Eglantyne Jebb Saves The Children

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One overcast day in April 1919, a woman called Eglantine Jebb arrived at Trafalgar Square in London.

She had flaming red hair, which she pulled up into a bun at the back of her head.

She was tall, thin, pale.

She had forget-me-not blue eyes.

Trafalgar Square was a place where discontent often formed into protest.

It's where the Chartists demonstrated in 1848.

It's where the suffragettes would demonstrate.

Of course, the National Gallery is right there, and that's where they slashed the Roqueby Venus in 1914.

Jeb was there with a purpose, too.

She handed out a leaflet to passers-by.

And it shows a photograph of a little child with a massive head and a small body.

And she's actually being held supported.

You can just see the hands of a nurse standing behind her lifting her because she cannot lift her own body weight.

The child has an intelligent face above shrunken, tapering limbs.

This was a two and a half year old little Austrian girl who should have been screaming and running around and chasing butterflies, but she cannot stand on her own feet.

This, what seems to be an enlarged head, is actually the result of something we called arrested development, where a child's body doesn't have enough nutrition to support its development in the natural way.

A year before the First World War had ended, in Europe there was still widespread hardship.

The death toll from starvation included 800 people every week.

But some Britons were unmoved by the plight of their former enemies.

Retrospectively, it just seems like a good, compassionate idea to help prevent the starvation of children internationally.

But at the time, Egentine's work was pretty much seen as seditious.

As the day wore on, Jeb's delicately gloved hands gave out hundreds of leaflets to Londoners until she was interrupted by the police.

And they took her away.

Egentine wasn't the source of person to go quietly.

She went with her head held high.

But she thought, right, perhaps there is another way that I can use this, my own arrest, to create a bigger story.

For BBC Radio 4, this is history's heroes.

People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone.

I'm Alex von Tunselmann.

I'm a historian and I'm inspired by the story of Eglantine Jeb.

She was a difficult woman in the best way, standing up for the most vulnerable children, even at a time when that made her a hate figure for some and a criminal in the eyes of the law.

When I had my second daughter, I officially became a bad mother.

I remember thinking that my favourite moment with my children was when they were asleep upstairs in bed and I was looking at photographs of them looking happy and awake downstairs.

Around that time, historian Claire Mulley became interested in Eglentine Jeb.

I first came across Eglentine when I was a rather struggling corporate fundraiser at Save the Children, the development agency.

Jeb founded Save the Children and Claire was intrigued by her story.

Who was this woman, you know?

While on maternity leave, she began to seek out more about this unusual woman.

And it just snowballed.

It was developing into something like an obsession.

The obsession resulted in Claire's biography of Eglentine Jeb, the woman who saved the children.

One thing I think we seem to have in common is that we often loved our children, loved children from afar, loved children from a distance, because I'd left Save the Children to go and have a child of my own.

But then I was creeping away from my childcare duties to investigate this woman who dedicated her life to children, but seemingly didn't like them individually.

She once said, I'm not fond of the little wretches.

So I was very aware of the irony in this story.

Though she may not have enjoyed being in the company of children, Jeb dedicated much of her life to protecting them.

Eglentine Jeb had a very privileged upbringing.

She was born to this very prosperous Shropshire family near the borders with Wales.

She enjoyed a comfortable Victorian childhood in the 1870s and 80s, growing up on a large country estate with five siblings.

The children would go and milk the cows straight into their mouths and steal the cheese from the dairy.

They made their own entertainment.

Eglentine was the fourth child.

She was closest to her younger siblings, her brother Gamel and her sister Dorothy.

Their parents would call Gamel, Dorothy and Eglentine, the three younger children, a covey of partridges.

They were absolutely inseparable, so they would go into the fields and walk around with baby chickens in their pockets or put mice down each other's backs.

They were really close, really naughty, a little gang really, going out together to play.

Eglentine had to fight to be allowed the same education as her brothers.

She was very bright.

She wanted to go to university.

her father was set against it, he didn't want his beautiful daughter being turned into an unmarriageable blue stocking as the way he saw it.

Eglentine went to Lady Margaret Hall, a women's-only residence at Oxford University, to read history.

At the time, Oxford University refused to grant degrees to women, but they could attend lectures and tutorials and even take examinations if they paid the fees.

