Caroline Benn

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). Biography Benn was born Caroline Middleton DeCamp in Cincinnati, Ohio, the eldest daughter of Anne Hetherington (née Graydon) and James Milton DeCamp, a Cincinnati lawyer. 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. She met Benn over tea at Worcester College, Oxford, in 1949, and just nine days later he proposed to her on a park bench in the city. Later, he bought the bench from Oxford City Council and installed it in the garden of their house in Holland Park. In June 1999, on their golden wedding anniversary, she put on the red striped dress she had worn that night. She had four children – Stephen, Hilary, Melissa and Joshua – and ten grandchildren. Benn devoted her life to comprehensive education and was co-founder of the Campaign for Comprehensive Education. She sent her own children to Holland Park School, one of the first comprehensive schools in the country. In 1970, she wrote alongside Professor Brian Simon, Halfway There – the definitive study of the progress of comprehensive reform in the UK. This was followed up in 1997 with Thirty Years On, which she co-wrote with Professor Clyde Chitty. Her widely respected and authoritative biography of the Labour founder Keir Hardie was published in 1992.