William Tebb

William Tebb (22 October 1830 – 23 January 1917) was an English businessman and wide-ranging social reformer. He was an anti-vaccinationist and author of anti-vaccination books. He was also concerned about premature burial, and co-founded the London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial.

Early life William Tebb was born in Manchester on 22 October 1830, the son of Eleanor (née Hewetson) and William Tebb. 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 on 4 December 1856.

The NAVL succeeded in its lobbying for a government enquiry (a royal commission in 1886), and the Vaccination Act 1907 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.

Later life

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 in 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. His daughter, Florence Joy Tebb (1858–1936), studied mathematics at Girton College, Cambridge and worked closely with her husband the biologist Raphael Weldon. His other daughter, Mary Christine Tebb, was a biochemist and married the biochemist Otto Rosenheim.

Publications Sanitation, not Vaccination the True Protection against Small-Pox, 1881 paper, Second International Congress of Anti-Vaccinators Testimonies of Medical Authorities on Vaccination, Preface, 1882, London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination Compulsory Vaccination in England: with incidental references to foreign states, 1884, E.W. Allen, London The Increase of Cancer, 1892, The Tocsin. Booklet reprint 1892, Wertheimer, Lea & Co., London Leprosy and Vaccination, 1893, Swan Sonnenschein & Co., London Premature burial, and how it may be prevented, with special reference to trance catalepsy, and other forms of suspended animation, ed. Walter Hadwen, Swan, London, 1905