William Tebb

William Tebb (October 22, 1830, Manchester – January 23, 1917, Burstow) 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.

Tebb's daughter Florence married Raphael Weldon.

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.

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