trial. And after the trial ended, the prosecutor quietly gave Eglantyne Jebb a £5 contribution for her work, the same amount that she had been fined.
The prosecutor's £5 was likely the very first donation to the Save the Children Fund. Within two years, this new charity had raised more than a million British pounds, a staggering sum, to aid the starving children of Europe.
Today, Save the Children is still based in London, but it oversees almost thirty national Save the Children organizations, serving more than 120 countries. You might think that’s a long way from two do-gooding upper middle-class ladies being arrested for handing out leaflets in Trafalgar Square.
Don’t be so sure. First, we need to get to know Eglantyne Jebb.
Eglantyne Who? Stick With Me.
I’m going to bet you never heard of Eglantyne Jebb. Neither had I, before I picked up The Woman Who Saved the Children, Clare Mulley’s biography. In fact, the only Eglantyne/Eglantine I had heard of was Angela Lansbury’s character in Disney’s 1971 movie Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Introducing you to a famous person you’ve never heard of is always a risky business for me. American education, especially, leaves the impression that the facts and people you were taught were the sum total of history. And as I’ve said before, the unfamiliar is uncomfortable, which is why I try to make you comfortable and ready to learn more.
I first read The Woman Who Saved The Children shortly after it was published in 2009. I remember enjoying and admiring it as engaging and intelligent. But when I read the book again, for this post, I found it especially thought-provoking. A lot has happened since 2009 to lead me to see this book anew, and partly it’s personal: Since then, I’ve turned to working with the public, and especially children. Plus, as ever, the world has changed, and the problem and plight of modern refugees, including children, has been more and more in the news, and on my mind. Always, our relationship with history is as personal as our relationship with the present.
Today, almost a century after her death, we might call Eglantyne Jebb a single, child-free woman. She would certainly have embraced the idea of being child-free, rather than childless, as we’ll see. We might call her nerdy, or privileged, or all sorts of labels that tell us more about ourselves and the times in which we live, than about Eglantyne Jebb and the times in which she lived. To me, here’s the most interesting thing of all about Eglantyne Jebb: She defies any attempt to slap a label on her, and file her away as an identity. She was a Victorian lady. She was also very much a modern person.
The Childhood of the Woman Who Saved the Children
Eglantyne Jebb could not have had a childhood less like those of the children around the world whom her charity, Save the Children, has helped over the past century. Her late Victorian youth checked all the boxes for a future posh early 20th century woman activist: Rich dad, check, mum who does charitable work, check. Big family home out in the countryside, Shropshire, to be exact (on the border with Wales), check. Her upper-middle class (not upper class) house is a lot smaller than Downton Abbey, as you can see, but I promise it’s still very impressive, plus servants and a lot of land came with it:
Eglantyne’s father, Arthur, not only had this inherited house, but he also had an income of £3,000 per year at the time he married. According to the Bank of England web site, which makes a very rough guesstimate, that is today worth about £600,000, or, translated into dollars, quite a lot more than I or, I expect, any of my readers make. Much of Arthur Jebb’s income came from his inheritance.
Eglantyne was born in 1876, the fourth of six children. Lacking TV and video games, while living in a quiet country house with few visitors, the Jebb kids read a lot of books. Like most privileged children, Eglantyne and her siblings began their education with homeschooling, taught by a governess their parents hired. Eglantyne was especially close to her two younger siblings, Dorothy and Gamul, which, in case you’re wondering, was a pretty strange name at the time, but still better than, I dunno, Moon Unit.
It’s not surprising, then, that Eglantyne was not only a big reader, but also loved writing poetry and stories. She also devised elaborate games of make-believe, once creating a pretend army to which she appointed as officers her governess, parents, and siblings. She developed elaborate plans of world conquest, which is fascinating in light of how her life turned out.
By the time she was a teenager, Eglantyne was reading news magazines, and taking an interest in the outside world. She was already bored with the traditional, conservative education of a “lady”: Religion, drawing, watercolor painting, piano, and French and German, all aimed at making her a suitably decorative wife to a wealthy man, who had servants to do the domestic work.
