William Tebb


William Tebb was a British businessman and wide-ranging social reformer. He was an anti-vaccinationist and author of anti-vaccination books. He was concerned about premature burial.

Biography

Privately educated, Tebb started work at fifteen for a Manchester business, attending evening classes where he encountered the ideas of the British radicals John Bright, Richard Cobden and Robert Owen, and the American Christian social reformer Adin Ballou. His ideas were also influenced by a Salford Swedenborgian sect promoting physical purity, food reform, and teetotalism.
In 1852, Tebb went to the United States as a representative of the Vegetarian Society. He was introduced to Ballou and made frequent visits to the latter's experimental Hopedale Community, where he met and married Mary Elizabeth Scott in 1856.
In the 1850s he became active in the American abolitionist movement, but he and his family returned to England in the 1860s to escape a malaria outbreak, settling in London. Tebb became a director of a company making bleaching chemicals for paper, earning a large fortune that he used to fund a variety of social causes.
He co-founded the Royal Normal College for the Blind, was active in anti-vivisection, contributed to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals as well as joining the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the Humanitarian League. Politically a radical Liberal, he was a member of the Devonshire Club, National Liberal Club, New Reform Club, and the Vigilance Association for the Defence of Personal Rights.
Tebb's daughter Florence married Raphael Weldon.

Anti-vaccination activism

In 1869 Tebb became deeply committed to the anti-vaccination campaign whose aim was repeal of the Vaccination Acts that made smallpox vaccination compulsory for children. He himself was prosecuted and fined thirteen times for refusal to vaccinate his third daughter. In 1880, he co-founded the London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination and established its official publication, the Vaccination Inquirer. He served as its chairman until 1896, when it was dissolved to form the National Anti-Vaccination League, of which he was president.
He became a highly publicised activist against compulsory smallpox vaccination, and then one of the most prolific writers and activists against vaccination itself. Although interested in spiritualism and theosophy, he campaigned not on religious grounds but on general appeal to values of social liberty.
He visited the United States in 1879, and campaigned against smallpox vaccinations. Smallpox had recently become epidemic again, after a decline in vaccination, following a decline in cases of smallpox earlier in the century. Several American anti-vaccination organisations arose around the time of his visit.
The NAVL succeeded in its lobbying for a government enquiry, and the 1898/1907 Act of 1898 that introduced exemption from vaccination on grounds of conscientious objection. Although he continued to campaign against vaccination, in later life Tebb took on further causes.

Other interests

In 1895 he moved to Rede Hall, Burstow, Surrey, where he occupied major posts in the parish council, local horticultural society and cricket club. He paid for a monument to Adin Ballou at Hopedale, and a drinking fountain at Burstow in memory of the 400,000 horses killed and wounded during the Boer War, to which he was strongly opposed as a pacifist and anti-imperialist.
Along with Walter Hadwen, in 1896 he had co-founded the London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial, that campaigned for burial reforms to ensure that those buried were certainly dead. When he died at Burstow in 1917, his will specified that "unmistakable evidence of decomposition" should be visible, so he was cremated a week after his death.

Publications