Ruth Runciman

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, was until 2024 a professor of politics at the University of Cambridge.^[6]

Honours

• 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]