Enter Aunt Bun. Aunt Bun was a Victorian Liberal (the meaning of “liberal” changes somewhat over time, as do all labels, but you get some idea) and an agnostic who was a fan of Charles Darwin. She firmly believed in women having the vote. In the 1870s, she had been one of the earliest graduates of Newnham College, a women’s college at Cambridge University which has been producing badass women ever since (think Emma Thompson, Miriam Margolyes, or Mary Beard). Not surprisingly, Aunt Bun had views about girls going to university, or posh girls, anyway. She also rejected feminine standards of clothing, with the result that her nickname among the neighbors was “Man Jebb”. I suspect her conservative brother, Eglantyne’s dad, Arthur, had conflicted views about her arrival.
Aunt Bun now joined the Jebb household as a quasi-servant, as manager of house and estate. She took charge of much of the kids’ education, including fun field trips to castles, Roman sites, even factories, as well as fishing and ice-skating. She taught carpentry, metalwork, glasswork, and how to make bullets, to her thrilled nephews and nieces. Yes, I wrote bullets. Think of Bun as a delightfully dangerous Mary Poppins, who encouraged the children to lead intrepid, fearless lives. Sadly, she’s no longer available for hire.
This is not to say that Eglantyne’s much more conservative mother, also called Eglantyne but nicknamed Tye, wasn’t a role model. Mulley tells the story of how Tye came across a little boy working on their estate. He was crying. For several years, he had spent every day but Sundays picking up rocks in the fields. He saw no chance of a better life: And now we see why free land in America had long been an attraction to Brits who never imagined owning it any other way.
Tye was aware of the work of American Charles Leland, who was encouraging people in Pennsylvania to take up traditional crafts. So, with this lad in mind, she began offering free classes in basketry, carpentry, woodcarving, and more. The Jebb kids, having learned from Aunt Bun, happily joined in these classes. They not only acquired useful skills, but met kids who lived much differently than they. They also saw how their mother’s project benefited lives. Tye’s work had great reach, as programs she inspired sprang up around the country. Oh, and the little rock picker? He ended up a cabinetmaker.
Exhausted by all this activity, Tye retired from her work. She retired to the sofa, anticipating an early death. She was 42. She would live to be 80. I think it’s not entirely unfair to think her a bit of a hypochondriac.
But we might also call retired Tye her kids’ life coach. She cheered them on from her pretendy deathbed, the sofa, while they, and especially Eglantyne, supported her. Tye had already seared on Eglantyne’s soul a commitment to taking personal action for social justice, while Bun had made her adventurous. Those who have benefited from Tye’s and Bun’s influence on Eglantyne are too many to count.
Eglantyne Finds Herself at Oxford University
Eglantyne Jebb’s idyllic childhood ended abruptly, when her dad died suddenly in 1894 at only 55. Unlike her brothers, who went off to boarding school, Eglantyne was still at home at age 18. Note that the age when adulthood began was 21, but her dad’s death freed her: Arthur had thought an educated woman would never find a husband, and likely was thinking of his sister, Bun. But Eglantyne was already determined to follow Aunt Bun’s pioneering example. She enrolled at age 19 at Lady Margaret Hall (LMH), the first women’s college at Oxford University, with the goal of getting access to all the lovely books at the library. There, she would major in (or, as Oxford and Cambridge put it, tellingly, read) history.
Until two years before Eglantyne Jebb’s arrival, women students at Oxford University were chaperoned when they went to lectures. They were forbidden to join university clubs, or ride their bikes on Sundays. LMH, more conservative than Somerville, the other women’s college at Oxford, seems at first more like a finishing school than a modern university. It was presided over by Elizabeth Wordsworth, the great-niece of the famous poet, who said she wanted “to turn out girls so that they will be capable of making homes happy". Yet, Eglantyne was soon among her favorites, because Miss Wordsworth, interestingly, admired Jebb’s intellectual independence.