Eglentine's formidable aunt Louisa, known as Bunn, provided money to support her.

Even though Eglentine found the rigid rules of a women's hall silly, she enjoyed university life around the edges.

She's very smart, she's very funny, she's writing satirical plays, they do a production, she and her friends, of Pride and Prejudice, and she insists on playing the part of Mr.

Collins herself.

She went to a lot of parties as one account of her being terribly sick out of a carriage window.

She was popular and had everything going for her.

Birth, beauty, and brains.

But suddenly, in 1896, she received a telegram from her mother.

Telegrams are always bad bad news.

And it said that Gamel, her younger brother, had gone out just with the one vest, and apparently he caught a chill.

Gamel's chill turned into pneumonia.

Eglenthine was shattered by the news.

She had a series of terrible dreams at this time, and she begins to picture Gamel as sort of a Peter Pan figure, you know, this symbol of the importance of youth, the value of life, and of a pledge she takes at this moment herself to live a life of social worth.

If he isn't going to contribute to society as a doctor, what can she do?

What can she bring to society to honour those ideals the children had together when they were young?

She stopped going to parties and her friends struggled to reach her.

Instead, she read history books and took up the study of ethics.

Egmantine went out to see the other half of Oxford, the less privileged in society that she'd never really regarded that much.

And she was shocked at the levels of poverty even within Oxford on the housing along by the canals.

And she came back and she actually threw everything out of her room in this sort of overt rejection of material values, even the carpet.

This was described as her mad attack.

Some friends even feared she was becoming a socialist.

Eventually, she was persuaded to allow the carpet and furniture back into her room.

But from that moment on, she'd live her life dedicated to helping people.

She was going to do something to try and level up society, to provide opportunities to everyone.

Jeb hoped to become a teacher.

It wasn't unusual for a woman of her background to teach as a governess or in a well-heeled private girls' school, but she had no interest in those.

It takes Ekentine some time to be able to get a school to take her on.

I think they're a bit suspicious of this lady.

Eventually she found work in a girls' school in a working-class neighbourhood in Marlborough.

It just had one large schoolroom.

They didn't have enough fuel to heat it.

In winter, it was absolutely freezing.

The first thing she did was get all the children up in the morning to stamp their feet and clap their hands just to warm them up.

They didn't have enough chalk for the chalkboard.

They didn't have enough needles for the sewing lessons that she was meant to be giving.

And she didn't love it.

You know, she had decided this was going to be her life's work.

The awkward thing was that Jeb swiftly realised she didn't like children.

She said classes hung over her like a thunderstorm, that she would rather be at the dentist having her teeth pulled out than give another religious education class.

And she later said, you know, idea of closer acquaintance with children will never enter my mind.

She'd had enough of children very much.

Thank you.

Thirteen years later, in the spring of 1913, Jeb arrived in the Balkans and in the city known today as Skopje in Macedonia, though the Ottomans used its Turkish name, Uskub.

At the time, it was a war zone.

She'd come by train.

She was travelling light.

She had her large folded-out paper passport.

She had a bag in which she had a single change of clothes, a change of shirt and, you know, a sponge and a toothbrush.

For years, Jeb had suffered from exhaustion and collapses stemming from a thyroid condition.

She'd had to give up teaching and then social work.

She felt dissatisfied with her life.

She's now the only unmarried daughter in her family.

Her mother, Ty, is unwell, and Eglantine is expected to be the daughter that now looks after her mother.

For a long time, Eglentine Jeb had been romantically involved with another woman, Margaret Maynard Keynes.

And Eglentine and Margaret worked very closely together.

They both had a pioneering vision.

They set up the first boys' employment registry.

And working very closely together, they actually fell very deeply in love.

This was the most important, the most intimate relationship of Eglintine's life.

Instead of exchanging rings, the two women gave each other charms to wear round their necks.

They planned to live together in Kensington.

But Margaret wanted to have children.

So when a man proposed marriage, she accepted.

Jeb was devastated.

She seems to have an emotional breakdown.

She takes it very hard.

But again,

she pulls her resources together and redirects her energies into good work.

This time she directed those energies to a crisis in the Balkans.

The Balkan League was an alliance between Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Montenegro.

In 1912, this League declared war on the Ottoman Empire, which administered much of the region.

As the League's armies advanced, thousands of people were forced to leave their homes.

