Ruth Runciman

Hellman, as she then was, was educated at Roedean School, Johannesburg, and the Witwatersrand University, also in Johannesburg, where she gained a baccalaureate degree. She then matriculated at Girton College, Cambridge, in England[2]

Runciman became active in public life after marriages and children. In 1981, she was one of the founders of the Prison Reform Trust and was responsible for setting up a full-time Citizens' Advice Bureau in Wormwood Scrubs, the first full-time independent advice agency in any prison. She also became a Trustee of the Pilgrim Trust and the National AIDS Trust (now known as NAT), and chaired it from 2000 to 2006. [3]

For more than three decades, Runciman worked with the Citizens Advice Bureau and made significant contributions to work on drug misuse.[4]

She was Chair of Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust for more than ten years, retiring at the end of 2013.[5]

Between 1959 and 1962 she was married to Denis Mack Smith, a Cambridge historian of the Italian "Risorgimento".[1]

In 1963, she married secondly the British sociologist Walter Garrison Runciman, becoming Viscountess Runciman of Doxford, a title she does not use. Runciman died on 10 December 2020. Their son David, who then inherited the peerage, is a professor of politics at the University of Cambridge.[6]

• Officer of the Order of the British Empire, 1991.
• Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, 1998, for services to mental health.[7]
• Honorary Fellow of the University of Central Lancashire, 2000.[8]

• Profile BBC.co.uk; accessed 12 July 2014.
• Parliament publications #1; accessed 12 July 2014.
• Parliament publications #2; accessed 12 July 2014.
• Central and North West London Mental Health Trust, cnwl.org; accessed 12 July 2014.