A Tribute to Caroline Benn: Education and Democracy

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The CSC had been founded the previous year. It was the time of the new Labour government's circular 10/65, which requested local authorities to put forward plans for comprehensivisation. By the end of a CSC day, I could be pretty tired. Not so Caroline, then bringing up four children; hers was an unbelievable energy, and she had a wonderful sense of humour. A Tribute to Caroline Benn: Education and Democracy, edited by her daughter and Clyde Chitty, was published in 2004, featuring essays on her life and on educational reform and her life's work. Benn played an important role in her husband's political career. She was popular with his colleagues and her views were respected. She is personally credited with having suggested the title of the Labour Party manifesto for the 1964 general election; she proposed The New Britain, and it eventually became Let's Go With Labour for the New Britain. She supported her husband's proposals in the 1980s for Labour's leadership and direction. However, she was also able to provide constructive criticism throughout his political career, such as his 1998 ITN documentary. [ citation needed] In the meantime, she also co-wrote Higher Education For Everyone (1982). Her best known book was a biography of Keir Hardie (1992). In 1980, she made a television film, Carry On Comprehensives, and she also wrote a novel, Lion In A Den Of Daniels, about an American girl in London. A tutor at the Open University, she was a lecturer at Ken- sington and Hammersmith Further Education College from 1970 to 1996. Later still, she spoke to members of the ELHS about her Hardie biography, bringing the past, and the characters she described, vividly to life, proving, as her husband has remarked, that if you will only blow on the embers of history, they will surely burst into flame. She was greatly admired, and her loss is deeply felt by those whose lives she touched.

When Caroline attended an SEA meeting a few months ago - pushed in a wheelchair by Tony - she sat, taking notes in her usual fashion, and giving us her full attention, even though she knew she would not be with us for much longer. Through Caroline, I was introduced to the Socialist Education Association, when she asked me to write about the scheme for an SEA publication. As president, she chaired and spoke at SEA conference meetings and at Labour party conferences. Small gathering or large, her husband, Tony, attended to support her. At his own meetings, he would often mention our very small scheme, and say that his wife worked for Carlie Newman! As Caroline's researches had revealed, the ELFS was a breakaway group from Emmeline Pankhurst's increasingly autocratic WSPU, led by Sylvia, whose demand, as "a citizen of the world who owed no barrier of race or nation", was not merely for votes for women, but for an economic, as well as a political, democracy.As well as writing extensively about education, Benn held a number of other positions: She was a member of the Inner London Education Authority from 1970 to 1977, an ILEA Governor at Imperial College London, a tutor at the Open University, a lecturer at Kensington and Hammersmith Further Education College from 1970 to 1996, a governor of Holland Park School for thirty-five years (serving thirteen of those as chair of the governors), and president of the Socialist Education Association. [ citation needed]

She was very influential in his political career, and is personally credited with having suggested the title of the Labour manifesto for the 1964 general election; she proposed The New Britain, and it eventually became Let's Go With Labour For The New Britain. Here we are in September 1959: "Caroline's advice was, as always, the most sensible: 'The most important thing is that you should be seen to be an easy man to work with.'" Then, in March 1960, with Labour's national executive committee (NEC) discussing rewriting clause 4: "Caroline said: 'Keep your mouth shut today.'" Again, in October 1960, when Benn himself resigned from the NEC, he noted: "Caroline was as sweet as can be, but she thought I shouldn't have done it." Caroline saw the British education system with a foreigner's eyes. She hated British divisiveness and elitism, and, when her own children were at Holland Park comprehensive, she wanted the best for them, and for the school - and for that best to be extended to all. Utterly informal, with that American vitality, she was classless. With her, there was none of that "presence", that sense of being with someone important. She could relate to anyone. This lecture draws attention to the significance of Caroline’s role as school governor at Holland Park Comprehensive School in the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea in the 1970s and 80s to counter the demonization of comprehensive education and the ideal of the common school. In Tony Benn's office, I trawled through her scholarly and profoundly human text, and discussed Hardie with them both, thus forming a picture of the first Labour MP, whose preoccupations, including internationalism, women's rights and vegetarianism, are still relevant today.

But, perhaps because of the intense public scrutiny to which her husband was constantly subjected, Caroline Benn went to great lengths never to reveal herself unwittingly in public. She did not give interviews, and there is scarcely a meaningful reference to her in the newspaper cuttings libraries that she and her husband learned so much to detest. Benn was born Caroline Middleton DeCamp in Cincinnati, Ohio, the eldest daughter of Anne Hetherington ( née Graydon) and James Milton DeCamp, a Cincinnati lawyer. [1] Educated at Vassar College (BA, 1946) and the University of Cincinnati (BA, 1948), she travelled to the United Kingdom in 1948 to study at Oxford University and voted for Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate in that year's American Presidential election. She gained an English MA on Jacobean drama (specifically on the masques of Inigo Jones) at University College London in 1951. [ citation needed] Caroline Middleton DeCamp Benn (née DeCamp; 13 October 1926 – 22 November 2000), formerly Viscountess Stansgate, was an educationalist and writer, and wife of the British Labour politician Tony Benn (formerly 2nd Viscount Stansgate).