Dame Esther Rantzen died today at her home in the New Forest, surrounded by her family. She was 86. The broadcaster, founder of Childline and The Silver Line and, in her final years, the country's best-known campaigner for assisted dying, had made the Forest her permanent home after leaving London, describing herself in 2021 as having "become a country mouse".
Bramshaw, since 1948
Her connection to the area was older than her fame. As a child in north London (Camden Magazine has the Hampstead story) she was brought to Bramshaw in 1948 to stay with a cousin, and came back every year. "It was the only countryside I knew," she told Hampshire Life. "I loved it so much. It used to break my heart when we had to leave and go back to the grey streets of London."
In the late 1980s she and her husband, the documentary maker Desmond Wilcox, bought a farmhouse north of the A31 near Bramshaw. It had been sold to them as Victorian and turned out to date from about 1680; the floors were rotten, an end wall was coming away and there was no damp course. They restored it and spent 23 years making a garden together. Before every drive back to London, she said, "we would hold hands and race round the garden". Desmond died in 2000. She kept walking the garden on every arrival and departure, "so it's clear in my memory".
A neighbour who joined in
She was not a celebrity who hid behind a hedge. She campaigned with village shopkeepers Derrick and Vera Roberts for a 40mph limit through Bramshaw, and when Derrick retired as postmaster she staged a mock This Is Your Life for him. She opened Hartwood House care home in Lyndhurst. She hosted Childline fundraisers in the farmhouse garden and spoke about the Forest with a convert's zeal: "It is like a great ocean of trees."
When her three children were asked, after a fiftieth-birthday world tour that took in Bali, the Himalayas and the Taj Mahal, which place they had loved most, all three said the New Forest.
The Silver Line and the final years
Widowhood taught her about loneliness, and in 2012 she founded The Silver Line, a free 24-hour helpline for older people. It launched nationally in November 2013, took 11,000 calls in its first fortnight and was handling more than 10,000 a week by the time it joined Age UK in 2019. She was made a Dame in 2015.
In January 2023 she announced she had lung cancer. She joined Dignitas in December that year and campaigned for a change in the law, but said on 10 September that she was now too frail to travel to Switzerland. She died at home instead, in the house she had loved for nearly forty years.
Her children Miriam, Rebecca and Joshua Wilcox said: "We are grateful she is finally at rest with her beloved husband, Desmond Wilcox, but we will miss her immeasurably. She was our sunshine." Her life began in Hertfordshire (Hemel Magazine has the Berkhamsted story) and took her through Oxford, the BBC and Buckingham Palace. It ended where, by her own account, her heart had always been.
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
- Oxford Magazine: Somerville and the Oxford stage
- Camden Magazine: Hampstead, home for half a century
- Hammersmith Magazine: That's Life! at Wood Lane
- Westminster Magazine: the Palace, the honours and Parliament
- 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.