As well as writing extensively about education, Benn held a number of other positions: She was a member of the Inner London Education Authority from 1970 to 1977, an ILEA Governor at Imperial College London, a tutor at the Open University, a lecturer at Kensington and Hammersmith Further Education College from 1970 to 1996, a governor of Holland Park School for thirty-five years (serving thirteen of those as chair of the governors), and president of the Socialist Education Association. [ citation needed]

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 was diagnosed with breast cancer in June 1996, having been unwell for about a year, but fought the illness for several further years. She became increasingly frail during 2000, having developed spinal metastases, and died at Charing Cross Hospital, London, on 22 November 2000. 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.She was president of the Socialist Education Association, co-founder of the Campaign for Comprehensive Education and a member of the Inner London Education Authority (1970-77). With Professor Brian Simon, she wrote Halfway There (1970), a report on the British comprehensive system, and she followed it up with another co-authorship, with Professor Clyde Chitty, on the same subject, Thirty Years On (1997). 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.

Through Caroline, I was introduced to the Socialist Education Association, when she asked me to write about the scheme for an SEA publication. As president, she chaired and spoke at SEA conference meetings and at Labour party conferences. Small gathering or large, her husband, Tony, attended to support her. At his own meetings, he would often mention our very small scheme, and say that his wife worked for Carlie Newman! Caroline Middleton DeCamp came from Cincinnati, Ohio, a member of a family descended from three French Huguenot brothers who fled to America in the 17th century. Her father, and both her grandfathers, were lawyers, and her maternal great-grandfather was a United States solicitor-general. She graduated from Vassar College in 1945, and got a second degree at the University of Cincinnati in 1948, the year she came to England. After her marriage, she got a master's degree at University College, London, in 1951. 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. As Caroline's researches had revealed, the ELFS was a breakaway group from Emmeline Pankhurst's increasingly autocratic WSPU, led by Sylvia, whose demand, as "a citizen of the world who owed no barrier of race or nation", was not merely for votes for women, but for an economic, as well as a political, democracy.She is survived by her husband, her children Stephen, Hilary, Melissa and Joshua, and 10 grandchildren.

Chris Searle considers the situation regarding exclusions in his home city of Sheffield and its relevance to other British cities.At the first night of A Better Day, Caroline, resplendent in red silk, engaged in animated debate with a hostile theatre critic. She inscribed her biography to me: "United by Keir Hardie and much more." It was a pleasure and a privilege to know her. 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]