It was hugely traumatic for the civilian population's mass movement of internally displaced people and following the fighting lines, starvation and disease.

Jeb had been sent out to the Balkans by the Macedonian Relief Fund with money to finance their humanitarian efforts, providing food and clothing, and working towards reunifying families that had been split apart.

She'd grown up with romantic ideas about war, surrounded by portraits of venerable and dashing ancestors such as Richard Jeb, who'd fought beside King Charles I on the losing side of the English Civil War.

As soon as she arrived, though, any fantasies of adventure were shattered by the grim reality.

She is absolutely horrified by the scale of the problem that she faces.

In Uskub, there are 30 to 40,000 displaced people who have come on top of the civilian population already in that city.

She sees houses with 12 families sharing three rooms.

She sees children who are starving, whose bodies are so tiny because they never had the nutrients they needed.

She sees mothers who cannot feed their children, whose bones are flexible.

While the men fought a war, they left behind a sea of desperate women and shivering children.

The only time she doesn't see a child who is starving and freezing is just in the moments after they have eaten the ladle full of soup that her funds have provided.

And at this point she says, the only international language in the world is a child's cry.

Jeb soon learned to detest war.

She heard a lot of people on the trains as she travelled into the Balkans saying, you know, these people, the Greeks, they are not human.

The Serbians, they have no human feelings.

And ultimately, she heard all sides describe each other like this.

And what she decided was it wasn't one single party who was responsible, but it is war itself that is dehumanising.

And under those conditions of desperation and fear and patriotism that's been wound up by propaganda, these are the things that take away our humanities.

It's war itself you have to fight against.

It was a real turning point for her.

Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of Your Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.

In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed-from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg brothers.

Listen to You're Dead to Me Now, wherever you get your podcasts.

Jeb never gave in to to despair.

Instead, she returned to London, invigorated by a new mission.

She immediately throws herself into a publicity and fundraising campaign.

She goes around doing magic lantern slides, a bit like PowerPoint, but back in the day, trying to bring awareness to people of what the situation is out there and raise funds for them.

But the world had different ideas.

In July 1914, the Great War broke out in Europe.

With the continent consumed by conflict, it was impossible for Jeb to do much to save anyone.

At the same time, she suffered another physical collapse.

This time, she underwent thyroid surgery.

Afterwards, she had to spend much of the rest of the war convalescing with her sister.

And it's her sister Dorothy Buxton that comes to the fore, who's a more political character than Eglintine.

And Dorothy has applied under the Defence of the Realm Act to secure a permit to translate sections of the foreign press.

And as soon as Eglintine Eglintine is well enough, she's very well educated, she speaks several languages, so she becomes part of that core translation team.

Dorothy Buxton worked on foreign news for the Cambridge Magazine, a weekly roundup of reports from the foreign press.

In 1917, Jeb joined her.

At a time when censorship was rife and the truth could be hard to find, the Cambridge Magazine became a significant publication.

There is this demonisation in the British press saying that German soldiers are skewing babies and

there is horror to be reported.

But there is also a very cynical use of horror stories, which don't have their basis in reality, which are designed to keep public opinion supporting the war effort.

There was a great deal of loathing towards anything German during the war.

British royals with German titles or surnames were renamed, including the British royal family itself, from Saxecobergotte to Windsor.

Britons of every class with German connections were harassed or fired from their jobs.

There were even reports of animosity against Dachshunds.

Jeb wanted British people to stop demonising foreigners and instead engage with the fact that ordinary people abroad were suffering horribly.

Nobody else is looking at the humanitarian plight in the countries overseas with whom we are at war.

On the 11th of November, 1918, the guns on the Western Front ceased firing.

Even that morning, another 2,738 men had been killed.

After an estimated 10 million military deaths and four brutal years, the war was finally over.

At the end of the First World War, there is, of course, a ceasefire, but the

devastation in the conquer countries remains, and in fact, more than that, the starvation continues.

The British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, swiftly called an election.

Lloyd George promised to pursue a peace treaty that would force Britain's former foes to pay.

The general public mood is not to show mercy, but is to get some reparations for the costs of the war.

It wasn't a war that Britain had started and it has been a huge military but also social cost to the people in the country.

And so there is a strong feeling that Germany must pay, the enemy must pay.

Lloyd George won the election by a landslide.

