The rebel with a world-changing cause
Maverick rule-breaker EGLANTYNE JEBB was an unlikely founder of Save the Children but is one of history’s greatest heroes, says writer Charlotte Bogard Macleod
Save the Children founder Eglantyne Jebb
All wars are wars against the child,’ said Eglantyne Jebb in 1924. While you may not know her name, you will know her legacy – Jebb founded Save the Children. Her declaration of children’s rights – now called the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child – is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history. Jebb achieved all this despite not wanting any children of her own – or even really liking them.
In 2019, I was asked if I’d write a short play about Jebb to mark Save the Children’s centenary. I was trying to finish a drama for the BBC and, while I didn’t have time for a new project, I also knew I had to write it. Jebb had all the qualities I look for in a heroine: she was a maverick, navigating the narrow confines of her society, grappling with a messy love life, and battling to make the world a better place. I had no idea why she wasn’t a household name.
Born in 1876, Jebb grew up with her five siblings in Shropshire where she rode horses at a gallop, raced cars and, at 18, went to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford to study English. Presented with the college’s rules informing her she had to be chaperoned to lectures, an outraged Jebb wondered whether she should leave or ‘stay long enough to break all the rules and be sent down’. She stayed, but not quietly. It was at Oxford she learned how the poorer half of society lived and began her lifelong humanitarian work.
In 1907, she fell in love with Margaret Keynes, who shared her passion for social justice. The two women swapped promises and love tokens, but Keynes broke it off to marry and start a family. Heartbroken, Jebb vowed to find life’s purpose through her work.
Much as she championed children’s right to a fair start in life, she failed at teaching, admitting, ‘I don’t care for teaching… I don’t care for children. They fall on me with shrieks and howls and inarticulate sounds like pigs when they see food coming.’
Instead she channelled her energies into activism, experiencing the horrors of war in 1914 in the Balkans while distributing aid to starving children. In 1919, in the First World War’s aftermath, she protested against Britain’s economic blockade of Europe, which was being used to force Germany into accepting punitive peace terms. Jebb was determined to help the millions of German and Austrian children who had survived the war only to starve in peacetime. ‘Surely it’s impossible for us as human beings to watch children starve to death without making an effort to save them,’ she said.
Jebb was arrested in Trafalgar Square that year for handing out protest leaflets that hadn’t been cleared by government censors. Vilified by the press – she was called ‘the spinster in the brown cardigan’ – she had few supporters. Despite facing a heavy fine and prison, she insisted on conducting her own defence, hoping to use her trial to call the government to account.
Princess Anne, the charity’s then president, on a Save the Children trip to Kenya, 1971
Although the judge found Jebb guilty, he was so won over by her arguments he not only imposed the minimum fine of £5 but produced a banknote to cover the cost. Jebb insisted on paying her own way but took his £5, saying she’d donate it to a new fund to help starving children in Europe. And in that moment, the idea of Save the Children was born.
Today, the charity is the largest independent international children’s development agency. Last year, it helped 48.8 million children around the globe, responding to 107 emergencies in 66 countries. Its UK work includes supporting disadvantaged families with emergency cash grants, funding projects such as food pantries and baby banks, and securing government reform on child benefits, the expansion of free school meals and the childcare system.
In 2017 Princess Anne took over from the Queen as Save the Children’s patron, after being president since 1970. Anne attended a fundraising performance of my play about Jebb in London in May 2019, which starred Joely Richardson, Helena Bonham Carter, Sue Perkins and children from the Chickenshed Theatre. Speaking to the princess afterwards, I found we had a mutual admiration for this unconventional heroine.
I’m currently turning Clare Mulley’s biography The Woman Who Saved the Children into a screenplay and Hollywood is interested – excited by this unsung activist and the startling immediacy of her story.
Jebb once said, ‘The only international language is a child’s cry.’ Her words resonate now more than ever before.
