An inspiring figure

Date: 17 Mar 2010

While most people will have heard of the Save the Children Fund, they may not be so familiar with its founder, Eglantyne Jebb. Clare Mulley is hoping to change this.

She became fascinated by Jebb while working as a fundraiser at the SCF and her award-winning biography, launched in paperback on Mother’s Day, celebrates an inspiring and complex character.

In fact, says Mulley, the choice to launch the book on Mother’s Day is fairly ironic since Jebb herself never became a mother and declared at one point: “I don’t care for children... the little wretches”. Mulley herself, though, is a mother and has juggled the writing of the book, which has won plaudits from no less than Gordon Brown (“a truly brilliant book”), with bringing up three daughters.

Despite some of her comments about children, Jebb was, however, hugely inspired by her own mother and other prominent and unconvential female figures and was very much dedicated to her cause. “She was like a wild rose,” says Mulley, “beautiful and prickly, very romantic and passionate, willing to be arrested for her beliefs.”

She says she has asked herself many times why Jebb, who was born in 1876, is not better known, considering that she not only founded SCF but also played a major role in shaping universal children's rights. “I guess she was quite a controversial figure,” she says, “and she may have fallen between traditional historians who tended to write only a white male history and Marxist historians who may have seen her as being too upper class. She defies categorisation really.”

The fact that she did not want children of her own and had fairly non-traditional, spiritual beliefs may also have played their part.

Achievements
Her achievements, however, were huge. Mulley became fascinated by her after reading about her at SCF. “I did not start out thinking I would write a biography,” she says. “But I could see this was a fantastic story.” There had been relatively little written about Jebb and nothing in depth. When Mulley went on maternity leave in 2001 to have her first child, who she named Millicent Eglantyne, she had time to delve further into her life. One of the things she found during her research was a crumpled up leaflet and photo of a starving Austrian toddler in the First World War. “Looking at it I could feel Eglantyne’s sense of outrage,” she says.

She returned to work for a different agency and then became pregnant with her second daughter. She decided not to go back to work after this and put her energy into researching Jebb’s life and into doing an evening MA course in social and cultural history at Birkbeck College in London. Her third daughter was born two years ago while she was writing the last three chapters of the book. “It was a race as to what would come first – the book or the baby. In the end the baby came first,” says Mulley.

Her research involved scouring libraries and archives and travelling to Jebb’s Shropshire home to visit her great nephew and pouring over bundles of letters, including diaries, photos, press clippings and her love letters to her close friend Margaret. Mulley says she had to persuade her family to let her include the latter relationship in the book as she wanted to give as complete a portrait of Jebb as she could. Mulley also travelled to the UN archives in Geneva where she spent 10 days while she was six months’ pregnant with her youngest daughter.

Because Mulley had not finished the book when she was born, she says the baby slept by her desk while she worked and she learnt to type really well with one hand. “I felt it was somehow appropriate,” she says.

Having children while she was writing about Jebb threw up some interesting emotions. Mulley considered the difference between personal and political commitment to children. She herself loved her children individually whereas Jebb’s relationship with them was more objective. Mulley says this perhaps helped her to do more on a political scale.
Jebb, who had been a teacher after leaving University, was fundamentally interested in social justice from an early age. Her parents were both highly influential in this regard, with her mother being a social entrepreneur and her father stating when some children were prosecuted for stealing that children had rights. Her Aunt Bun also had a big impact. She was unconventional, a women’s libber, pro-educating women and used to ride around on a bicycle in manly clothes. “She opened up Eglantyne’s eyes to challenging ideas,” says Mulley.

Jebb was also interested in children because for her they represented the future of society. She firmly believed that whereas adults could make up for any lost ground, children found it more difficult to recover from trauma both psychologically and physically. “Jebb was part of the First World War generation who responded to the war by looking for ways to ensure it never happened again,” says Mulley. “She thought that if you invested in your citizens and in the future, which was where children came in, you would have a more peaceful society.”

Jebb was also fairly canny. She was a great humanitarian and did not believe in treating your enemies inhumanely. She wanted to help the Austrians who had suffered in the war and she realised that by focusing on their children she could arouse more sympathy.

Her story is full of passion and politics and she was prepared to take risks to forward her beliefs. Publicly arrested in Trafalgar Square, she was a passionate internationalist, realising the potential of Save the Children to be a truly international organisation and linking up her work for the organisation and her later campaign for universal rights for children, which became one of the world’s most influential pieces of international legislation, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Sadly, she died young in her early 50s, but nevertheless feeling optimistic about the future. She wrote at the time: “A leading characteristic of modern thought is its insistence upon the unity of mankind. And at long last this truth begins to find a more ready echo in the heart of the individual.” She had played no small part in this transformation.

Writing
Mulley, who lives in Saffron Walden, says she really enjoyed writing. “It has made be a better mum and writer by juggling the two. You have to be really focused working part time and it is true that an employer gets a good deal out of part time workers because you never really switch off,” she says. At first she fit in the writing whenever she could, but later on she had au pairs to help out so she could have more time to do the writing. “I then really enjoyed my time with the children,” she says.
In addition to her writing work, she is a Campaigns Ambassador for Save the Children and a Friend of the national charity Standing Together Against Domestic Violence

Although she found it hard to extricate herself from Jebb, she has begun to get excited about the subject for her next book, although she has not written the proposal for it yet. It is likely to be the story of three of Karl Marx’s daughters. One lived to her 70s and committed suicide with her husband and another had five children and died of cancer. “Their story is fascinating,” says Mulley, “and I think the fact that it is about the relationship between three girls when I have three daughters makes it more appealing to me. Their relationship changes all the time and they are all such individual personalities.”

*The Woman Who Saved the Children is published by OneWorld price £9.99. www.oneworld-publications.com

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