‘A Perfect Jungle of Intrigues, Suspicion and Hypocrisies’: The Early Save the Children Fund in Time of Crisis

Abstract

‘We have been attacked,’ Eglantyne Jebb told a Save the Children Fund volunteer, Victoria de Bunsen in 1922. We ‘probably shall continue to be attacked so bitterly and insidiously from outside; we must not let the forces which are against us disrupt us internally’. Eglantyne was describing the ‘mental anguish’ the exhausted ‘little band’ of volunteers felt as they struggled to raise money for the world’s children.¹ The end of the war did not bring stability to Europe, and children continued ‘dying of hunger and want’ in the ‘war zones’ of Europe.² The Fight the Famine Council had formed the SCF to take over famine relief so that they could focus directly on lobbying the government to restore trade relations in Central Europe and support Woodrow Wilson’s proposals for a League of Nations. By 1920, despite the controversy surrounding it, the SCF caught on in some quarters and garnered wide cross-class appeal. This chapter shows that after the war many British men and women renewed their interest in voluntary action. The SCF gave Eglantyne a way to make use of her interest in social questions and her talent for committee work and provided an outlet for her writing. It also enabled her to challenge government policy and to create controversy, which was a long-standing prerogative of women’s philanthropic work. By 1921, there were SCF national committees in 12 different countries. Eglantyne announced that ‘the movement had grown much too large…to be able to stop it’.³