Eglantyne learned much at Oxford, and not just in lectures or reading. She was incensed that male students were offended by the presence of women in lectures, and wondered aloud why they felt threatened. She made friends. She found her feet as an independent woman. And she reassured herself, and her sister Dorothy, who was considering Newnham College, Aunt Bun’s alma mater at Cambridge, that a woman taking a degree was not guilty of self-indulgence. Rather, she said, a university education was good preparation for living the life of service that the Church of England had encouraged her to believe was what God expected of her. “It is perhaps a sacred duty,” Eglantyne wrote to Dorothy, “to try and be as clever as we can.”
A history degree at Oxford in the 1890s was what today we would call an interdisciplinary course: Eglantyne studied not only history, but archeology, Latin, Greek, psychology, and much more. But, in her first year, it was history, the often romantic history of the time, that was her first love, and she practically lived in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Which I have to say, looking at this link, I can totally understand.
Despite being excluded from male students’ clubs, Eglantyne had no shortage of extracurricular activities. Oxford women students started their own debating society, and Eglantyne ended up as president. She also acted, danced, played field hockey, fenced, and rowed. Her education went well beyond the walls of library and lecture hall, and she gained confidence and friendship. Oxford would serve her well.
This idyllic existence didn’t last. In the spring of Eglantyne’s first year at Oxford, her beloved little brother Gamul died tragically from pneumonia at his boarding school, aged only 16. She was devastated, as was her younger sister Dorothy, who was still being tutored at home. Clare Mulley writes,
“Eternally young, Gamul had become Eglantyne and Dorothy’s tragic Peter Pan, an emblem of the value of youth, the potential of life, and of their own commitment to live lives of social worth.”
Eglantyne came home, to comfort her mother and Dorothy. When she returned to Oxford, her friends immediately noticed that she had changed. She was more serious, more introverted, and less social. Wounded by her brother’s death, she seems to have found it easier to relate to people in general, from a distance, than to risk being hurt by becoming close to people, and then losing them. She also began to value possessions less: At the start of her second year, she got rid of all the furniture, even the carpet, from her room at LMH.
Eglantyne, this conservative girl from a wealthy, conservative family now took an interest in how ordinary people lived: She went “slumming”, visiting poor neighborhoods to see them for herself. While at home in Shropshire, she visited schools for poor children. She spent spring break in the desperately poor East End of London, at a settlement house.
Choose Your Own Adventure as a paying subscriber at Non-Boring History, which gives you access to more than 500 NBH posts, like this. This house is famous for its literary connections. But it was also once a settlement house, in which privileged ladies sought to improve the lives of poor immigrants:
At the settlement house, Eglantyne met working class people. including at social events, even mingling with factory girls at dances.
While she wasn’t drawn to settlement house work as a career, Eglantyne was increasingly uncomfortable with staying in college while there was practical work to be done in English society. Her academic advisers persuaded her not to drop out after her second year. But Eglantyne’s interests now wandered away from her history studies. She experimented with new spiritual beliefs. reading everything from Ancient Greek to Hindu texts, that drew her to start to think of the world and humanity as one. To the dismay of her academic advisers, she decided her special subject in her final year would be India. This was, to say the least, an unusual choice at Oxford in 1897.
During winter break, when Eglantyne’s brother was visiting Egypt, she came along for the ride. It was her first overseas trip.
Eglantyne graduated from Oxford with weak exam results, disappointed in her academic performance, and, like many liberal arts majors (UK: arts graduates) feeling unprepared to find work. Like them, she need not have worried. First, she took a break at home, helping in the fields and in the dairy, writing poetry, and messing about in boats. Soon enough, her life would be a whirlwind of activity.
Eglantyne Meets Kids. This Doesn’t Go Well.
A year after she graduated, Eglantyne decided to contribute to society by teaching poor kids in a working-class elementary school. She had been considering this for at least four years. Now, we see the influence on her of her mother’s programs for poor kids.
When Eglantyne prepared to set foot in the classroom, mandatory public elementary education in England was only a generation old. There was still much debate about how much education working-class children should get, beyond basic reading, writing, and math. As more and more Englishmen got the vote, and worked in industry, some argued, they needed to be educated. Others worried aloud that working-class people (hey, that’s my ancestors, and likely yours!), if educated in the humanities, might get discontented with their lot, and revolt against their “betters”.
