Tower and Town, August 2021 (view the full edition)Eglantyne Jebb: from Marlborough to Save The ChildrenEdited by Sara Holden from Nick Baxter's longer article, published in Wiltshire Life in May 2019. Eglantyne Jebb, founder of Save the Children, taught at St Peter's School in Marlborough from 1899 to 1900. The school, now the town library, was then flanked by overcrowded and squalid terraces, rows, yards, places, and courts such as Union Place, Holt's Row, Macklin's Court, Bernard's Court, Smith's Yard, St Peter's Terrace, and Militia Court. Eglantyne came from an enlightened upper-middle class family from Shropshire. Before undertaking teacher training she had been a student at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She clearly had a vocation to work with deprived children because she would have preferred to teach in London Docklands, but couldn't get a job there. Instead she succeeded in gaining a post at St Peter's School in Marlborough, where she had connections through her uncle James, a retired Marlborough College teacher, who lived nearby. When Eglantyne taught at St Peter's, there were three school rooms: boys, girls, and infants; Eglantyne taught the girls. Her classroom was built to accommodate about 115 pupils. There were five members of staff but only Eglantyne and the headmistress were formally qualified. The others were teenage girls aged 18, 15 and 14. Eglantyne noted in her diary how casually her pupils talked about death in their families, one girl stating that "None of us has died yet." It was perhaps unsurprising that she found the children pretty indifferent to the suffering involved in the Boer War then raging in South Africa. But Eglantyne's health was poor. Her diary reveals bouts of depression. On one Sunday she wrote, "The prospect of returning to my work tomorrow makes me feel physically ill, my body and heart ache in concert. If I were only going to the dentist tomorrow - but to stand, mutilating scripture to the detriment of inattentive children, I could shed tears over the prospect." On 20th December 1900, she left St Peter's School. In the aftermath of World War I two decades later, appalled by starving children in defeated Austria-Hungary and Germany, she founded Save the Children with her sister Dorothy Buxton. Although her time in Marlborough was brief, it clearly made a big impression upon her and contributed to her later life's work. Nick Baxter (edited Sara Holden) |