Every autumn a new cohort of girls walks through the gates of North London Collegiate School at Canons Park, and every one of them is told, sooner or later, about the old girls who went before. From today, one name on that list belongs to the past tense. Dame Esther Rantzen, who has died aged 86, was educated at the school in the 1950s, and it was here that the habits of mind that later built Childline were formed.
A scholarship girl with a pen
Esther arrived at North London Collegiate after an unusual early childhood. Born in Berkhamsted in 1940 (Hemel Magazine has that story), she had started school in Hampstead and then spent part of her childhood in New York, leaving Buckley Country Day School in 1952 before returning to north London.
At NLCS she was, by her own account, focused on winning a scholarship to Oxford, and she got one, going up to Somerville College in 1959 to read English (Oxford Magazine picks up the story there). But she found time for the school magazine committee, contributing a piece of verse about cows and a description of food written as a dream. Among her contemporaries in the sixth form was Susan Orbach, later the psychotherapist and author Susie Orbach.
The school's headmistress, Dame Kitty Anderson, made a lasting impression. Decades later, on Desert Island Discs, Rantzen paid tribute to Anderson as an inspiration, an educator who expected girls to think for themselves and to expect to be heard.
Being heard became the point
That expectation ran through everything she did afterwards. At the BBC she moved from sound effects to research to the studio floor, and from 1973 to 1994 she presented That's Life!, a programme built on the letters of ordinary people who had been ignored by companies, councils and officials.
In 1986, after a programme on child abuse, she and her producers created a free telephone line that any child could ring, at any hour, and be believed. Childline launched on 30 October 1986. The idea that a child's voice deserved to be heard on its own terms, without an adult in the room to filter it, was radical then. It has since become the settled view of the country.
She founded The Silver Line for lonely older people in 2012, and was made a Dame in 2015. Her later years were spent campaigning for the right to an assisted death after her own diagnosis of lung cancer in 2023.
The Harrow connection today
North London Collegiate sits inside the London Borough of Harrow, on the Canons estate that once belonged to the Dukes of Chandos. The school lists Rantzen among its notable alumnae, alongside the writers, scientists and politicians who came through the same gates. Local schools in Harrow use Childline resources in assemblies and PSHE lessons, which means a helpline conceived by an NLCS old girl is still, in a roundabout way, doing its work in the borough's classrooms.
Her children said in a statement today that she was "the most wonderful mother to us three children and a cherished grandmother to her five treasured grandchildren", and that they would remember "her beautiful way with words". Anyone who has read the 1958 school magazine would agree the words were there from the start.
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
- 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
- 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.
