Eglantyne Jebb insisted on defending herself in court. A few days earlier, she had been arrested for distributing leaflets in Trafalgar Square, London’s traditional site of public protest. Beneath the uncompromising headline, ‘A Starving Baby’, her fliers bore photographs of an emaciated two-and-a-half-year-old Austrian child, her body so underdeveloped that she cannot stand. In January 1919, Herbert Hoover, as chair of the American Relief Association, estimated that between four and five million children were dying of malnutrition and related diseases in Eastern and Central Europe. It was now 15 May, almost six months after the armistice that ended the Great War, but peace terms had yet to be finalised. Jebb had been campaigning to end the economic blockade of Europe, which the then Liberal government was maintaining to secure greater reparations at Versailles. She believed that if the British public knew the human cost of this economic policy, they would be outraged too. Concerned that she might be right, the government had her arrested.

Since Jebb had not cleared her leaflets with the British censors under the Defence of the Realm Act, she knew that, technically, she did not have a leg to stand on in court. Instead, she focused on the moral case, giving the reporters plenty to fill their columns. Archibald Bodkin, prosecuting, did not spare her in his condemnation, but, although found guilty, Jebb was fined just five pounds. The verdict was, she wrote to her mother, ‘equivalent to victory’. She could have been fined for each of the almost 800 leaflets she had distributed or been given a custodial sentence.

As the court session was formally closed, but the room was still full, Bodkin walked over to Jebb. Producing a five-pound note from his wallet, he theatrically unfolded it before pressing it into her hands. As far as the prosecution was concerned, he was making clear that she had won the moral case. Jebb insisted on paying her own fine but took the note to put towards a new emergency fund, to help ‘save the children’. Thus, the first donation to what is now the world’s leading independent development agency for the young came from the prosecutor at its founder’s trial.

The next day, the story was across the front pages. Building on this wave of publicity, within a week, Jebb and her sister, Dorothy Buxton, launched ‘The Save the Children Fund’ at a packed public meeting in London’s Royal Albert Hall. Many of those attending, however, had brought rotten fruit and vegetables to throw at the ‘traitor sisters’, who, they had read, wanted to give succour to the enemy. The war losses had been unbearable, tensions were still high, and sympathy for do-gooding, well-to-do ladies was limited. Nervous in front of this hostile crowd, Jebb started speaking quietly, but her voice rose with passion until she called out: ‘Surely it is impossible for us, as normal human beings, to watch children starve to death without making an effort to save them.’ Potatoes were replaced by purses, and a spontaneous collection was taken up around the hall.

With the help of some British trade unions and the Society of Friends (the Quakers), within weeks, Save the Children was delivering sustainable aid, in the form of dairy cows, to Vienna’s outer suburbs. A group of Swiss farmers had agreed to keep only enough revenue from the animals’ yield to maintain them, and to distribute the rest of the milk where it was most needed. Thousands of young lives were saved, and Jebb was inspired to transform this emergency fund into a permanent relief organisation.

Motivated by a series of further humanitarian crises, including a Turkish earthquake, deprivation in the Welsh Valleys, and starvation inside Soviet Russia, over the next few years, Jebb created an ‘International Save the Children Alliance’, raising funds and delivering aid where needed. Later, Vienna helped the children of the Welsh farmers who had once supported them. Jebb would expand her focus again, supplementing ‘ambulance work’, as she called responsive aid, to running development programmes that would, she hoped, reduce the need for relief, at least in response to war and other man-made causes.

This summer will mark the 150th anniversary of Eglantyne Jebb’s birth, and yet, given her achievements, her name is remarkably little known. Two blue plaques honour her: one in Marlborough, Wiltshire, where she once taught in a local school, and the other in Cambridge, where she did charitable work. Lady Margaret Hall, her Oxford alma mater, has a bronze bust of her on display in its library, and some glass chandeliers, donated by her friends, in the chapel she once threatened to bomb if the new intake of students was not more interesting than the last. Her face also featured on a British postage stamp. In 2024, the city of Geneva, where she died, paid tribute by reinterring her remains in their prestigious Cimetière des Rois. Had a less controversial figure founded Save the Children, however, there would no doubt be Eglantyne Jebb streets, humanitarian offices, and think tanks.

Eglantyne Jebb was born to an affluent family in a colonnaded house in Shropshire in 1876. Her first name, which recurs in the family, is taken from the wild rose, somewhat fitting for someone who was beautiful, but could also be wild and prickly. Jebb’s father was a barrister and conscientious country gentleman who raised his six children to know that ‘of those who live in fine houses, much is expected’. Her mother, another Eglantyne, founded the Home Arts and Industries Association, running classes for low-paid workers on the family estates to raise their prospects and preserve skills such as woodcarving, chair-caning, and mosaic-making. Attending these workshops, Jebb witnessed a compassionate idea being transformed into a national charitable movement, eventually based out of the Royal Albert Hall and boasting John Ruskin and G.F. Watts among its patrons.

