This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
On April 6, 1919, Eglantyne Jebb stood in London’s Trafalgar Square passing out posters and leaflets titled “A Starving Baby,” which featured a photo of a 2-and-a-half-year-old Austrian child weighing 12 pounds 2 ounces. The average weight for a child of that age was 28 pounds 2 ounces.
Why was the child so thin? During World War I, the Allies instituted a blockade of food and other aid to Germany, Hungary, the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey) and other regions. Even after the conflict had ended the previous November, the Allies continued the naval barricade in part to pressure its former enemies to sign the Treaty of Versailles, which secured peace in June 1919 but imposed harsh penalties on the vanquished powers.
Jebb was the honorary secretary of the Fight the Famine Council, a group advocating that the British government lift the blockade. It sent photographers and doctors to Central Europe to document civilian suffering. At a Vienna hospital, a physician named Hector Munro reported seeing 38 women whose hips had spontaneously fractured because malnutrition had made their bones dangerously fragile.
Among the literature Jebb handed out were 7,000 leaflets that read: “What does Britain stand for? Starving babies, torturing women, killing the old?”
She had not received permission for doing so and was brought to trial for violating the draconian Defense of the Realm Act of 1914, which gave the government broad powers to control publications, speeches and assemblies, and allowed fines or imprisonment for such offenses.
During her trial that May, Jebb said the leaflets had a humanitarian, not a political, purpose. She was found guilty, paid the fine of 5 pounds (about £224 or $300 today) and received a donation in the same amount from the prosecuting counsel, Sir Archibald Bodkin, which she put toward a nascent group she called the Save the Children Fund.
Save the Children, which remains a leading international humanitarian organization, has since aided 1 billion children in more than 110 countries, said Janti Soeripto, the current president and chief executive. During times of crisis, Save the Children has set up health clinics; offered hygiene and shelter repair kits; administered vaccinations; and provided food, water, blankets and clothing.
From the start, Save the Children aimed to help communities become self-sufficient. In 1919, it started a program called Cows for Vienna that allowed families to sell milk. Recently, during the war in Ukraine, it gave livestock to families struggling to rebuild their lives.
Eglantyne Jebb was born on Aug. 25, 1876, to Arthur and Eglantyne Jebb, a distant cousin who went by Tye. They lived on an estate they called “The Lyth,” in Ellesmere, Shropshire, near the border with Wales. Arthur Jebb, an Oxford-educated barrister, had inherited the property from his grandfather. Eglantyne was the fourth of six children, four girls and two boys.
One of Eglantyne’s aunts, Louisa Jebb, also lived at The Lyth, and had a significant influence on Eglantyne getting a university education and developing her social consciousness in an era of harrowing inequity.
Louisa had graduated from University of Cambridge’s Newnham College for women, organized the servants and farm workers, and taught the Jebb children carpentry, woodworking and how to make boomerangs, kites, bows and arrows.
Arthur Jebb planned to marry off his daughters, but Louisa persuaded him to send Eglantyne to university — and paid her niece’s way at Lady Margaret Hall at the University of Oxford.
She easily made friends at college. “Eglantyne was funny, mischievous and tongue-in-cheek,” said Clare Mulley, a manager in Save the Children’s fund-raising department who wrote the Eglantyne Jebb biography “The Woman Who Saved the Children” (2009). She was also tall and thin, had eyes the color of forget-me-nots, pale skin that blushed and thick, wavy, red-gold hair.
Eglantyne studied international history, graduated in 1898 and became a teacher at St. Peter’s Girls’ School in Marlborough, England. She didn’t take to the profession. “I have none of the natural qualities of a teacher,” she wrote in her diary. “I don’t care for children, I don’t care for teaching.”
The children gravitated to her anyway. “They often wait outside the door of my lodgings and when I come out, they fall upon me with shrieks and howls,” she wrote. She compared the youngsters, who won her over, to wayside flowers, “not cut back or trimmed in garden pots, nor nurtured in abundant soil and tended with care, but struggling up as they could, blossoming in wanton luxuriance, and there pinched and stunted but everywhere, turning their faces to the sun.”
She soon quit because of health issues — an overactive thyroid caused her body to shake and her heart to palpitate. Sometimes she fainted. Her physical energy declined throughout her life, Mulley said.
She found a purpose in social causes, working for a time with the historian Florence Ada Keynes at the Charities Organization Society, which studied social reform and poverty. There, Jebb wrote a 270-page social survey of Cambridge in 1906. Injustice, not misfortune, causes poverty, she concluded. She also fell in love with Keynes’s daughter, Margaret, whose brother was the economist John Maynard Keynes.
Citing their correspondence, Mulley said Eglantyne and Margaret’s relationship turned passionate and into what one friend described as a “Sapphistic affair” that ended when Margaret married Archibald Hill, the physiologist and future Nobel laureate, in 1913.
That same year, Eglantyne joined the Macedonian Relief Fund, which aided victims in the immediate aftermath of the first and second Balkan Wars. At a soup kitchen, she saw starving, shivering children who only stopped shaking once they’d finished eating. In 1916, she returned to England fatigued and with a goiter, and had the growth removed.
After recovering, she joined her younger sister Dorothy Jebb Buxton in translating articles from French and German that raised awareness of the acute social and medical needs arising from World War I and publishing them in Cambridge Magazine, a university publication. Then, after the armistice of 1918, the sisters began focusing on the famine in Europe, lobbied to lift the Allied naval blockade and co-founded the Save the Children Fund.
One of their earliest supporters was George Bernard Shaw, the playwright and political activist who was one of the richest people in England. His initial response to Dorothy’s pleas for money — “I have no enemies under the age of 7” — was widely publicized by the group and became a rallying cry for the organization’s further fund-raising efforts.
After the archbishop of Canterbury declined to donate, according to Mulley’s biography, Eglantyne traveled to Rome to meet with Pope Benedict XV and secured 25,000 pounds.
In 1921, Jebb moved her organization to politically neutral Geneva, home to the International Committee of the Red Cross and the League of Nations. And that September, she chartered a ship to deliver 600 tons of aid to Russia during a famine. The group also built orphanages and trained girls in trades.
Jebb drafted the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child, advocating that children should be protected, fed and housed, and the document was adopted in 1924 by the League of Nations, a precursor to the United Nations. The U.N. in 1989 adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child; the United States is a signatory but is the only member state that has not ratified the child-rights convention.
Ill health continued to shadow Jebb. She had surgery on a second goiter in 1924 and, four years later, had a stroke while convalescing in Sierre, Switzerland. She died after a stomach operation, on Dec. 17, 1928. She was 52. She was buried in the Cemetery of Saint George in Geneva and, in 2024, was reinterred in the city’s more prestigious Cemetery of Kings. (Her sister Dorothy died in Peaslake, England, in 1963.)
In 2016, Eglantyne Jebb was one of six humanitarians featured on a British stamp, and pictures of her hang in the National Portrait Gallery in London. A park in Geneva was named after her, and a bronze bust of her is on permanent display in the University of Oxford library.
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