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. 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. In 1964, Tony and Caroline Benn decided to move their children from Westminster preparatory school to Holland Park comprehensive school, one of the first in the country. From then on, Caroline, who was to become the chair of governors at Holland Park for 13 years (and, at 35 years, the school's longest-serving governor), devoted a great deal of her time and energy to the subject of comprehensive education.

She is survived by her husband, her children Stephen, Hilary, Melissa and Joshua, and 10 grandchildren. 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.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). 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. 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. 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. 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. [ citation needed]

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. They met over tea at Worcester College, Oxford, in 1949 and, nine days later, Tony Benn 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. They planned, some years ago, to be buried together in the garden of their house in Essex, with the bench to mark the grave. 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.

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] 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.