Benjamin Waugh

The Reverend Benjamin Waugh
Waugh c. 1900
Born	(1839-02-20)20 February 1839 Settle, West Riding of Yorkshire
Died	11 March 1908(1908-03-11) (aged 69) Westcliff, Essex
Nationality	English
Education	Theological college, Bradford
Occupation	Minister
Religion	Congregationalist

Benjamin Waugh (20 February 1839 – 11 March 1908) was a Victorian era social reformer and campaigner who founded the UK charity, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) in the late 19th century, He was an outstandingly brilliant, energetic and highly competent charismatic organiser who was to change how the British public understood and valued childhood and was instrumental in securing Britain’s first legislation on children’s rights.

Early life

Waugh was born, the son of a saddler, in Settle, West Riding of Yorkshire. Aged eight, he was deeply affected by the death of his mother and soon afterwards his father sent him to a small private school in Warwickshire run by his maternal uncle, a Congregationalist minister. When 14, he was apprenticed to Samuel Boothroyd, a prosperous draper and leading member of the Congregational Church in Southport, Lancashire. By the age of 20, Waugh had become secretary of the local branch of the United Kingdom Alliance, a leading temperance organisation. His religious commitment led to him giving up the drapery business while remaining friendly with his former employer whose daughter Sarah later became his wife. Between 1862 and 1865, he studied at the Congregationalist Airedale Theological College in Bradford and on graduation, married Sarah Boothroyd with whom he moved to Newbury, near Reading, as minister to the local Congregational church. Both politically liberal and a non-fundamentalist, he became a Fellow of the Geological Society in 1865. A year later, he accepted the pastorate of the Independent Chapel at Maze Hill in Greenwich.

Early career

As a Congregationalist minister in poverty-stricken East Greenwich, Waugh devoted himself to improving the conditions of the inhabitants, including establishing a creche for working mothers and a Society for Temporary Relief in Poverty and Sickness. In 1870, John Stuart Mill and four trade unions nominated him as a candidate to represent Greenwich to the new London School Board; after his successful election, he argued for non-sectarian elementary education. Befriending fellow Board member Thomas Huxley, he learnt from the importance of factual investigation in his subsequent campaigns on behalf of neglected children. The first of these concerned the incarceration of child offenders in adult prisons and Waugh first became widely known for his book, The Gaol Cradle, Who Rocks it? that pleaded against child imprisonment and for the creation of juvenile courts. The year following its publication he collapsed from over-work but despite thereafter declining re-election to a third three-year term on the School Board, continued to do too much.

The Sunday Magazine

After another breakdown in 1877, he resigned his ministry in Greenwich on medical advice and accepted an offer by the publisher Isbister to edit the widely-circulated monthly periodical, the Sunday Magazine. It attracted contributions from numerous well-known writers, including novelist Hesba Stretton who helped found what later became the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Waugh also contributed poems and articles to the magazine. His monthly stories 'Sunday Evenings with the Children' were later published in book form.

National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children

In 1884, at the suggestion of Hesba Stretton he brought together a number of leading philanthropists to found the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (modelled on a similar initiative in Liverpool), launched at London's Mansion House on 8 July. The London body's first chairman was veteran social reformer, Earl Shaftesbury. It evolved to become the NSPCC some five years later (14 May 1889), with Waugh as its honorary director and Queen Victoria its patron. Under Waugh's leadership and guidance, two hundred local branches of the NSPCC were created across the United Kingdom to campaign for children's rights to be protected from harm, neglect and abuse and to raise funds for the work of the NSPCC that recruited a body of inspectors to investigate and prevent cruelty to children. Most of the fund-raisers were middle-class ladies who according to social historian, George Behlmer, were ‘left no room for doubt on the subject of female duty’: its women supporters had to postpone fighting for their own rights until ‘the citizenship and rights of children are established’.

Waugh supported the agitation of W. T. Stead against ‘white slavery’ in 1885, and that same year was instrumental in having inserted into the Criminal Law Amendment Act a provision allowing courts of law to accept as evidence the testimony of children too young to understand the meaning of an oath. Waugh also played a major part in in securing the landmark Anti-Cruelty Act of 1889, legislation which allowed a child to be taken from abusive parents and became popularly known as the 'Children's Charter'. Waugh's success led inevitably to criticism and in 1896 the Echo newspaper published a strong personal attack on the NSPCC leader -

Mr. Waugh declares that he is above all committees, He initiates expenditure, gives orders, buys houses, starts shelters, takes and dismisses officials without asking permission from committees. The N.S.P.C.C.is virtually a one-man society.

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Family and homes

With his wife Sarah Elizabeth, Waugh had twelve children including daughters Edna, who would become a notable watercolour artist and draughtsman, and Rosa, who would follow in his footsteps as a social campaigner.

Waugh lived at a number of addresses including Oak Cottage, Shipbourne in Kent, Croom's Hill in Greenwich, and at 53 Woodlands Villas (today Vanbrugh Park) in neighbouring Blackheath. In 1884 he was living at 33 The Green, Southgate. He later retired, in 1905, to live at 4 Runwell Terrace in Westcliff, a suburb of Southend, Essex, where he died three years later, and was buried in the Southend borough cemetery.

A blue plaque marks a property mistakenly believed to be that of Waugh's residence on Croom's Hill when it was installed in 1984 by the Greater London Council. English Heritage, the successor authority responsible for blue plaques correctly identifies Waugh's former home as 62 Croom's Hill.

Gallery

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  Waugh's blue plaque at Croom's Hill, Greenwich
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  Benjamin Waugh's home once stood on this site at 33 The Green, Southgate.
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  The plaque to Benjamin Waugh at 33 The Green.
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  Benjamin Waugh with some of his family of twelve children in about 1889.

References

Sources

• Waugh, Rosa (1913), Life of Benjamin Waugh. T. F Unwin, London.

External links

• Works by Benjamin Waugh at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Benjamin Waugh at Internet Archive