Somerville College has lost one of its best-known daughters. Dame Esther Rantzen, who read English at the college from 1959 and returned as an Honorary Fellow in 2016, died today at her home in Hampshire, aged 86. Her family said she was "finally at rest with her beloved husband, Desmond Wilcox".
Woodstock Road, 1959
Rantzen arrived at Somerville from North London Collegiate School (Harrow Magazine remembers her schooldays) with a scholarship and, she later admitted, more interest in the stage than in the library. One of her tutors was Mary Lascelles, the Jane Austen scholar, a formidable presence whose standards Rantzen respected even when her own attention was elsewhere.
Elsewhere was usually a rehearsal room. She performed with the Oxford University Dramatic Society, became Secretary of the Experimental Theatre Club and joined the Oxford Theatre Group, which took student productions to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The training was in speaking clearly to a room and holding it. She would later do exactly that, on Sunday nights, to more than 18 million people.
She was fond of the college and clear about why. "It was unsnobbish, it was egalitarian, it was a bit left wing, it was a bit out there," she said. "Somerville is tolerant, broad-minded, celebrates diversity of all kinds." In 2016 the college made her an Honorary Fellow, joining a roll that includes Dorothy Hodgkin, Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher.
From the Fringe to the front room
After Oxford she joined the BBC as a trainee in radio sound effects, then worked as a researcher, and in 1968 was put in front of the camera on Braden's Week. When that programme ended she was given its successor, That's Life!, which she presented from 1973 to 1994 (Hammersmith Magazine tells the story of the programme and its west London studios).
The performer never left her. Colleagues remembered the pauses, the raised eyebrow, the ability to make a complex consumer scandal land as a story a family could follow. Her former co-presenter Bill Buckley put it simply today: "It was her absolutely amazing gift of explaining complicated nuanced things in simple direct terms."
Two helplines and a Damehood
That gift was put to its best use in 1986 when she founded Childline, the free helpline for children in danger or distress, and again in 2012 when she founded The Silver Line for isolated older people. She was appointed OBE in 1991, CBE in 2006 and a Dame in 2015 (Westminster Magazine covers the honours and her Parliamentary campaigning).
Oxford's own transplant charity counted her as a patron, and she returned to the city regularly for college events. Diagnosed with lung cancer in January 2023, she spent her last years arguing for a change in the law on assisted dying with the same clarity she had once brought to a student stage.
Somerville's motto is Donec rursus impleat orbem, "until it fill the world again". For a student who left the college with a voice and spent sixty years using it on behalf of people who had none, it is a fitting line to end on.
Dame Esther Rantzen across our magazines
Each Firefly title is remembering a different chapter of her life. Read the others:
- Hemel Magazine: her Berkhamsted beginnings
- Harrow Magazine: the Edgware schoolgirl
- Camden Magazine: Hampstead, home for half a century
- Hammersmith Magazine: That's Life! at Wood Lane
- Westminster Magazine: the Palace, the honours and Parliament
- Southampton Magazine: the New Forest cottage where she died
- Bedford Magazine: the Luton South campaign of 2010
- Tower Hamlets Magazine: the Spitalfields cap-maker
- Warsaw Magazine: the family story that began in Warsaw
Sources: BBC News, ITV News, Hello!, Wikipedia, the family statement issued by Miriam, Rebecca and Joshua Wilcox, Somerville College, Hampshire Life, the Advertiser and Times, Jewish News, The Jewish Chronicle, Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine, UK Parliament election results. Images via Wikimedia Commons, credited individually.