Eglantyne was among those who thought working-class kids should, most of all, get a practical, vocational education. This might reflect her doubts about the intellectual abilities of poor kids, or a belief that people should know their place, or her early fear that her own education hadn’t got her ready for the world of work. But seeing poverty in Oxford had also led her to worry about the massive inequality and class distinctions of her time.
So, long story short, Eglantyne signed up for a one-year crash course at a teacher training college. She had been allowed to skip the first two years of the training because she held a university degree.
After the beauty of Oxford, it was a shock for Eglantyne to find herself living in an ugly “great barrack of a place.” She thought she had little in common with the other students, who were lower-middle class (hey, like me! And a good chance, you!) In other words, she was a bit of a snob. She kept herself to herself, so her fellow students responded in kind. They “just regard me as a pleasant idiot,” Eglantyne wrote. Yet she started to realize that her colleagues were not furniture, but people, with values and interests. She confessed that she was learning from them.
Still, she disliked the college, which unlike her empowering Choose Your Own Experience education at Oxford, was regimented in an “over-efficient, almost dehumanizing” sort of way, aimed at giving talented lower middle-class young women a living as elementary teachers, rather than a true education in thinking for themselves.
Let’s not forget: Eglantyne had never been to school. Nor did she know anything about needlework, nutrition, and many other subjects she was expected to teach.
Student teaching began badly, especially after her class size increased from 20 to 60. Eglantyne was stressed. She lost her appetite, lost weight, and was often ill.
Eglantyne was tempted to quit her training, and take a job offered to her (because she was posh) as a schools inspector. But then she decided to pull herself together, and keep on. Eglantyne took her students on a field trip to the Tower of London. She dissected a rabbit with them. She started to get to know the children as people. She learned that teaching is very hard work. She got better at it.
But when she graduated from teacher training, she discovered that London’s working-class schools were not waiting for a posh Oxford-educated teacher with high ideals. Nobody hired her. Finally, her uncle arranged a teaching job for her. Arriving in the west of England, Eglantyne rented her own little cottage, where she could enjoy plenty of alone time, reading, and writing a novel.
Eglantyne’s peace and quiet ended abruptly when she started her new job. Worse, she was not impressed with her working-class students, describing their “pathetic faces with expressions of dull stupidity or animal cuteness.”
She tried to keep the children at arm’s length. That made them even more devoted, because she talked to them like thinking human beings rather than as babies. They met her at her cottage door, and followed her to school. That doesn’t mean she liked them. Or teaching. But she was probably a better teacher than she thought, as Clare Mulley points out.
Still, Eglantyne began dreading going to work. She thought the children weren’t learning. She couldn’t face the idea of spending her life this way. She got depressed. The following summer, she wrote bluntly,
“I don’t care for children, I don’t care for teaching.”
Eglantyne Jebb quit her job in December. She never set foot in her own classroom again. She never married, or had children, or spoke of regretting not having children. She resented looking after nieces and nephews.
But she never lost interest in education. And unlike most people of her class, Eglantyne came to believe that secondary education should not only be available to a small elite. Her beliefs carried into the work of Save the Children, and influenced education policy worldwide. For that, I give thanks, as the happily educated granddaughter of a clever woman whose schooling abruptly ended when she was only thirteen.
Eglantyne Jebb was starting to understand that her future didn’t lie in practical hands-on work with people she wanted to help. She did not yet know that even more practical work of developing policy, and working for it to be put into practice, lay in her future.
After she quit her job, she went home.
Eglantyne Jebb: The Lost Year
Eglantyne was only 25 when she retreated home to her mother, to recover from the stress of her short teaching career, and the depression, and physical effects it had brought. Soon, tired of the four walls, she went on several vacations with her sisters, paddling on the English coast, walking in Germany, and generally living a life of active leisure.
