Baroness Floella Benjamin

Floella Benjamin arrived in England from Trinidad in September 1960, aged 10, as part of the Windrush generation. The welcome she and her family received was often brutal: when they went to view a house in the mostly white, middle-class area of Beckenham, neighbours called the police, believing Black people were burgling the empty property. Living for a time in a single shared room with her family of eight, Benjamin faced daily racism and bullying at school in her early years in Britain.

At just 14, Benjamin experienced what she has described as a spiritual turning point that shaped the rest of her life: after physically retaliating against yet another racist taunt, she resolved instead to build her self-respect from within, deciding that other people's prejudice was their problem, not hers. That resolve carried her into a stage and screen career that eventually led to her best-known role — twelve years presenting BBC's Play School and Play Away, where her warmth, beads and beaming presence became a formative, joyful memory for a generation of British children who, for many, had never before seen themselves reflected on screen.

Beyond television, Benjamin built an extraordinary parallel career as a children's rights campaigner, author and politician, becoming a life peer in the House of Lords in 2010 as Baroness Benjamin of Beckenham — a title that pointedly reclaims the very town where she once had the police called on her family. She has continued to campaign against racism and for children's welfare throughout her time in Parliament, and in 2022 received the Order of Merit, one of the UK's very highest honours, personally requested by Queen Elizabeth II shortly before her death.