EGLANTYNE JEBB
Saving Children
1876 - 1928

Becoming the Person
You Long to Be

Tomboy

Slim and tall, Eglantyne Jebb was a tomboy with delicate features and copper-red hair who grew up in a country house with six brothers and sisters she loved to organise when she wasn't reading, riding or daydreaming. She read history at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and took honours in modern history before training to become a primary school teacher. But after a year’s teaching she knew it wasn't what she wanted.

A dead-end and a new beginning

She faced the fact she had come to a dead end, and moved to Cambridge to live with her mother. Sometime during her twenties, Eglantyne became a Christian in response to a vision of Christ. For the rest of her life she would ask herself what Christ would do. In Cambridge Eglantyne became interested in taking a scientific approach to helping people in need, and in 1906 she published Cambridge, a Study in Social Questions. It was a lucid and compassionate manual and treatise, interesting and potentially useful, but nothing much came of it.

Meanwhile, she had fallen in love, but had not had her love returned, and she felt tired all the time. She blamed for herself for being lazy. She did not realise that she had an undiagnosed thyroid problem.

For the next six years she cared for her mother, and engaged in works of personal charity. In 1913, on the eve of World War One, the organisers of the Macedonian Relief Fund, who had been impressed with her book, asked her to travel to Macedonia to investigate. She went immediately. While in Macedonia she learned how tangled up religion and politics could be, and reported on conditions. When she returned she threw herself into raising funds for Macedonian relief efforts.

Responding to World War One

With the beginning of World War One, war fever swept Europe. Hoping to moderate the polarization between two warring sides, Eglantyne helped her sister Dorothy Buxton to edit weekly ‘Notes from the foreign press’ in the Cambridge Magazine. As the war ended, they learned about the plight of children in Germany and the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The government was adamant that they would not aid their defeated enemy, but Eglantyne and Dorothy defiantly decided to launch an appeal for the children at the Royal Albert Hall. Eglantyne was arrested, but the British public responded, donating hundreds of thousands of pounds overnight. It was the beginning of the Save the Children fund.

Saving the children

Eglantyne developed the fund with a "powerful combination of personal energy, flair for publicity, astute political and diplomatic skill, and personal approaches to prominent people" (DNB). She drew on her earlier dead-end efforts and lessons, and organised Save the Children around planning and research and individual sponsors. She insisted that the fund would help all children, regardless of religion. Save the Children went on to take out full-page advertisements in national newspapers, and was so successful at fundraising and delivering help it went international in 1920, just in time to rush to the rescue of Russian children.

In 1923, Eglantyne headed to Geneva, to launch an international Children's Charter. Written in her clear and simple style, the Charter affirmed that children had rights and the international community had a duty to protect them. Gaining the support of the community of nations was her focus until after more than five operations she lost her struggle with thryoid disease, and died in Geneva, in 1928. The Anglican Communion celebrates her feast day on December 17.

Princess Anne has been President of Save the Children since 1970. Often first on the ground in a crisis, the fund helps children in over 111 countries, linking individual sponsors with children. Eglantyne has made a difference to the lives of millions of children.

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