Now, with the last of her children leaving the nest, Eglantyne’s mother decided to rent out the big house in Shropshire, and move to Cambridge. Eglantyne came with her, and soon had opportunities to mingle with interesting people, starting with her Uncle Richard (a Cambridge don, or professor), and his glamorous American wife, Carrie.
Aunt Carrie took a shine to Eglantyne, and Eglantyne learned much from Carrie. This included how to fundraise, starting with staking out “victims”, as Carrie called them, wealthy potential donors.
But now that she was stuck at home with her mother, Eglantyne began to take a brand new interest in marriage, something that hadn’t interested her before. She set her sights on Marcus, a popular and charming Cambridge don. Eglantyne was drawn to his cleverness and sense of humor. She realized they had much in common, including similar social backgrounds, as well as love of books, the countryside, and, especially, riding. Eglantyne enjoyed his company.
And then, in 1902, Marcus married. But not Eglantyne, who was stunned.
Maybe he ghosted Eglantyne. Or maybe he just never had been that into her. This had been, it seems, a bad case of unrequited love. Whatever Marcus’s view, Eglantyne was heartbroken. Then again, if she had married, it’s likely Save the Children might never have existed.
Eglantyne Finds New Purpose in Cambridge
With Eglantyne’s sisters married off, she faced an unthrilling future. As the only single daughter, she was expected to look after her mother, dividing her time between Cambridge, and the European health spas that Tye loved, but which bored Eglantyne to death.
Fortunately, other possibilities beckoned. While Eglantyne had studied the conservative subject of history at Oxford, her younger sister Dorothy enrolled at progressive Newnham College, Cambridge. There, her determination to improve society was nurtured, as she studied what we might now call social sciences and economics. Dorothy frowned upon her older sister’s party life in Cambridge. Eglantyne wasn’t writing, much less doing social work, but enjoying herself. Tut.
That wasn’t entirely a fair judgment. Eglantyne was enjoying hanging out with people, but she also took a keen interest in education and urban planning. And she wasn’t content to be an observer. After the Marcus disaster, she threw herself into work.
For a long time, privileged English people believed that poverty was not caused by an unstable economy, or other big changes that were hard to control, but by individual poor people’s moral failings. Middle- and upper-class women were encouraged to volunteer to work with the poor, to be moral examples to them. By the time Eglantyne Jebb came of age, thousands of women were doing just that.
But by the 1880s, the new social science research was showing that poverty wasn’t easily blamed on personal failings among the poor. Poverty required a more organized, professional response than sending in well-meaning untrained volunteers. Reformers called for a national minimum wage, and began to lay the research groundwork for new policy. This would, one day, lead to a modern social safety net in Britain, with unemployment insurance, old age pensions, and the National Health Service.
Such changes lay in the future, but ideas about the poor were already changing as Eglantyne and her sister Dorothy moved to Cambridge, which was a center for social science research and action. Dorothy learned much about this new thinking in her classes while at Newnham. She brought her sister Eglantyne up to speed on what she called “the motive forces” that determined the “horrid state” of life for the majority of people. At the same time, Dorothy struggled with her personal dislike of working-class people, whom she called “liars, thieves—indifferent lazy beasts. I would so anything not to be be surrounded by them.”
Eglantyne, however, with her teaching experience in working-class communities, did not feel the same way as her sister about what had long been called the “undeserving poor.”
Choose Your Own Adventure at Non-Boring History: The division of the poor into “deserving” and “undeserving” has a very long history in Britain and America, and while it’s well known to historians, it’s not so well known among the public. Read about workhouses, where cruelty, not care, was the point:
The great thing about Cambridge is that it’s always been full of interesting people doing fascinating work. But while you or I might cringe at the idea of actually introducing ourselves to such lofty people (I will write for the Nonnies about what it was like for me to speak at Cambridge University), Eglantyne Jebb had no such qualms. She had all the confidence of her poshness.
But how did a “lady” meet strangers? Here’s now Eglantyne met Mary Marshall in Cambridge.
In an age before telephones, many privileged ladies held “At Home” days, when anyone (of the same class) might stop by without an appointment to say hi. Mary Marshall had a very Cambridge ‘at home' day: She gave lectures to her visitors.
