Ruth Runciman, Viscountess Runciman of Doxford DBE (née Hellman; born 9 January 1936), known as Dame Ruth Runciman, is a former Chair of the British Mental Health Act Commission.[1]
Early life
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]
Career
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]
Personal life
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]
Honours
References
External links
