Celebrating 100 years of Save the Children … and ongoing collaborations with the University of Birmingham

Over the past few years, I have been collaborating with Save the Children on a research and policy project related to the implementation of their Global Policy Position on User Fees and Private Schools. So I’m especially pleased to announce that, along with my colleague Paul Lynch, I have been awareded a PhD studentship by the Economic and Social Research Council Doctoral Training Partnership to investigate how private schools can provide inclusive education to disadvantaged and marginalised children in India.

Towards the end of last year, the year in which Save the Children celebrated their centenary, the University of Birmingham hosted a double-bill event showcasing aspects of collaborative work with the organisation. In the first part, Dr Laura Day Ashley with Save the Children India’s Technical Advisor for Education, Kamal Gaur, and Save the Children International’s Early Childhood Education Officer, Rowan Ainslee discussed their collaborative research and policy impact project on private sector involvement in education in India. In the second part, a collaboration of a different nature was explored. With the Save the Children archive being held at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham, archivists Holly Waughman and Matthew Goodwin presented a show-and-tell exhibition of selected materials from the Save the Children collection to an audience of historians, educationists, museum archivists, post-graduate research students, as well as our guests from Save the Children, Rowan and Kamal, who, given their contemporary work for the organisation in this area, found the exhibition very moving.

Cadbury Research Library archivists Holly Waughman and Matthew Goodwin present a show-and-tell exhibition of selected materials from the Save the Children collection at the University of Birmingham

Offering a tour of the Strong Room, Holly and Matthew explained how the collection arrived at the University of Birmingham in 2011 and is now being catalogued and re-packaged as part of a Wellcome Trust funded project. The exhibition took a chronological approach, taking records from each decade from the 1910s to the 1990s to show the history and evolution of the organisation. Through this arrangement, archive items were able to show some of the key campaigns in Save the Children’s history, such as relief for victims of the Russian famine in the 1920s, support for Hungarian refugees in the 1950s, and the STOP Polio vaccination campaign of the 1980s. The exhibition included a wide range of materials, including reports, correspondence, photographs, posters, and objects, such as the Save the Children collecting tins.

Materials from the very early beginnings of the organization were on display, including a copy of the flyer – depicting starving Austrian children suffering due to the continued Allied blockade of Europe after the First World War – which founder, Eglantine Jebb, was distributing in April 1919 when she was arrested in Trafalgar Square for breaking censorship laws. Also on display was a beautifully illustrated ‘concertina comic strip’ created by Corrine de Candole, c1925. The illustrations depict Corrine’s interview at Save the Children Fund, her first week at the office and a trip to Geneva for the charity’s Summer School. 

Cadbury Research Library, Save the Children Fund Archive EJ299, A417, EJ 299: Clever and Humorous Pictures by C. de Candole.

One section of the exhibition focused on materials relating to Save the Children’s education programmes, including education fundraising, work in schools to support disabled children, nursery schools and play groups, and health education programmes. These records – including material such as, project reports, photographs, artefacts, educational resource packs, posters, and leaflets – offered a small sample of the material held in the archives. You can read more about these on the Save the Children archive project blog.  

Geographically, materials from a number of countries were incorporated into the exhibition, including reports on a health education programme in Peru, photographs of projects in Korea, and blueprints for Save the Children’s kitchens in Greece. In keeping with the theme of the event, one section of the exhibition had a special focus on India. Save the Children has had a strong connection to India since its inception, with £3,461 being donated from the country in the first five years of the Fund’s existence. Save the Children began working in India from the 1960s establishing homes and nurseries for Tibetan refugee children. Operations expanded throughout the country where the organisation responded to natural disasters, provided emergency relief for Bangladeshi refugees, supported nutrition and education projects, and developed a sponsorship programme.  By 1983 the charity was working with over 40 different projects across the country. Today, Save the Children India’s work spans 19 states with Education being a key focal area.

With our new ESRC doctoral studentship award, the University of Birmingham and Save the Children have the opportunity to build on and continue their collaborative work in India. We are looking for a highly motivated applicant to work with us on a PhD funded by ESRC DTP on how private schools provide inclusive education to marginalised children – more information on this link. The closing date is 2nd March 2020 – informal enquiries about the research before application can be directed to Dr. Laura Day Ashley and Dr Paul Lynch.

Save the Children collection archivists Holly and Matthew would also welcome enquiries about using material from the collection in research projects. If you are interested in using this material or would like to find out more, please contact them on special-collections@bham.ac.uk. Additionally the Cadbury Research Library is hosting a Study Day on Wednesday 1st July 2020 to explore the potential and value of charity archives, including the Save the Children archives and have opened a call for papers (closing date 27th March 2020) – more information on this link.

