Sue Young Homeopathy

Stephen Henry Hobhouse 1881 – 1961, and Rosa Waugh Hobhouse, a husband and wife team who wrote Life of Christian Samuel Hahnemann, founder of homepathy.

The Hobhouses used the publishing house of Charles William Daniel.

Stephen and Rosa Waugh Hobhouse were colleagues of Richard Haehl, who also wrote a biography of Samuel Hahnemann.

Stephen Hobhouse was a conscientious objector, and therefore he was imprisoned during WW I, where he met Fenner Brockway. Together, they wrote English prisons today, the resulting reforms of this book can still be felt today.

Stephen Hobhouse was born into a wealthy, liberal family and educated at Eton and Oxford. As the eldest son, he was expected to inherit and follow in his father’s footsteps. However, Stephen renounced his inheritance, and influenced by Tolstoy, Stephen and his wife Rosa adopted povery and went to live in Hoxton.

Rosa and Stephen joined the Quakers and became politically active. As a conscientious objector, Stephen ended up in prison in 1916.

Rosa Waugh Hobhouse wrote Life of Christian Samuel Hahnemann, founder of homepathy, The divine art of healing, An interplay of life and art, The life of Benjamin Waugh, Mary Hughes, Her Life for the Dispossessed, Story-making, Norse legends, Out of the Years, Poems, As Gems in Metal, Robin Hood and Other Tales of Old England, The records of Senelder, Sonnets and Other Verses, Perspectiveland; or Peggy’s adventures and how she learnt to draw, The Man with the Leather Patch and Five Other Tales, and various other collections of poems.

Stephen Hobhouse wrote Joseph Sturge, His Life And Work, English prisons today with Fenner Brockway, An English Prison from Within, The silence system in British prisons, Forty years and an epilogue, and many other works, including Margaret Hobhouse and Her Family,

Of interest:

Hermione Hobhouse was the biographer of Prince Albert.

John Cam Hobhouse, 1st Baron Broughton PC 1786 – 1869 known as Sir John Cam Hobhouse. John Cam Hobhouse was a friend of Lord Byron, Francis Place,

Reverend Benjamin Waugh 1839 – 1908 was a Victorian 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, and also wrote various hymns.

Waugh was born, the son of a clergyman, in Settle, North Yorkshire and attended theological college in Bradford before moving to Newbury, Berkshire and then in 1866 to London.

Working as a Congregationalist minister in the slums of Greenwich, Waugh became appalled at the deprivations and cruelties suffered by children. Critical of the workhouse system, the Poor law and aspects of the criminal justice system as it affected children, he wrote a book (The Gaol Cradle, Who Rocks It?, 1873) urging the creation of juvenile courts and children’s prisons as a means of diverting children from a life of crime.

He also served on the London School Board from 1870 to 1876. He was also, from 1874 to 1896, editor of a religious periodical, The Sunday Magazine, in which he published several of his own hymns.

In 1884, he founded the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to children (echoing a similar initiative in Liverpool), launched at London’s Mansion House on July 8. The London body’s first chairman was veteran social reformer Earl Shaftesbury. It evolved to become the NSPCC some five years later (May 14, 1889), with Waugh as its first director and Queen Victoria as its first patron.

A house in Crooms Hill, Greenwich marks one of Waugh’s residences; 53 Woodlands Villas (today Vanbrugh Park) in the nearby Blackheath Standard area was another. He later retired, in 1905, to Westcliff in Southend, Essex, where he died three years later. A blue plaque in Runwell Terrace marks his residency there.