Hampstead has always had more than its share of famous residents, and most of them keep their heads down. Dame Esther Rantzen, who died today aged 86, was not built for keeping her head down. For decades she was one of the most recognisable faces in the country, and for most of those decades she went home to Hampstead.
The five-year-old at Sarum Hall
Her connection to the area began early. Born in Berkhamsted in June 1940 (Hemel Magazine covers the Hertfordshire birth), she was sent at the age of five to Sarum Hall School in Hampstead, a small independent girls' school that still stands off Eton Avenue. After a spell in New York and then North London Collegiate in Edgware, she came back to the neighbourhood as an adult and stayed.
A marriage that began as a scandal
Her Hampstead home was shared with Desmond Wilcox, the documentary maker behind Man Alive and later the BBC's head of general features. Their relationship began in 1968 when he was her department head and still married. They lived together openly, told BBC management, and were moved to a different production team as a result. They married in December 1977 and had three children: Miriam in 1978, Rebecca in 1980 and Joshua in 1981.
Desmond died of a heart attack in Paddington on 6 September 2000, aged 69. Rantzen said his last words to her were "I adore you". She never remarried, and spoke often and frankly about the loneliness of widowhood, which became the seed of The Silver Line, the helpline for older people she founded in 2012.
Running the nation's helplines from NW3
Hampstead Heath was the family's weekday base and the New Forest its weekend one (Southampton Magazine has the story of the cottage where she died). From north London she oversaw two charities that changed the country. Childline, launched in October 1986 after a That's Life! special on child abuse, took around 50,000 attempted calls on its first night. The Silver Line took 11,000 in the fortnight after its national launch in 2013.
She was Jewish, agnostic in later life, and unambiguous about what her heritage had given her. "I recognise how much I owe to being Jewish," she told Jewish News. "The closeness of my family, the priority of education, the culture we share as Jews are the basis of so many of my values." One of her daughters, she said, kept her "in touch with the High Holy Days". Her family's story stretches back through Spitalfields to Warsaw (Warsaw Magazine has traced it).
A neighbour's farewell
She was appointed a Dame in 2015. In January 2023 she announced she had lung cancer, and she spent her remaining time campaigning, with characteristic candour, for the right to an assisted death. She died at her New Forest home, surrounded by her children.
The broadcaster Lorraine Kelly called her "a pioneer and a force of nature. Helped so many people. Funny, forthright and fabulous." Hampstead residents who saw her on the High Street, or on the Heath with a dog, would probably settle for something simpler: she was ours, and she was on our side.
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
- 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.