Frederick Nicholas Charrington

Frederick Nicholas Charrington (4 February 1850 – 2 January 1936) was an English social reformer who renounced succession to a fortune of over £1 million in order to devote his life to temperance work.

About a year later, while walking through Whitechapel, he saw a poorly dressed woman with her children begging her husband to leave a public house and give her money for food.

Then and there I pledged to God that not another penny of that money should come to me.”[2] Charrington abandoned the family business to devote his life to helping the poor in the East End.

He opened a school, led a fight to clean up the music halls and became an ardent worker for the Temperance Movement.

In 1903 Charrington purchased Osea Island off the coast of Maldon in Essex and established a treatment centre for people with alcohol and opiate addictions.