Eglantyne Jebb
There are some names that really ought to be better known. Eglantyne Jebb is one of them.
If the name means anything at all to you, you may know her as the founder of Save the Children. That alone would be quite an achievement, but it barely scratches the surface of what this extraordinary British woman actually did. Because Eglantyne didn’t just establish a charity. She helped change the way that the world thought about children.
Born in Shropshire on 25 August 1876, Eglantyne grew up in a comfortable and socially conscious family. Her mother, also called Eglantyne, was involved in charitable work, and the idea that those fortunate enough to have money and education had some responsibility towards those who did not was part of the world in which the younger Eglantyne was raised. She studied history at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford, and afterwards trained as a teacher.
She hated it.
Which is probably worth mentioning, because we have a habit of tidying remarkable women into neat little biographies in which they appear to know exactly what they are doing from the age of twelve. Eglantyne didn’t, teaching wasn’t for her so she left it behind. Instead, while living in Cambridge, she became involved with the Charity Organisation Society and began investigating poverty. Not just feeling sorry for people. She investigated it. She visited families, gathered information and examined the conditions in which people were actually living. In 1906 she published Cambridge: A Study in Social Questions, based upon this research. It was an approach that would remain important throughout her life. Charity work was useful, certainly, but sympathy without understanding just wasn’t enough.
Then came the First World War. And afterwards came something which appalled her.
The fighting officially ended in November 1918, but the Allied blockade of Germany continued into the following year. Across Germany and Austria, civilians were suffering from severe shortages. Children, inevitably, were among those paying the price. To many British people these were the children of the enemy. To Eglantyne, they were children. That distinction – or rather her refusal to make it – is probably the key to everything that followed. Alongside her sister, Dorothy Buxton, Eglantyne became involved with the Fight the Famine movement. They wanted the blockade lifted and food allowed to reach starving civilians in Europe.
In 1919, Eglantyne took to Trafalgar Square with leaflets showing the effects of starvation on children. The headline was not subtle:
“Our Blockade Has Caused This – Millions of Children Are Starving To Death”
She was arrested. And there is something wonderfully ballsy about this part of her story. Britain had just emerged from a devastating war with Germany. Anti-German feeling had not disappeared overnight, and here was an Englishwoman publicly asking people to care about German and Austrian children. Eglantyne was prosecuted and fined £5.
Then something rather lovely happened. The prosecuting counsel was apparently so impressed by her argument that he offered to pay the fine himself. That £5 is regarded by Save the Children as its first donation. Eglantyne and Dorothy realised that protesting was not enough. Children needed food, medicine and practical assistance, and they needed it immediately. In May 1919 the Save the Children Fund was established.
Even then, persuading the British public to donate money to children in countries Britain had so recently been fighting was not an easy sell. Eglantyne was asking people to look beyond borders, governments and blame and see hungry children who had played no part in creating the war that had devastated their lives. And it worked.
The organisation rapidly expanded its work. In 1920 the International Save the Children Union was established in Geneva, and when famine devastated Russia in 1921, Save the Children launched another huge relief effort. A ship, the SS Torcello, was loaded with around 600 tons of food and medical supplies. During the Russian relief operation, meals funded through Save the Children were eventually feeding hundreds of thousands of people.
But Eglantyne had begun thinking beyond emergency relief. Feeding a starving child was essential. But why had the child been allowed to starve in the first place? Saving children after catastrophe was necessary. Could the world agree that children were entitled to protection before catastrophe swallowed them?
Today, the phrase Children’s Rights seems perfectly ordinary. In Eglantyne’s time, it was anything but. Children were generally considered dependants for whom adults were responsible. Eglantyne pushed the idea further.
Children should not have to depend on the goodwill of adults. They had rights of their own.
In 1923, she drafted a short document containing five principles. It became known as the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, or the Geneva Declaration. There was nothing complicated about it. Children should be given what they need to develop. Hungry children should be fed. Sick children should be cared for. Children should receive help in times of distress. They should be protected from exploitation.
Simple ideas. Revolutionary implications.
On 26 September 1924, the League of Nations adopted the Declaration of Geneva. Its opening declared that humanity owed the child “The best it had to give.”
Let’s just take a minute to think about that.
A woman born in Victorian England had helped persuade an international organisation representing nations across the world to formally recognise that the welfare of children was not simply a private family matter or an occasional subject for charity. Humanity itself had responsibilities towards them. A woman. Helped to convince them of that.
In the words of M People – “What have you done today to make you feel proud?”
Eglantyne did not live long enough to see where that idea would eventually lead. She suffered from serious thyroid problems and died in Geneva in 1928. She was only 52.
But the document survived her.
The United Nations adopted an expanded Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1959. Thirty years later came the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1989, setting out children’s civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights across 54 articles. Eglantyne’s five simple principles had helped to lay the foundations for something vast.
And Save the Children survived too. What began in the ruins of the First World War became an international organisation still operating over a century later. In 2025 alone, Save the Children reported reaching 37.8 million children in 92 countries. Yet Eglantyne Jebb herself remains strangely absent from the collection of names we reach for when we talk about influential British women or Strong Feminine Energy.
Maybe part of the reason for that is because her work sits in that awkward space between activism, humanitarianism and political reform. She didn’t discover an element or fly an aeroplane or lead an army. There is no single dramatic moment into which her achievement can be squeezed. She looked at something society had largely accepted and said that it wasn’t good enough. Children should not starve because adults had gone to war. They shouldn’t suffer because they were born on the wrong side of a border. Helping them should not depend on someone feeling charitable and their protection should not be regarded as a favour. It should be their right.
In 2026, 150 years after her birth, millions of people know the organisation she created. Millions more live in countries which have formally accepted the principle she helped to introduce to international politics: that children possess rights simply because they are children. Yet comparatively, few know her name.
So let’s fix that.
Eglantyne Jebb.
Shropshire woman. Failed teacher. Social researcher. Campaigner. Lawbreaker. Humanitarian.
And the woman who showed the world that its children were owed something better.
A Little Something You Can Do
Writing about Eglantyne Jebb feels particularly timely.
At Buxton for Books this year, I met author Zoe Sharp. Next month, she will be driving a truck carrying supplies and humanitarian aid to Ukraine.
Eglantyne believed that feeling sympathy for people in desperate circumstances wasn’t enough when there was something practical that could be done to help them. More than a century later, that seems like a pretty good principle to live by.
If you’d like to support Zoe and help towards the journey and the aid she is taking with her, you can find her JustGiving page here:
CONVOY4UKRAINE
Nobody is under any obligation to donate, obviously. But if this article has left you wondering what you can do today, here’s one small answer.
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