Born into a wealthy family in Shropshire, England in 1876, Eglantyne Jebb was a bright student who defied the expectations of women in the nineteenth-century by going on to study at Oxford University. She would also later become the founder of the International Save the Children we know today.
In the recently published The Woman Who Saved the Children: A Biography of Eglantyne Jebb, Clare Mulley captures the courageous story of this eccentric woman who had the human vision to permanently influence the way the world regards and acts towards children.
The beginnings: Save the Children founder arrested in Trafalgar Square
In 1908, Eglantyne accompanied her ailing mother on a trip through Europe and was horrified by some of the scenes she witnessed so close to her doorstep. Later, and during a break in the Balkan War, Eglantyne did the almost unthinkable for women at that time, and travelled solo into a conflict zone in order to deliver money to the Macedonian Relief Fund.
After the World War, the need to get aid to thousands was clear, at least to Eglantyne. A blockade imposed on Germany, Austro-Hungary and Turkey by the Allies left tens of thousands of people suffering. Children in cities like Berlin and Vienna were starving whilst tuberculosis and rickets were rife. Eglantyne was never one to back away from a fight. This time she was armed with a powerful weapon of persuasion – a photograph collected by her sister, Dorothy, while in Vienna. The two and half year old girl featured was so shockingly malnourished, she looked like a young baby.
Printed on leaflets with the headline "A Starving Baby and Our Blockade Has Caused This", the leaflet had not been cleared by the Defence of the Realm Act. As she had hoped, controversy erupted, resulting in her arrest for distributing the leaflets. Her court case only further attracted publicity to the devastating effects of the blockade. The Save the Children Fund was set up at a public meeting in London's Royal Albert Hall in May 1919 and donations started to flow in. So compelling was Eglantyne’s argument that a substantial contribution even came from the lead prosecutor in the case against her.
News of Save the Children quickly went global. Australian opera singer, feminist and peace activist Cecilia Annie John, brought Eglentyne's pleas for famine relief to the shores of Australia. A co-founder of the Women’s Peace Army (with Vida Goldstein), Cecilia John established Save the Children’s first international branch in Melbourne in 1919. Together with a group of concerned Melbournians, she organised to send consignments of milk powder from Victoria’s dairy farming communities to the famine relief effort in Europe.
“The work in the Commonwealth was started in (the) face of almost insurmountable difficulties, and only the magnificent courage of the first Executive, formed in December 1919, could possibly have accomplished what has been done,” Cecilia John wrote, 18 months later in the annual “Record of the Save the Children Fund” (Vol 1, No. 16, July 1921).
At the time, the Australian government still adhered to a “no trade with former enemy-countries” policy and provided no support to the fledgling organisation which was sending milk to help save the lives of children in Austria and Poland. However, Ms John co-opted the support of Melbourne’s then Lord Mayor, Councillor Aikman, inviting him to act as honorary treasurer. The executive then issued a letter to the two major daily newspapers of the time, The Argus and The Age, along with an appeal for assistance for the starving children of Europe. In another effort to raise awareness, they distributed 60,000 leaflets containing pictures of the suffering children and, within months, they had raised around £8500 for famine relief.
"Thousands of people . . . tired, sick and hungry. I had to carry my youngest brother. One day I saw that he was not moving or crying for bread any more. I showed him to my mother and she saw that he was dead. We were glad that he was dead because we had nothing to feed him." Armenian refugee child, 1921.
The Fight the Famine campaign raised money very quickly. Single donations ranged from two shillings to £10,000. It gave the money to organisations working with children in Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, the Balkans and Hungary and for Armenian refugees in Turkey.
Save the Children was not expected to be a permanent organisation, but it was called on to deal with emergency after emergency. Dorothy become less involved with Save the Children to concentrate on political campaigning. But the charismatic Eglantyne Jebb, honorary secretary, was a force to be reckoned with. Eglantyne was persuasive and committed, and her ideas about children's welfare were well ahead of her time.
Again facing criticism, this time for sympathising with ‘communist enemies’, in 1920 Eglantyne led her largest relief program to date. Amazingly, in the midst of a famine, Save the Children’s feeding centres provided 157 million meals for over 300,000 Russian children. Even the Australian arm of Save the Children, established a year earlier, played a part by shipping milk, wool and other supplies. Almost as big a task was convincing Russian officials to let Save the Children establish and run their own programs within Russia. It was a pivotal moment, turning Save the Children into a fully operational aid organisation, responsible for on-the-ground relief rather than simply handing out funds.
Eglantyne had been searching for a long-term solution to child welfare when she arrived in Geneva in 1923.
"I believe we should claim certain rights for the children and labour for their universal recognition, so that everybody - not merely the small number of people who are in a position to contribute to relief funds, but everybody who in any way comes into contact with children, that is to say the vast majority of mankind - may be in a position to help forward the movement." Eglantyne Jebb
It was there, whilst hiking up Mount Saleve on a Sunday morning that her most enduring legacy was penned. Pausing to rest halfway up the mountain, she jotted down five directives she believed were the fundamental rights of every child. Determined that her vision would become a reality, Eglantyne lobbied the League of Nations until they adopted these rights in 1924. From there, they would form the basis of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1959 and later inspired the present United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. This declaration has been signed by more countries worldwide than any other declaration.
