The Rathbone Family

The Rathbone family has been fighting injustice and helping people less fortunate than themselves for over 250 years.

The Rathbones started up businesses in Liverpool as early as 1742, mainly in the timber trade, merchant shipping and banking. Being Quakers helped them to establish a wide and successful trading network, but the family always refused to supply companies building slave ships – in fact both William Rathbone III and his son belonged to the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

Business expanded, but the family always kept their social conscience. William Rathbone VI founded the District Nursing Service and worked with Florence Nightingale. He also supported the founding of the Liverpool Institute in the 1870s, a forerunner to the University of Liverpool. And when he was a Liberal MP in Caernarvonshire, he promoted compulsory state funded education in Wales and helped establish the University of North Wales in Bangor.

The Rathbone women were also involved in social concerns. Eleanor Rathbone was one of the first women magistrates and MPs, and pushed for social and political reforms in housing, women’s suffrage and the need for family allowance.

Her cousin Elfrida firmly believed that ‘all children can learn’. In 1916, she started teaching in a special kindergarten in King’s Cross for children considered to be incapable of learning.

The kindergarten’s services grew in response to the children’s needs. It came to include an occupational centre for children excluded from schools, and a centre with crèche facilities for women with mental and physical disabilities. Elfrida always fought for children’s right to be educated at school. She died in 1940, but her inspirational work eventually led to the formation of the Rathbone Society in 1969.

The Birth of Rathbone

The Rathbone Society continued the work Elfrida Rathbone had started, and in 1995 joined forces with Community Industry, a similar charity, to become Rathbone C.I.

Today, simply called ‘Rathbone’, the organisation still works towards helping anyone whose needs have not been met by education, or who needs support to overcome their barriers to learning, training or employment.

We currently educate and train over 10,000 children, young people and adults every year from training centres and residential projects across England, Scotland and Wales.