Eglantyne Jebb

Eglantyne Jebb grew up in a large Shropshire family that was expected to do good. She studied history at Oxford and trained as a teacher, but a year in a Marlborough primary school left her exhausted and convinced she had no gift for it. Through her thirties she suffered from a thyroid condition and drifted between social research, charity committee work and doubt about what she was for.

In 1913 she went to Macedonia to distribute relief funds during the Balkan Wars, and saw for the first time what modern war did to civilians. After the Armistice in 1918 the Allied blockade of Germany and Austria continued, and children there were dying of hunger. In 1919 she was arrested in Trafalgar Square for distributing a leaflet with a photograph of a starving Austrian baby. She defended herself in court and was fined five pounds; the prosecuting counsel paid it for her.

Weeks later she and her sister Dorothy Buxton launched the Save the Children Fund at a meeting in the Royal Albert Hall, where some in the audience came to protest at feeding enemy children. She raised money fast, spent it fast, and used the new tools of publicity, full-page adverts and film, without embarrassment.

In 1923 she drafted a five-point Declaration of the Rights of the Child, which the League of Nations adopted the following year and which is the ancestor of the UN Convention. She died in Geneva in 1928, aged 52, still ill and still working.