90 years of Save the Children

Eglantyne Jebb enjoyed a liberal education

Ninety years ago, a pair of determined sisters, born in Ellesmere, set out to make the lives of children and refugees better.

They were Eglantyne and Dorothy Jebb, who lived at The Lyth which is still the Jebb family home today.

Save the Children is still going strong as an organisation which cares for the needs and welfare of all children.

Recently a memorial to Miss Jebb was unveiled in Ellesmere by her great, great, great nephew, Felix Jebb.

Family home

There have been Jebbs at The Lyth since 1938, when the house was bought from a West Indian planter called Abednego Matthew.

Lionel Jebb still lives in the family home at Ellesmere

He built the house in 1820 in the colonial style. Despite this, it sits comfortably in its 85 acres of park land.

It was here that Eglantine and Dorothy Jebb were brought up with their four brothers and sisters.

The girls were educated at home and despite the fact their father Arthur Trevor Jebb had been a student at Balliol College in Oxford in the 1860s, he was not in favour of his daughters going to university.

Lionel Jebb said he had a theory about that: "He was very against girls having that sort of education. I think he was very worried they might become blue stockings, as they used to be called."

The Indomitable Aunt Bun

Arthur Jebb's sister Louisa, an indomitable woman known as Aunt Bun, did not agree: "She decided that if the girls were clever enough then they should go to university," said Lionel Jebb.

All the children were tutored at home in their early years and it was only the boys who were sent away to boarding school.

Not a happy experience, according to Lionel Jebb: "It must have been pretty grim. Indeed it was grim enough for the youngest of the family to die at Marlborough and my grandfather was the only surviving boy out of the remaining five children."

Eglantyne went to Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford in 1895 to study history and later trained to be a teacher.

Social work

Eglantyne taught for a while at a school near Marlborough, but, Lionel Jebb suggested, "She loved the children but found the whole thing a terrible strain... she also suffered from thyroid which can't have helped at all."

She first became involved in social issues while living in Cambridge with her mother. She wrote a book entitled Studies in Social Questions, about the poverty she had encountered in the city.

It was after the death of King Edward VII and the start of the Balkan wars that she became concerned about what was happening abroad.

Lionel Jebb said she had gone to the Balkans to see the situation for herself: "She came back very disheartened by the way in which war affected people. But that wasn't the war. It was two or three years later that the First World War started."

Fight the Famine Council

Elglantyne and her sister Dorothy decided they must do something to help and the Save the Children Fund was born out of a sub committee of the Fight the Famine Council.

Eglantyne and her friend managed to get themselves arrested as they handed out posters of starving children during a fundraising drive.

Lionel Jebb recalls the family story: "It's Eglantyne who is best remembered. She was actually the leader and when they got to court she was found guilty and fined £5.

"At the end of the case, the magistrate said 'it's not for you, but here's £5 for Save the Children'."

In that first year (1919) £400,000 was raised for the charity with £10,000 being donated by the National Union of Mineworkers alone. Lionel Jebb said that gift would be the equivalent of £1m today: "She hated fundraising but she was terribly good at it."

Rights of the Child

She was not in the best of health, but moved to Geneva to carry on her work for Save the Children.

It was there that she drew up the Declaration of the Rights of the Child which she persuaded the League of Nations to adopt.

Eglantyne was living in Geneva when her frail health failed her and after a series of operations she suffered a stroke and died on 17 December 1928.

She was just 52, but left a legacy which has seen Save the Children grow into one of the biggest international children's charities.

Aunt Dorothy

A memorial to Eglantyne Jebb has been unveiled in Ellesmere

Lionel Jebb never met his Great Aunt Eglantyne. She died a few years before he was born. He did meet her sister Dorothy Buxton: "I remember her coming here. I can't have been more than 13 or 14 years old."

She showed him a letter from a family of German refugees she was trying to help: "I got an inkling of what Eglantyne must have been like, because Dorothy herself realised that without the mainspring of Eglantyne, Save the Children might just have burst into flower and just died again.

"Because of the impetus Eglantyne gave it, it was a spiritual intellectual allsort. Now it's one of the biggest international charities that there is."

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