One of the very first Newnham College students, Mrs. Marshall had married her professor (UK: lecturer), and become a professor herself. Mary Marshall impressed Eglantyne, but Eglantyne did not impress Mrs. Marshall. She liked Eglantyne, and thought her clever, but also saw her as a bit of a lightweight in terms of actual work. So she suggested to Eglantyne that she keep coming back to her weekly lectures, and meanwhile do the usual volunteering that ladies did.
But Eglantyne exceeded expectations. She began writing papers for her new mentor. A few months later, she started attending meetings of the Charities Organization Society (COS) an old-school group in Cambridge that believed poverty was the result of the poor’s moral failings, while also working to make the system of (mostly) posh lady volunteers more efficient in helping the poor.
Eglantyne wasn’t a socialist. She didn’t believe the government should take on social welfare. But what she saw at these COS meetings made her uneasy. She was fascinated and disturbed by the ways in which the privileged COS committee members passed judgment on people who applied for help. She watched “diamond rings on very white fingers turning the pages” as they decided, person by person, which people were “deserving” and which “undeserving” of assistance.
* “White fingers” weren't a reference to race, since it's almost certain that everyone in the scene was white, but to alabaster hands that were never grubby from manual labor.
Eglantyne’s confidence had taken a beating with her poor academic results, her failure as a teacher, and Marcus’s rejection of her. When Mrs. Marshall demanded to know in 1903 why she hadn’t done more, Eglantyne’s heart must have sunk. But Marshall was impressed by her essays, suggested that she start writing about social and economic subjects, and encouraged Florence Keynes, another early Newnham graduate and a leader in local charities, to hire Eglantyne as an assistant. Keynes was an officer in the COS, and she led women students at Cambridge to take up social work, as well as doing social work of her own, including special needs classes for children. Her daughter Margaret would become Eglantyne’s closest friend.
Soon, Eglantyne Jebb, at Florence Keynes’s request, was putting together a report on charity activities in Cambridge. Meanwhile, her sister Dorothy had married and moved to London, where she and her new husband, Charlie Buxton, a lawyer who soon entered politics, became friends with big names pushing for social reform (and I bet at least one is familiar to you), including Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard, Bertrand Russell, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Soon, Charlie Buxton, who did not think private charity was capable of, or appropriate for, addressing poverty was having a progressive influence on his wife and sister-in-law.
Unlike Charlie, her brother-in-law, Eglantyne was not very political, and, watching elections, she began thinking democracy might have been a mistake. “The ignorance of voters,” she wrote, “is something incredible.” Thinking this through led her to be more optimistic about democracy, but she still wasn’t interested in active involvement in politics. In 1905, she still identified as “a staunch Conservative.”
But even Conservatives were starting to think differently. The Conservative Party lost that year’s national election by a huge margin, suggesting that they were out of step with the voters. The new progressive Liberal government began introducing sick pay for working people, and pensions for the elderly. By December 1905, after the death of Cambridge’s Conservative MP (Member of Parliament, an elected representative to the House of Commons in Parliament), who was also Eglantyne’s uncle, she started campaigning on behalf of the Liberal politician seeking to replace him.
Charlie and Dorothy would become socialists, and join the new Labour Party. Eglantyne did not. But she agreed with them on many issues, because of what she was learning at a time when British society was more divided by wealth than it had ever been, or has been since.
In 1906, Eglantyne published the report she had written, at Mary Marshall’s suggestion, on poverty in Cambridge. She reminded her readers of the context for poverty in the town: Cambridge had once been a little college town in which many local folk worked on farms around town. Very quickly, it had become a city. It now had four times the population it had had 75 years earlier, but without matching growth in housing, water and sewer systems, education, or jobs.
Result? The poor had poor health, poor housing, few savings (because a lack of jobs drove down pay), little schooling, and little involvement with religion. Eglantyne was not opposed to capitalism. She just thought its benefits should be distributed more evenly. Her report became a model for reports on cities throughout Britain.
