Eglantyne Jebb Memorial

Eglantyne Jebb was a British social reformer who founded Save the Children at the end of the First World War to relieve the effects of famine in Austria-Hungary and Germany.

Commissioned by a private benefactor to mark Save the Children’s hundredth anniversary, my bust of Eglantyne Jebb, the charity’s founder and pioneer of children’s human rights, was unveiled at the Royal Albert Hall in May 2019. It is now on permanent public display in the library of Lady Margaret Hall, her Oxford University alma mater. There is a second edition at Save the Children’s London HQ.

One hundred years ago, Eglantyne Jebb was arrested in Trafalgar Square for distributing humanitarian leaflets. It was 1919 and few in London were sympathetic to a woman hoping to help the children of Britain’s former enemies. Yet within weeks the audacious Jebb secured the first donation to her ‘Save the Children’ fund from the public prosecutor at her trial. Five years later, she drafted the pioneering statement of children’s human rights that has since evolved into the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most universally accepted human rights instrument in history. Yet Eglantyne was never particularly fond of individual children, ‘the little wretches’ as she once called them.