Back in Australia in the early 1920s, Cecilia John’s good friend Clio Jensen, a former President of the Women’s Peace Army in Brisbane, established a Queensland Branch of Save the Children to raise money for the relief effort and also send milk consignments. In the same year, appeals were made in Western Australia, Tasmania and South Australia, where the Adelaide Advertiser and the Adelaide Register played a critical role in promoting the Fund. Residents of these states contributed donations to the relief effort although, with the exception of South Australia (which established a division later that year), they would not establish their own divisions of Save the Children until more than two decades later.
Eglantyne Jebb died in 1928. In her 52 years on this earth, Eglantyne Jebb managed to launch an international aid organisation; feed and clothe millions of children regardless of their race, creed or colour; completely redefine how welfare organisations should operate and write a piece of social policy so significant it was adopted by the United Nations. Not bad for a woman in an era when women didn’t even have the right to vote.
"If we accept our premise, that the Save the Children Fund must work for its own extinction, it must seek to abolish, for good and for all, the poverty which makes children suffer and stunts the race of which they are the parents. It must not be content to save children from the hardships of life - it must abolish these hardships; nor think it suffices to save them from immediate menace - it must place in their hands the means of saving themselves and so of saving the world." Eglantyne Jebb.
In the 30’s Save the Children went on to establish the Child Protection Committee, which lobbied for the rights of children in Africa and Asia throughout the decade, set up a nursery school in Addis Ababa in 1936 and the first ever nursery school in Wales and worked with refugees from the Spanish Civil War.
"Thirty vagrant children who had escaped from the Warsaw ghetto were publicly drowned in a pool at the Glymianski brickworks...The only place where the Jewish children of Warsaw can see grass and trees is the cemetery." Children in Bondage, 1943.
During the Second World War we were forced to withdraw from projects in occupied Europe. However, work in the UK continued helping young children who had been evacuated from the cities, playcentres in air-raid shelters in large cities and created ‘Hopscotch’, the first playgroup in the UK and the start of a major area of work for many years.
Save the Children started planning for overseas post-war work in 1942 by publishing the report Children in Bondage. It painted a picture of widespread violations of children's rights and consequent suffering. In Asia and Africa, we supported a child welfare centre in Calcutta and set up a health centre was set up in Ibadan, Nigeria.
Most work was planning to meet the needs of children in Europe after the war. By the autumn of 1946, we had 105 staff working with children, displaced people, refugees, concentration camp survivors in devastated areas of France, Yugoslavia, Poland and Greece.
After the death of Eglantyne, Save the Children’s Australian branches lay dormant until Florence Grylls decided to re-establish the Victorian branch in 1944. At the conclusion of World War II when Europe needed assistance, branches began to spring up around the country to raise funds for the relief effort. In 1947, the West Australian division was formed and, a few months later, the South Australian division following a visit from field officer Miss Ferguson from Save the Children UK. Miss Ferguson visited Adelaide along with the Secretary of the Victorian branch and encouraged the locals under the chairmanship of Adelaide’s Lady Mayoress, Lady De Crespigny, to re-establish a South Australian Branch.
""People have found it convenient to forget Korea. But the war there left - in the south alone - over 100,000 homeless children, over a million people with active TB; and the fourth largest army in the world." Stephen Peet, director of A Far Cry, 1958
By the 1950s there were still many displaced families and Save the Children continued working in Germany, Austria, Italy and Greece. It sent extra teams to Austria in 1956 to help Hungarian refugees fleeing after the failed revolution.
Outside Europe, the Serendah project gave orphaned boys an education, training and a safe place to live in Malaya. Save the Children tried to set up projects in Nigeria and Sudan, but failed. Work in Somaliland, Syria and Lebanon was more successful.
The Korean War began in 1950. Two years later the first Save the Children workers arrived. They stayed for more than 20 years. Many children were left destitute by the war, living unaccompanied on the streets. Malnutrition and associated diseases were rife.
In 1959, Save the Children and Oxfam produced the film A Far Cry, which showed how far Korean children were from basic housing, food, education and healthcare. The BBC showed the film on Easter Sunday that year.
In Australia, the Victorian founder, Florence Grylls, became concerned that Australia’s indigenous children were not securing their rights and, in 1951, travelled around the state assessing the conditions they were living in and concluded that the Victorian branch should make the plight of Australia’s indigenous children their major focus. In response, Save the Children established indigenous welfare centres and pre-school centres around the state in an effort to increase the nutritional status of indigenous children and improve their health, well being and educational opportunities. In their pre-schools they provided nutritious meals for the children and prepared them for school. Their outreach workers began building relationships with indigenous parents and conducting health, hygiene and nutrition classes, providing mothers with access to a washing machine, sewing classes and morning teas where they could discuss issues of concern. Meanwhile, the organisation lobbied federal and state governments for more services and public housing for indigenous communities, many of whom were still living in humpies and settlements without any access to services or the right to vote.
At the same time, Save the Children began providing play centres for newly arrived migrants in holding centres at Maribyrnong and Brooklyn. Indigenous preschools were later opened in New South Whales, South Australia, Qld and West Australia. In 1956, Save the Children opened a branch in New South Wales.
By the end of the 1950s, most of the organisation's money internationally was now going towards work in Asia.
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