In her report, Eglantyne had especially focused on young people. She felt that not enough attention was paid to the fact that children really were the future: They would soon be adults. Would they be prepared to be contributing citizens, or become a burden on society?
After asking that intriguing question, Eglantyne Jebb’s health took a downturn.
Nobody knew what was wrong with Eglantyne. Tye, her mother, explained away her ailments, as Victorians tended to do, as Eglantyne being “delicate”, easily exhausted by the stress of work, whether mental or physical. Eglantyne may also have used her illness as a way to repel visitors, to get peace and quiet to write. Later, it was discovered that she did, indeed, have serious health problems.
For now, she soon felt better, and found the energy to work on a novel, march for the vote for women, move in with Dorothy and Charlie to (reluctantly) help look after their new baby, named Eglantyne, and (also reluctantly) care for her two nephews while her brother ran as a Conservative MP, and his wife campaigned with him. Eglantyne joked that she would turn his sons into radicals while his back was turned.
Margaret Keynes was now Eglantyne’s closest friend, with whom she was much in love. Whether their relationship extended to sex is unclear: Labels are tricky, especially from a distance and in a different historical context. Whether or not they were lovers in the physical sense, Eglantyne and Margaret were very close, and together started and ran the Boys Employment Registry (BER) in Cambridge. Most British boys left school at age 12 for dead-end menial jobs, because no schooling was available to them beyond that age. The BER helped them get apprenticeships.
In 1910, Eglantyne’s mother decided she would move out of the Cambridge rental house, and go traveling, with an unenthusiastic Eglantyne as her companion. Eglantyne found herself stuck in a series of boring hotels across continental Europe, frustrated at her inability to do meaningful work, as she often complained in letters to Margaret Keynes. She did a lot of walking up mountains while thinking. In 1912, even as Margaret was increasingly attracted to a male friend, she and Eglantyne were also discussing setting up house together in an informal “marriage”.
The very next year, Margaret married her boyfriend.
Eglantyne, heartbroken again, threw herself into her work. This time, it would take her beyond the boundaries of Britain.
Eglantyne Finds She Likes Working For Kids
A few month’s before Margaret Keynes’s marriage, she and Eglantyne had discussed traveling together to the Balkans, where war was raging, just as it would for much of the 20th century. Margaret’s fiancé, afraid for her safety, had talked her out of going.
So Eglantyne Jebb traveled alone to Macedonia, which had been ruled over by powerful empires since it was part of the Roman Empire, and, in 1913, was now under the oppressive control of the Ottoman Empire, run by the Turkish government.
Several years before Eglantyne’s trip, Victoria Buxton, the sister of Eglantyne’s brother-in-law, Charlie, had already visited Macedonia to investigate conditions for civilians. She obtained photographic evidence of Turkish atrocities against Macedonians, including a graphic picture of the bodies of a peasant family, mother, father, and young daughter, all stabbed to death. Few British people read Victoria’s 1907 report, with its innovative call to action, pointedly suggesting how people might help. But Eglantyne did.
War in the Balkans only grew worse in the years after Victoria’s visit, and Eglantyne doomscrolled the newspaper coverage. Her life now seemed bleak: Looking after Tye, and doing social work in Cambridge without Margaret, was not enough. Then Charlie Buxton, Eglantyne’s brother-in-law, suggested she go to the Balkans to arrange for the distribution of food and supplies, and report on how well existing aid was reaching people in need.
Eglantyne didn’t hesitate. First, she raised thousands of pounds herself. Her mother alone gave £50.
After arriving in Belgrade, Eglantyne soon realized that women and children bore the greatest brunt of war. The aid provided, much of it in the form of clothes and food, through soup kitchens, was never enough to help war’s victims: They were starving, homeless, and desperate. In Belgrade, Eglantyne took an active, and often dangerous, role to bring people together and get evidence, to bring out the truth about atrocities and mistreatment of people on the losing side of the war, and to get them help. Her adventure had a lasting impact on how she thought. Among other things, she now saw the urgency of putting children first.
