Our History

It all started with Cecil Jackson-Cole when his first wife died and he couldn’t find any literature to help him with his grief.  He didn’t want anyone else to be in a similar fix so created a small charity to ensure Christian literature is accessible to everyone.

You would be forgiven for not knowing who Cecil was as he was an entrepreneur and philanthropist who preferred to stay out of the limelight yet had tremendous energy and passion for making a difference to people who were suffering. He was a co-founder of Oxfam and was responsible for its continuance after they successfully reached starving Greek people with food after the war. He opened the first ever charity shop in Oxford and went on to found as many as 50 charities, some of which you’ll be familiar with today such as ActionAid and Help the Aged.

Cecil owned a furniture shop which later became an estate agent as he could see the need to sell good housing after the war, this expanded and is now the biggest independent estate agents in the UK – Andrews Property Group. If you live in Southern Britain you may be familiar with them. 

Before his death Cecil bequeathed his business entirely to three charities that he had formed, one of which was ours, known as the Christian Book Promotion Trust.  Cecil believed that charity and business could and should work together so the three charities merged in later years under the one Andrews Charitable Trust enabling the unique partnership between business and charity to flourish. And Cecil’s wish to provide good literature to soothe the soul continues within ACT in the Speaking Volumes programme.

The Speaking Volumes programme has evolved itself since its formation in 1967. Formerly known as Faith in Print and Christian Book Promotions it has provided uplifting and helpful books with a Christian theme to many different libraries both in the UK and abroad. We started with books for adults in public libraries then added children’s titles. Later we understood that people borrowed books from many different places as informal as a bookshelf in the back of a room. So these days we offer grants for books to many diverse places such as in prisons, schools, care homes, hospices, churches, community centres, plus many places abroad, ensuring that whenever someone needs comfort, hope or inspiration there’s a book that can help them in their moment of need.