My first Christmas card landed on the doormat on Armistice Day. The excuse for its ridiculously early arrival was an invitation scrawled inside it to a Christmas party.

But it was an Oxfam card and it set me thinking about those thoughtful and intelligent people of Oxford who, during the war, exercised their minds to help civilian victims of war regardless of which side they were on.

Somehow it’s hard to imagine Oxfam starting up anywhere other than in Oxford — though I suppose it could have been called Camfam had it started in Cambridge — but in fact it began life in 1942 as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, one of a number of such committees set up to fight poverty and hunger among civilians in war-torn Europe, particularly children in Greece.

The original committee was formed at a meeting of a group of Quakers, academics and other social activists on October 5 which was held in the Old Library at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin under the chairmanship of Canon Theodore Richard Milford. Its original purpose was to persuade the British Government to allow food through the Allied Forces’ blockade for distribution by the Red Cross.

After the war, many of the other UK committees wound down their activities but the Oxford group continued to relieve poverty and starvation in various parts of Europe, notably in Germany.

That the Oxford committee continued to exist is thanks largely to the activities of its remarkable first honorary secretary, Cecil Jackson-Cole (born 1901) — who is surely not now nearly as famous as he should be. He remained honorary secretary until he died in 1979 and his concern was to link the worlds of business and charity — bringing the management skills of the former to bear on the latter.

He was the founder of the Oxford estate agency Andrews — which is still today owned by charitable trusts set up by him. And charities which he founded through his Voluntary and Christian Service Trust (VCS) include Help the Aged (1961); the Anchor Housing Trust (1968); and Action Aid.

Jackson-Cole, or CJC as he was universally known, decided in 1948 that there was an ongoing need for a famine relief organisation — in peacetime as well as wartime — and persuaded the rest of the committee to support him. The organisation then started collecting and distributing clothes and widened its scope beyond Europe. After the birth of Israel that year, for instance, it helped relieve hardship among Palestinians.

Also in 1948 the first charity shop was opened at 17 Broad Street — where it still thrives — which also served in the early years as the administrative headquarters.

The committee did not change the name to Oxfam (presumably one of the first uses of this clumsy but catchy technique of abbreviating and then joining together two words) until 1958, when it was registered as a charitable company limited by guarantee.

As the charity grew under its new name its offices began to spread somewhat haphazardly into buildings throughout the city centre until the organisation moved into a single block in Summertown in 1962. There it remained until 2005, when it moved to its present headquarters in Cowley Business Park. Now, as a result of that first seed planted in Broad Street, Oxfam has about 750 shops in the UK and has become the nation’s biggest high street retailer of second-hand books. It has a £300m turnover and employs almost 6,000 people worldwide.

On a purely personal level, I wonder why anyone ever buys new clothes, even for wearing at that Christmas party, when you can buy such high quality at Oxfam.