Cromer's crab fisherman who went out in the lifeboat for 53 years and saved 873 lives
Coxswain of the Cromer lifeboat from 1909 to 1947, he took part in 387 launches and won the RNLI gold medal three times and the George Cross, while…
Founded the Red Cross, went bankrupt, vanished for decades and won the first Nobel Peace Prize
A Geneva businessman who stumbled on the battlefield of Solferino in 1859 and organised care for the wounded of both sides. His book led to the Red…
A war-scarred medical student who built a village for orphans with 600 schillings and a simple idea
Raised by his elder sister after their mother died, he decided that what war orphans needed was a mother, brothers and sisters, a house and a…
The Chinese consul in Vienna who issued visas to Shanghai in 1938 and never mentioned it
A missionary-educated scholar from Hunan who, as consul-general in Vienna after the Anschluss, defied his ambassador and issued visas that let…
Swore she would never be a missionary, then three men knocked at the door in one night
Born in India to a missionary family and determined to escape it, she was changed by three women who died in childbirth because no man could attend…
Smuggled some 2,500 children out of the Warsaw Ghetto and buried their names in jars
A Warsaw social worker who carried Jewish children out of the ghetto in ambulances, tool boxes and through the sewers, was tortured by the Gestapo…
Lost three daughters to a tank shell in Gaza and chose, on live television, not to hate
A Gaza-born obstetrician who worked in an Israeli hospital, he was on the phone to an Israeli news anchor in January 2009 when shells hit his home.…
Opened Hull House in a Chicago slum and lived there for the rest of her life
After years of illness and aimlessness she moved into an immigrant district of Chicago and founded a settlement house that offered nurseries, classes…
A Scottish matron in Budapest who would not leave her Jewish girls, and died in Auschwitz
A Dumfriesshire farmer's daughter who ran the girls' boarding house at the Scottish Mission school in Budapest from 1932. Ordered home in 1940, she…
The Old Doctor who gave children a parliament and a court, and would not leave them on the road to Treblinka
A Warsaw paediatrician and children's author who ran an orphanage on the principle that children have rights now, not later. Offered escape from the…
A bush parson who spent a decade making the Flying Doctor happen after a stockman died waiting for help
Presbyterian minister to the Australian outback who built nursing hostels across the interior, then spent years chasing aircraft and radio until the…
A shy country squire who inspected every prison in England and then in Europe, and died of jail fever
Made High Sheriff of Bedfordshire in 1773, he found men held in jail after acquittal because they could not pay the jailer. He spent the rest of his…
A chef who decided a disaster zone was just a kitchen with no food yet
A Michelin-trained chef who, after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, began flying toward disasters instead of away from them, building World Central Kitchen…
A priest born into deep poverty who joined a shanty camp of 250 families and founded ATD Fourth World
Sent in 1956 to an emergency housing camp outside Paris, he stayed, founded a movement run with the very poor rather than for them, and had the day…
A Korean doctor turned priest who built a hospital, a school and a brass band in South Sudan
The ninth of ten children of a widowed seamstress in Busan, he qualified in medicine, then trained as a Salesian priest and went to Tonj in 2001. He…
Watched the bomb fall on Nagasaki, then took a dying man into his house and nursed him
One of the most decorated bomber pilots of the war, he came home restless and failed, until a dying ex-serviceman with nowhere to go turned his empty…
A refugee surgeon who refused to let paralysed soldiers die and invented the Paralympics
A Jewish neurosurgeon who fled Germany in 1939 and in 1944 took over a hut of spinal injury patients at Stoke Mandeville, most expected to die within…
Forced to watch a massacre in Burundi, she hid 25 children and built them a town called Peace
A Tutsi schoolteacher who survived the killing of 72 people at a bishop's residence in 1993 and saved the Hutu and Tutsi children in her care. Maison…
An Irish aid worker who drove Jewish children out of a French internment camp in the boot of her car
From a children's hospital in the Spanish Civil War to the Quaker relief office at Perpignan, she quietly removed children from Rivesaltes camp…
Refused by the War Office, she paid her own way to the Crimea and nursed soldiers under fire
A Jamaican healer turned away when she volunteered for the Crimean War, she travelled there at her own expense, built a hostel near the front and…
From the Dundee mills to the Nigerian forest, where she stopped the killing of twins
A mill girl from a Dundee slum who went to Calabar as a missionary, lived among the Okoyong people as one of them, rescued abandoned twin babies and…
Turned physical embraces into a charity network reaching disaster survivors worldwide
A fisherwoman's daughter from Kerala known as "the hugging saint" for embracing millions of followers, she built her spiritual following into a large…
Fed the Frank family in hiding for two years and saved Anne's diary from the floor
An office worker who brought food, books and news to the eight people hidden in the Amsterdam annexe, and who gathered Anne Frank's scattered pages…
Stood at the college gate in Nanjing in 1937 and kept ten thousand women behind her
An Illinois blacksmith's daughter who stayed at Ginling College when the Japanese army took Nanjing and turned its campus into a refuge for women and…
