THE WOMAN WHO SAVED THE CHILDREN

Book Review

This is the biography of Eglantyne Jebb, the woman who with her youngest sister co-founded the Save the Children Fund. Her parents, Anglican Conservatives in Shropshire, instilled into all their six children a strong social conscience and a commitment to public service. Following an idyllic childhood, she came to Oxford in 1895, just after her 19th birthday, to study history at Lady Margaret Hall. She threw herself into university life, spending part of her Easter break in the second year in Bethnal Green.

After graduation, she decided to teach in an under-funded school for working-class girls, where she found the classes of 60 something of a trial. She realised she had no natural talent for teaching, but persevered in an easier school in Wiltshire, before finally giving up because of ill-health, declaring ironically in her diary: “I don’t care for children.” The book continues with accounts of Eglantyne’s two major love affairs, her interest in spiritualism, her relief work in the Balkans, and public arrest in Trafalgar Square in 1919 for distributing “starving baby” leaflets, printed to publicise the claim that German children were starving as a direct result of British post-war economic policy.

Her subsequent trial for distributing seditious leaflets, an offence defined by the Defence of the Realm Act, was a massive PR coup for her and was followed by a public meeting in an overflowing Albert Hall, where a spontaneous collection was taken: the Save the Children fund had been started. The rest of this account describes the development and successes of the Fund, Eglantyne’s other humanitarian work, and her involvement in the development of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1923, but yet to be realised worldwide
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http://www.oxfordtimes.co.uk/leisure/4417681.THE_WOMAN_WHO_SAVED_THE_CHILDREN/