Jebb was reading history at Oxford – among the second generation of women to study there, although still not permitted to graduate – when news of the sudden death of her beloved younger brother, from pneumonia, reached her by telegram. It was a pivotal moment for her. Suddenly appreciating the value of youth and potential of life, in her grief, she quietly pledged her own life to public service. She was not sure how best to start.

After various adventures in and out of love, on and off horses and bicycles, scattering hairpins across Cambridgeshire and chalk dust in Wiltshire, in 1913 Jebb set off to distribute aid in what the press then referred to as ‘the Barbarous Balkans’. Her closest sister, Dorothy, had married the young Quaker and aspiring progressive MP, Charles Roden Buxton, who was seeking someone with philanthropic experience to help run aid programmes in the region. Twice disappointed in love, with the manuscripts of several unpublished social novels locked away in a desk drawer, a failed career as a teacher, but some pioneering work with the Charities Relief Organisation in Cambridge behind her, Jebb leapt at the opportunity.

Arriving by train into the heart of a European war zone, Jebb set up soup kitchens, clothes banks and family tracing programmes. ‘The only international language’, she noted, while standing in a freezing field to oversee aid distribution, ‘is a child’s cry.’ Her interest would never again be contained by domestic borders. One evening, slipping away from her Serbian hosts, then the victors in her region, Jebb also undertook some perilous human rights work. Secretly meeting with a group of Catholic Albanians, she copied down lists of names of murdered local officials. That evening, after sewing the paper into her clothes, the best way to hide it, she recalled feeling the dead men’s names ‘pressing against my heart’.

When this localised conflict escalated into world war, Jebb was forced to return home. Once back in London, she gave the list of murdered officials to her sister’s political contacts. The newspapers were fascinated by this Shropshire woman’s heroic relief endeavours, and soon she was much in demand to give ‘lantern lectures’ on her experiences, the Edwardian version of PowerPoint-illustrated talks. In this way, she raised considerable sums of money for her cause, but she was distraught by the knowledge that many of the lives she had helped to save would probably be lost in the fighting or from the disease and famine left in its wake.

Jebb spent much of the rest of the war working alongside Dorothy, who had secured parliamentary dispensation to translate their pick of the foreign press. The sisters hoped that this project might help to bring an earlier, negotiated ceasefire, perhaps saving millions of lives. Their efforts, published as the Cambridge Magazine, were circulated widely on subscription, not only among influential celebrities such as Thomas Hardy and Jerome K. Jerome, but also the British war cabinet, including General Smuts in South Africa who reported that Jebb ‘must be a great woman’. Little wonder that, after the economist John Maynard Keynes reported back to friends on the long, hard negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference, the sisters established a ‘Fight the Famine Council’. When that made slow progress, Jebb took to distributing her leaflets independently and chalking up the pavements in Trafalgar Square, a tactic learnt from the suffragettes, with the aim of bringing an end to the suffering more quickly.

Jebb found her life’s calling with Save the Children. Once launched at the Royal Albert Hall, she quickly secured the support of the wife of the British Prime Minister, the Welsh mining unions, the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Queen of Sweden and the Soviet Union. Her tenets were simple but innovative: support should be provided regardless of race, faith, gender or anything other than need, it should be reciprocated when possible, and it should be sustainable. Yet transforming Save the Children from a one-off relief fund into an ongoing global operation, both raising and spending funds in Britain and overseas, was not enough.

Within a few years, Jebb was running the International Save the Children Alliance from Geneva, where the ‘Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’ was based, Esperanto was promoted, and the headquarters of the League of Nations was under construction. It was here that she developed the pioneering concept that all children, everywhere, should be party to the same human rights. Jebb drafted five fundamentals, but revolutionary ‘rights of the child’, the last being the right to be brought up with an awareness of responsibilities: the flip side of the coin. Securing herself a position as an independent advisor to the League of Nations, in 1924, she managed to get her statement of children’s rights adopted as the ‘Declaration of Geneva’.

Jebb died at the age of just 52, in 1928, with many more pioneering programmes planned in partnership with foreign governments, including in China and what was then Persia. She would have been astounded by both modern society and technology on the 150^th anniversary of her birth, 25 August 2026. What would not have surprised her is continuing suffering and ongoing need. ‘The world is not ungenerous, but very busy and unimaginative’, she once said. ‘We have to find the means to touch the imagination of the world.’