Elizabeth Cadbury

Elizabeth Mary Cadbury , nee Taylor (born June 24, 1858 in Peckham Rye, London , † December 4, 1951 ) was a British philanthropist .

Life and activity

Elizabeth Taylor was one of ten children of the stockbroker and director of the Quaker Company John Taylor and his wife Mary Jane, b. Cash born. She grew up in wealthy circumstances and attended a boarding school for English girls in Meiningen from 1872 to 1874 before moving to the North London Collegiate School from 1874 to 1876. In 1876 she passed the Cambridge University entrance exam in ten disciplines but did not take up studies. Instead, she devoted herself to social projects in the London docks and in Paris and taught children in the Sunday school of her Quaker community.

In 1888 Taylor married George Cadbury, a wealthy chocolate maker. Together they had six children (Laurenc eJohn, Georg Norman, Elsie Dorothea, Egbert, Marion Janet and Ursula). There were also five children from Cadbury's previous marriage.

In the 1880s and 1890s, Cadbury helped her husband build Bournville, a model town built according to progressive social reform principles, where Cadbury Chocolate Factory workers moved their families. Measured against the standards of late Victorian England, the quality of living and living in the houses was trend-setting high.

Building on these experiences, Cadbury has been committed to charitable work since the 1890s, with a particular focus on promoting the well-being of children and women, with a particular focus on health and education. Within the sBournville project she managed the establishment and organization of the village schools. After her husband's death in 1922, she became chairman of the Borunvolle Village Trust, which was responsible for the ongoing financing of the village.

In the field of women's advancement, Cadbury found a forum in the National Council of Women, where she held leadership positions from 1896 until her death in 1951. In 1898 she also founded the Birmingham Union of Girls' Clubs.

In 1909 Cadbury founded the Woodland Hospital, now known as the Royal Orthopedic Hospital.

Politically, Cadbury was a staunch supporter of the Liberal Party, with which she sympathized from the standpoint of Christian socialism. From 1919 to 1924 she sat as a representative of the district King's Norton him city council of Birmingham. She had been chairman of the subcommittee on hygiene of the Birmingham City Council's Education Committee since 1911, which she also remained until 1924.

A staunch pacifist, Cadbury was the first chairwoman of the Peace and International Relations Committee of the National Council of Women in Great Britain, founded in 1914 . In 1916 she was also elected to the National Peace Council, where she temporarily held the post of treasurer and vice-president.

In the interwar period, Cadbury supported the idea of ​​international understanding through activities in the British League of Nations Union. In 1898 Cadbury led the British delegation to the World Congress of the International Council of Women in Calcutta.

During World War II, Cadbury returned to looking after Belgian refugees in Great Britain. From 1941 to 1948 she served as President of the United Hospital in Birmingham.

At the end of the 1930s, the National Socialist police authorities classified Cadbury as an important target: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin placed them on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who would be killed in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht Occupation troops following special SS commandos with special priority located and arrested.

In the last years of her life, Cadbury again focused her work on the work of the International Council of Women.

Honors

The University of Birmingham awarded Cadbury an honorary MA in 1919 for her contributions to popular education and the city of Birmingham. In addition, a technical college in Birmingham is named after her.

For her work in the care of refugees from Belgium, Cadbury was awarded the Belgian Order of the Crown by the Belgian government in 1918, which was awarded to her by the Belgian Queen Elisabeth.

There were also awards from the Red Cross in Serbia, Greece and Yugoslavia.

literature

• Richenda C. Scott: Life of Elizabeth Cadbury , 1955.
• Oliver Heyn: The Thekla Trinks' boarding school for girls in Meiningen (1868–1874). From the letters of Elizabeth Taylor Cadbury , in: Yearbook of the Hennebergisch-Fränkisches Geschichtsverein 34 (2019), pp. 249-279

Individual evidence

1. ^ Forces War Records: Hitler's Black Book - information for Elizabeth Cadbury