At the the time, a Labour MP said this was an election won on hate.

Jeb and Buxton could see from the reports that the situation across much of Europe was causing terrible suffering.

The war had been devastating, but peace did not mean everything simply went back to normal.

Across Europe, millions of displaced people tried to return to the homes they'd once known.

Some found their way onto trains.

The trains have to be powered by wood-burning stoves at this point.

Often they break down.

That winter you have horrific reports coming back of trains that have just stopped on the tracks, haven't been able to go on.

And when people finally find them, they go into the carriages and they find women completely naked.

They've taken off all their clothes to wrap them around their children.

They're huddled in groups, but they're all frozen to death.

And there's one report of the tears on the children's cheeks frozen in place where they died.

In many war-torn areas, farmland had been devastated.

Food shortages were severe.

While the peace negotiations continued, British economic blockades still prevented aid from reaching its former enemies.

There are cases where families could not afford to feed all the family members, where the mothers were no longer producing milk and couldn't feed their babies.

People sometimes talk about choices, the choices that you make, but I don't feel there's any choice involved if you cannot help your child, your baby to survive.

Some families had to make devastating decisions.

In times they had to let their children die or they had to actively help them out of their misery.

I mean it's just

inconceivable the situation that these people are facing and these are civilians, families, women, mothers and children.

Jeb and Buxton were horrified.

They continued to work on foreign press translations, hoping that a true picture of the appalling situation unfolding abroad might make a difference.

Egnentine is among a group of people who are very far-sighted, and they recognised that, first of all, there is human need, even more acute, overseas among the defeated nations.

And as she would say to people, I have no enemies under the age of seven.

But there was also, among some, a recognition that if there were reparations pushed through at such a level that were so damaging, that would destroy the economies overseas, that would be no good for long-term engagement with Britain with trade, that would cause anger and resentment that might build up towards further conflict.

The sisters joined forces with some like-minded women to set up a Fight the Famine Council.

Eglintine and Dorothy's lobbying through the Fight the Famine Council did manage to end the blockade early to certain countries, but not to Austria, Germany and Russia.

Buxton travelled to Switzerland and brought photographs home to Jeb, who used them to make a direct moral appeal to the British public in her printed leaflets.

When Jeb was ushered away from Trafalgar Square by the police, she knew she'd broken the law.

The photographs she'd distributed on Trafalgar Square of a painfully malnourished Austrian child had not been officially cleared for use, as legally they had to be under the Defence of the Realm Act.

Known by its initials as DORA, this Act had been passed as an emergency war provision in 1914.

DORA was also used during wartime as an instrument of censorship against some who spoke out against the government's war policies.

In May 1919, Jebb was summoned to court at Mansion House in London.

The only court in a private house in London, actually, in the Lord Mayor's house, but also the court that many of the suffragettes have been tried in, so it's already framed as this hysterical woman, if you like, in the public eye.

Jeb had no doubt she was guilty in the eyes of the law.

She could face time in prison.

She knew that she didn't have a leg to stand on, technically, so she decided to focus on the moral case, giving the court reporters who are up in a balcony in that courtroom plenty to fill their columns in.

She chose to defend herself.

She was nervous about public speaking, and the grand setting would hardly have put her at ease.

Mansion House was often used by politicians and dignitaries for formal events and proclamations.

Still, it was the perfect stage for Jeb to appeal directly to the public.

She argued that the Defence of the Realm Act

should no longer be in force because of the armistice.

She argued that she was operating purely on a humanitarian basis, a campaign to save lives, nothing to do with the military, the campaigning or politics.

But above all, she focused on the starvation of the children.

And she brought it home for people, telling stories, for example, about how returning British soldiers had shared their rations with children on the trains to save lives.

And this was the British spirit.

This is the spirit of humanity and compassion that they should all now have.

The Crown Prosecutor, Sir Archibald Bodkin, made the case against Jeb decisively.

She was found guilty.

And yet she was only fined £5,

which

she wrote to her mother in her first letter after the court case was the equivalent to victory because it could have been £5 for every leaflet she distributed and she got rid of over 800 of these or she could have been given a custodial sentence, so a prison sentence.

She may have lost the legal battle, but she had won a few hearts.

The police inspectors at the trial felt so warmly towards Jeb that they took tea with her.

