Long before Dame Esther Rantzen was a name on a Buckingham Palace citation, Rantzen was a name on a Spitalfields rent book. The broadcaster and founder of Childline, who died today aged 86, was the great-great-granddaughter of a Jewish cap-maker who arrived in the East End from Warsaw in the late 1850s, decades ahead of the great migration that would transform the district.
A rare surname in a crowded parish
The story was pieced together for the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are? in September 2008. The surname Rantzen is rare, even in Warsaw, and that rarity, together with the survival of Warsaw's records, let researchers follow the paternal line back to an established Jewish neighbourhood in the Polish capital in the 1760s (Warsaw Magazine tells that part of the story).
In the 1850s her great-great-grandfather left Warsaw for London and settled in Spitalfields, then one of the poorest parts of the capital. He made caps. The streets around Christ Church, Fournier Street and Brick Lane were already crowded with tailors, weavers and hatters, and the family joined them at the bottom of the trade. Her grandfather, Hyam Henry Rantzen, was born in Spitalfields in 1873.
The diamond in the family
What lifted them out was a marriage. Her great-grandfather's wife was the sister of a Whitechapel boy called Barnett Isaacs, who went to South Africa, changed his name to Barney Barnato and became one of the richest men in the world through the Kimberley diamond fields. He sold his interests to Cecil Rhodes for Β£5.3 million, said at the time to be the largest cheque ever written. When he died in 1897 his estate was worth the equivalent of about Β£80 million, and his will reached back to the relatives he had left in the East End.
With Barnato's help the Rantzens moved to a more comfortable neighbourhood, and the family never forgot the debt. Esther's father, an electrical engineer, was christened Henry Barnato Rantzen.
The other side of the family
Her mother's people were wealthier and more troublesome. Her great-grandfather Montague Leverson, a founder of the West London Synagogue and grandfather of the composer Gerald Finzi, was a solicitor who fled the country in 1867 when his clients' money disappeared, lived in France and California and returned to marry again at 82. Rantzen's verdict on television was affectionate: "That wonderful, crazy old man! Definitely a maverick." The family also included Ada Leverson, the novelist and friend of Oscar Wilde, and the translator Michael Meyer.
Back to the East End
Rantzen was born in Berkhamsted in 1940 (Hemel Magazine has the story), grew up in north London and never lived in Tower Hamlets. But the service she founded in 1986, Childline, now operates from the NSPCC's headquarters on Curtain Road, a ten-minute walk from Fournier Street. Children in the borough ring the number 0800 1111 every week. The cap-maker's great-great-granddaughter, in the end, left something behind in his neighbourhood.
She died at her home in the New Forest. Her children said her "legacy of compassion and understanding will live on in her charities Childline and the Silverline".
Dame Esther Rantzen across our magazines
Each Firefly title is remembering a different chapter of her life. Read the others:
- Hemel Magazine: her Berkhamsted beginnings
- Harrow Magazine: the Edgware schoolgirl
- Oxford Magazine: Somerville and the Oxford stage
- Camden Magazine: Hampstead, home for half a century
- Hammersmith Magazine: That's Life! at Wood Lane
- Westminster Magazine: the Palace, the honours and Parliament
- Southampton Magazine: the New Forest cottage where she died
- Bedford Magazine: the Luton South campaign of 2010
- Warsaw Magazine: the family story that began in Warsaw
Sources: BBC News, ITV News, Hello!, Wikipedia, the family statement issued by Miriam, Rebecca and Joshua Wilcox, Somerville College, Hampshire Life, the Advertiser and Times, Jewish News, The Jewish Chronicle, Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine, UK Parliament election results. Images via Wikimedia Commons, credited individually.