Bringing History to Life

Winterbourne House and Garden, School Pageant ensemble entitled ‘The Lost Property Office’

On a rare sunny day in March we took a group of almost 50 undergraduate students in Education to Winterbourne House and Gardens as part of their teaching and learning programme on our year one module, Schooling: a social and cultural history. This module focuses on the changes and continuities in schooling in England over a period of just over 100 years, from the 1870s and the introduction of mass compulsory schooling through to the 1980s; it also considers how changes impacted children’s experiences, considering a broad range of dimensions of diversity such as social class, gender, ethnicity and disability. The Winterbourne visit, or ‘experience’ as we like to call it, provides an insight into the lives and educational experiences of a middle-class family, the Nettlefolds, in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

Winterbourne House and Gardens were built and designed for John and Margaret Nettlefold in 1903, a well-connected Unitarian industrial family with an active interest in housing reform. Winterbourne is now part of the University of Birmingham but there was a connection from the start as Margaret was the niece of well-known politician and founder of the University of Birmingham, Joseph Chamberlain. Across a number of rooms in Winterbourne House, exhibits and displays tell the story of John’s working life; Margaret’s education, including at the new private school for girls, Edgbaston High School; Margaret’s lifestyle before marriage, and her home life as a married woman engaged in charity work and with a household of 10 servants. Upstairs, a nursery room is set out illustrating a play and learning environment for the young Nettlefold children, cared for by their nurse. Another room tells the story of the Nettlefold’s only son, John Kenrick and his public school and Oxford University education, interrupted by service in the territorial forces during the First World War. 

In the spirit of enquiry-based learning, our undergraduate students completed a treasure trail activity to gather information from Winterbourne exhibits and displays to inform their understanding of the educational lives of Margaret Nettlefold and her children. Then, in small groups they spent time with our host, Collections Officer, Henrietta Lockhart, to look behind the scenes at some of the historical materials from Winterbourne House and Garden’s archive. These included some of Margaret’s Edgbaston High School reports, dating back to the 1880s; our students were interested to see the wide range of subjects she studied including Physiography, Political Economy, Grammar, Latin, Greek, Discussion and Composition alongside subjects more familiar to them such as English Literature, French, German, Geography and History. There were images of girls and women in fancy dress for a school pageant in outfits that included the ‘Lost Property Office’ and the ‘School Building’ (see images) complete with brickwork detail; we commented on how these showed ‘off the wall’ humour and imaginative thinking ‘out of the box’ (excuse the puns!) and how it reminded us of how similar events continue in schools today, with for example, children and teachers dressing up to celebrate World Book Day, as many did earlier this month.


Winterbourne House and Garden, School Pageant ensemble entitled ‘School Building’

There was also a ‘found object’ from the archive that caused much intrigue – a beautifully and delicately hand crafted ‘Nature Book’ that included carefully pressed flowers sewn into the pages with recordings of the precise locations in which they were found. Henrietta explained to us that the child’s surname on the exercise book matched that of a domestic servant and so the book may be a product of a schoolchild attending a state-run school, rather than of a middle-class child’s private education. This, as yet, incomplete story gave insight to the work of the archivist and the fragmented nature of historical investigation.

Winterbourne House and Gardens, Nature Study book


‘For us, being given a focus like this for an archival session is immensely valuable, because it makes us search our archives in new ways and make new and unexpected connections. Most of the material we showed the students related to middle-class education, but this year we discovered some school exercise books in our collection which might have belonged to the daughter of a domestic servant. This will lead to further research, and perhaps next year we will be able to tell more of that story! Furthermore, the questions raised by students can start new lines of thinking for us. We look forward to further collaboration with the School of Education’

Henrietta Lockhart, Collections Officer

The Winterbourne experience has become a regular feature on our module and an event that that our students and tutors look forward to alike. As our students have said, being in the environment of the Nettlefold family home and having the opportunity to leaf through their school reports, photographs and writings ‘brings history to life’. In our ongoing collaboration, not only are we bringing students to the sites and materials of the past, but we are also bringing historical evidence to our students by sharing relevant archival materials from Winterbourne via our students’ online learning environment. We plan to use these materials with students in their learning in lectures and seminars, and to make them accessible to students so that they can draw on and use them as evidence for analysis and interpretation to inform their own assignments. We very much look forward to our next Winterbourne experience and to finding out more about its unfolding stories of education.