Dame Esther Rantzen, the broadcaster and campaigner whose name became shorthand for standing up for people who had nobody else to call, has died aged 86. She died today, 30 September 2026, at her home in the New Forest, surrounded by her family.
Her life ended in Hampshire, but it began five miles up the road from Hemel Hempstead. Esther Louise Rantzen was born in Berkhamsted on 22 June 1940, in the anxious first summer of the Blitz, to Katherine Rantzen and her husband Henry, an electrical engineer. The family was Jewish, and Henry's unusual middle name, Barnato, carried a story of its own that reached back to a Spitalfields cap-maker and a diamond fortune. Tower Hamlets Magazine tells that East End story, and Warsaw Magazine follows the line further back still.
A wartime Berkhamsted birth
Berkhamsted in 1940 was a market town of canal wharves, a ruined Norman castle and a High Street that had barely changed in a century. Like many families with London connections, the Rantzens were in Hertfordshire when the bombing started, and Esther's earliest years were spent between the town and north London, where she began school in Hampstead at the age of five. Camden Magazine has the story of the Hampstead years.
She would not stay in Dacorum for long. A spell in New York followed, then North London Collegiate School in Edgware and an English degree at Somerville College, Oxford. But the birthplace stayed on every biography and every honours citation, and Berkhamsted has quietly claimed her ever since.
What she went on to do
Esther Rantzen joined the BBC as a trainee sound effects assistant and rose through research jobs to the presenter's chair. From 1973 to 1994 she fronted That's Life!, the Sunday night consumer programme that mixed campaigning journalism with talking dogs and misshapen vegetables and drew audiences of more than 18 million.
It was That's Life! that produced her greatest legacy. After a 1986 programme on child abuse, she and her producers set up a helpline for children in danger or distress. Childline opened on 30 October 1986 on the number 0800 1111. Around 50,000 calls were attempted on the first night. The charity merged with the NSPCC in 2006 and still answers children every day.
In 2012 she did it again for the other end of life, founding The Silver Line for lonely older people. It took 11,000 calls in its first fortnight after the national launch in November 2013 and joined forces with Age UK in 2019.
She was appointed OBE in 1991, CBE in 2006 and Dame Commander in the 2015 New Year Honours, for services to children and older people.
Her final campaign
In January 2023 she announced she had lung cancer, and by May that year it had reached stage four. She spent the time she had left arguing, publicly and without self-pity, for a change in the law on assisted dying, and joined the Swiss organisation Dignitas in December 2023. Earlier this month she said she had become too frail to make that journey.
Her children Miriam, Rebecca and Joshua Wilcox said in a statement: "Our adored mother, Dame Esther Rantzen, died today. Her legacy of compassion and understanding will live on in her charities Childline and the Silverline, and through those of us who were lucky enough to love and be loved by her." They added: "She was our sunshine."
For a town that gave her nothing more than a birth certificate, Berkhamsted can be proud of what was written on it.
Dame Esther Rantzen across our magazines
Each Firefly title is remembering a different chapter of her life. Read the others:
- 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
- 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.