Edmund Wright Brooks (29 September 1834 – 22 June 1928) was an English Quaker philanthropist and cement maker.
He was Secretary of the British Quaker Anti-Slavery Committee and was concerned among other things with the establishment in 1897 of a Mission in Pemba, one of the Zanzibar islands, now in Tanzania, to help freed and escaped slaves there.
[2] Because of his knowledge of Russian and his expertise, he was asked by the Meeting for Sufferings in November 1891 to go with Francis William Fox[3] to Russia and investigate the reported famine there.
Brooks returned, reported on 15 January 1892 to the Meeting and left again with Herbert Sefton Jones, who was fluent in Russian, on 15 February with funds for a Quaker relief effort and an urgent need to distribute food before the spring thaw would make transportation difficult.
[4][5] In 1895 he and Thomas William Marsh (1833–1902)[6] waited on the Czar to plead the cause of religious dissenters in Russia, and he was later active on behalf of the Dukhobors when permission was secured for them to emigrate.
He stood for Parliament in the Essex, South East constituency, at the General Election of 1892 as a Gladstonian Liberal, against the sitting Conservative MP, Major F C Rasch.
[10][11] He was a founder of Friends of Armenia which provided relief to Armenians, in 1897, and long term honorary treasurer.
According to DQB and Digest Register in the Library of the Society of Friends,[14] the children were: He died at his home, 'Duval', Grays, 22 June 1928.