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

Ruth Hellman was born to a Jewish family and educated at Roedean School in 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 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

• 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