Cecil Jackson-Cole
The businessman who ran Oxfam like a firm and opened the first charity shop
Cecil Jackson-Cole was born in east London in 1901 and went into business young, building up a furniture firm and later an estate agency, Andrews, which he arranged so that its profits went to charity. He was a devout man with an unusual conviction for his time: that the methods of commerce, which he was good at, were exactly what good causes lacked.
In 1942 a group in Oxford, led by Canon Theodore Milford and including Quakers and academics, formed a committee to press for food to be allowed through the Allied blockade to starving civilians in Greece. Jackson-Cole became its honorary secretary. Where the others saw a wartime campaign, he saw an organisation. He paid for advertising, insisted on employing professional staff, wrote appeals in plain language and in 1947 opened a permanent shop in Broad Street, Oxford, to sell donated goods. It is usually counted as the first charity shop in the sense we now know.
The established charities of the day thought advertising vulgar and were uneasy about a tradesman running things. He carried on regardless, and when the Greek emergency ended he argued that the committee should keep going for the world's poor generally. That is why Oxfam exists.
He repeated the pattern for the rest of his life, founding Help the Aged in 1961 and Action in Distress, now ActionAid, in 1972, and setting up trusts to fund new charities as they started. He died in 1979.