We see the impact of everything, of course, in Eglantyne’s arrest in 1919, the founding moment of Save the Children.
This charity which Eglantyne started was international in scope, and modern in methods, from the very start. She grasped the power of fundraising and endorsements. As the Treaty of Versailles was still being negotiated, to bring an official close to World War I, she wrote to ask for support for her work from The Archbishop of Canterbury, spiritual head of Anglican/Episcopal churches worldwide. But he feared that Eglantyne’s work would entangle him in politics, and he ghosted her.
So she contacted Rome, and arranged a private audience with the Pope instead, even though she wasn’t a Catholic. Eglantyne got a warm reception. The Pope offered to have a special collection among churches for Save the Children, not just churches in England, as Eglantyne had hoped, but around the world. Learning of this, the Archbishop of Canterbury suddenly changed his mind.
Not only did the Pope’s support raise enormous sums, it also inspired people to start up their own Save the Children organizations in countries around the globe, and the international organization, which Eglantyne also ran, as well as the British Save the Children in London, was headquartered in neutral Switzerland.
From the start, Save the Children was a Big Charity, not a small time operation, and Eglantyne, with all her experience in policy research, was committed to running it professionally. She served as a capable administrator, with no patience for inefficiency, a reflection of her social science background. She was an inspiring leader, giving motivating speeches. She navigated the difficult politics of bringing help to the children of “enemy” nations of World War One, in the aftermath of a terrible war and a bitter peace. She firmly believed that the people of the world have responsibility for one another, and she also believed in working as equal partners with local agencies in the countries assisted, so that Save the Children did not come across as a colonizing charity. She believed, too, that what goes around, comes around: Today’s donors could find their own children and communities benefiting from aid tomorrow. That’s why the Save the Children Fund’s massive shipment of food and supplies for Russian children in 1921 was not the end of her campaign, but the end of the beginning.
This is why Eglantyne Jebb surprised me. I freely confess I don’t trust big corporate charities today. I had assumed (and approved) that Eglantyne was a Victorian lady, a goodhearted person, who led a team of devoted volunteers by personal moral example. She was. But, more, she was a modern woman who started a modern organization, and had she not, it’s hard to imagine that Save the Children would have had such a remarkable impact.
Yet Eglantyne’s faith in volunteerism and private charity also marked her as a woman of an earlier time. She believed that only voluntary organizations, not governments, could really be trusted to look out for children around the world. Mind you, as totalitarian governments rose in the 20th century, I can see that she had a point.
Eglantyne Jebb never warmed to children. But she continued to see them as she always had, as people, as future adults, who must have human rights. She wrote the first draft of what would eventually be known as the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child, first adopted by the League of Nations (the original United Nations) in 1924. It has formed the basis of the ongoing debate over children’s rights ever since.
Victorian lady. Wealthy. Conservative. Highly educated. Reluctant teacher. Disliker of children. Compassionate do-gooder. Efficient professional. There are so many labels we could have chucked at this woman, and drawn a line under her. In doing so, we would have learned nothing. Like most people, Eglantyne Jebb was not best summed up in labels.
There is so, so much more that is fascinating about Eglantyne Jebb. If you would like to dive deeper into her story, video and audio links to my 2022 interview with Clare Mulley, these are posted below. I warmly recommend to you the book on which this post is based. I don’t do affiliate links, I buy every book I write about, thanks to the Nonnies, my paying subscribers, and I encourage you to buy from the source of your choice (please consider indie bookstores) or borrow from your library.
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By the Way . . .
If this post seems at all connected with current events, please note: This originally appeared at Non-Boring History in January, 2022. Other than a few tweaks for clarity and to get rid of announcements that no longer apply, this is the original. There are more than 500 posts in the searchable NBH collection on the NBH home page, and they become accessible to you when you become a Nonnie, a paid annual or monthly subscriber. Love what I do? Consider becoming a SuperNonnie, or Patron. Details (no obligation) when you click the button:
Meet Clare Mulley, in the video interview I did with her when this post originally appeared:
Here’s the podcast version of the interview:
