Eglantyne Jebb
(1876-1928), Philanthropist; founder of Save the ChildrenSitter in 3 portraits
by Scott & Wilkinson
toned bromide print on photographer's card mount, circa 1906
NPG x200860
by H.E. Bailey
gelatin silver print on photographer's mount, 1920
NPG x200861
by Lafayette (Lafayette Ltd)
toned bromide print on photographer's card mount, mid 1920s
NPG x200862
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Antony Carpen
05 August 2021, 00:07
Eglantyne Jebb is best known as the founder of Save the Children - which she established along with her sister Dorothy Buxton. (https://www.savethechildren.org.uk/about-us/our-history)
Prior to that, Eglantyne spent a number of years in the town of Cambridge, having been pulled out of teacher training by her mother - a profession she entered into having completed her studies in Oxford at Lady Margaret Hall. Introduced to town and gown high society in Cambridge by her aunt Lady Caroline Jebb - the wife of Cambridge University Classics Professor Sir Richard Jebb, she later put her mind and efforts towards social reform campaigning under the mentorship of economist Mary Paley Marshall and a future Mayor of Cambridge, Florence Ada Keynes. (Florence was the mother of the economist John Maynard Keynes).
Eglantyne researched and wrote the first social scientific study of poverty and multiple deprivation in Cambridge's history. Published in 1906 by Bowes, it was titled Cambridge: a brief study in social questions. The first edition ran to 272 pages, and included a rental map of the city created by Gwen Raverat, one of Charles Darwin's granddaughters. Along with Florence's daughter Margaret - later Margaret Hill CBE, the three women surveyed the town going door-to-door asking residents what their rents were. The map gives a snapshot of the wealthy and deprived areas of Cambridge for that year.
In the run up to the 1910 general elections, Eglantyne joined the Cambridge Liberal Party and became one of its most prominent activists and public speakers in town. Although he lost both contests in 1910, the Liberal candidate and former MP for Cambridge Borough Stanley Buckmaster KC (the future Lord Chancellor), credited Eglantyne for single-handedly running his campaign in the second general election of that year - the one where David Lloyd George as Chancellor faced down the House of Lords over his People's Budget, laying the foundations for the Welfare State.
Eglantyne left Cambridge in 1913 to undertake relief work in Macedonia during the Balkan Wars, and spent time in Scotland resting and recuperating from illness. A pacifist from the outbreak of war in 1914, she wrote a number of radical articles including making the case for co-operation as an economic system for the Welsh Outlook Magazine titled "Where will the War lead? To barbarism or to a higher civilisation?", and condemned the British Government over its continued blockade of Germany after the Armistice of 11 November 1918 had been agreed. This was in an article for Labour Leader on 16 January 1919.
You can read more about her life in Clare Mulley's excellent biography: The Woman Who Saved the Children. (One World Publications - 2010).