And with the reporters still looking down from the balcony, Sir Archibald made a gesture of support, too.

He came up to her and he took out his wallet, and he pulled out a five pound note.

In those days, these were quite big documents.

He had to unfold it and he pressed it into her hands.

Clearly, he was saying, morally, even as far as the prosecutor is concerned, you have won the case.

Sir Archibald was the director of public prosecutions, and his action was deliberately public.

Neglantine said, no, thank you very much.

I can pay my own fine, thank you.

But I'll I'll take your five pounds and I'll put it towards a new cause to help save the children.

So the first ever donation to the Save the Children Fund was from the Crown Prosecutor in the case against her.

The next day, as Jeb had hoped, she was featured in The Times, the Daily Herald, The Guardian, the Daily Mail, and the Daily Mirror.

Suddenly she was a story, and she and her sister thought, well, let's ride on this publicity.

Jeb and Buxton decided to hold a public meeting.

They booked the biggest venue they could find, the Royal Albert Hall.

There's a photograph of the queue of people waiting to get in that goes all the way around Kensington Gore.

Apparently there were not enough seats in the Royal Albert Hall for the size of the crowd that turned up to hear both Egentine and Dorothy.

Their fame was a mixed blessing.

The audience was huge, but not necessarily sympathetic.

Unfortunately, many of them considered them to be the traitor sisters that had been in the press lobbying to help the enemy.

And Egentheim found to her despair that many had arrived with bags full of rotten fruit and vegetables to throw at these seditious sisters.

Then Jeb began to speak.

Her voice rose with her passion until she called out, surely it's impossible for us as normal human beings to see children starve to death.

without making an attempt to save them.

And people put back their potatoes and tomatoes in their bags and brought out their purses.

And there was a spontaneous collection taken up around the hall.

Together with the £5 Jeb had been given by Sir Archibald Bodkin, this money went to save the lives of children in Vienna.

Save the Children is still one of the world's leading independent children's development agencies.

Over half its funding comes from non-government sources to keep it independent of official control.

They actually still still operate on a lot of the founding principles that Egentine set in place.

She didn't stop there.

She lobbied the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury, as well as the leaders of churches, synagogues and mosques, to come together to raise funds for children everywhere.

Jeb moved to Geneva.

One summer Sunday in 1922, she set off to climb to the summit of Mont Salev.

She settled down at the top, looking out over the lake.

Then, suddenly, she had a flash of inspiration.

She came up with this concept that all individual children everywhere in the world should be partied to the same universal human rights, something from which children had been excluded previously.

She took out a pencil and paper and drafted a five-point charter for children.

Then she marched back down the mountain.

Soon she became a voluntary representative for mother and child welfare at the new League of Nations And pushed through, in the face of huge argument and resistance, what became known as the Declaration of Geneva, the Declaration of the Rights of the Child.

And this has since evolved into the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most universally adopted human rights instrument in history, which has actually been recognised by all but one country in the world and is massively influential to this day in how we organise all sorts of state facilities through education and welfare and sports and justice,

but also the basics of the right to a healthy, safe childhood, the right to shelter, to play, to food, to medicines and to a fulfilled life.

At the young age of 52, Eglentheim Jebb died.

Did it matter that Eglentine didn't like children?

You know, she did once call them the little wretches, but when she did, I think she's smiling.

She actually respects children.

She respects them as individuals.

She thinks they're human beings.

And this does matter.

She not only set up the world's leading international development agency for young people, but she changed the way the whole world both sees, regards, and treats its children.

Next time on History's Heroes,

a 19-year-old sets out to become the first woman to swim the English Channel.

Gertrude Edelie, ruling the waves.

Hello, Russell Kane here.

I used to love British history, be proud of it.

Henry VIII, Queen Victoria, massive fan of stand-up comedians, obviously Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor.

That has become much more challenging.

For I am the host of BBC Radio 4's Evil Genius, the show where we take heroes and villains from history and try to work out were they evil or genius.

Do not catch up on BBC Sounds by searching Evil Genius if you don't want to see your heroes destroyed.

But if, like me, you quite enjoy it, have a little search.

Listen to Evil Genius with me, Russell Kane.

Go to BBC Sounds and have your world destroyed.

Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.

In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed-from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg brothers.

Listen to You're Dead to Me Now, wherever you get your podcasts.