Gladys Skelton / Bendit was born Gladys Williams. Her writing name of Presland was also her mother's maiden name. She was educated at Queen's College, London, and Girton College, Cambridge (where she received a B. A. Hons in 1906). She married John Herbert Skelton in 1907. In 1963 she married Francis E. Bendit. She co-founded, with the Save the Children Fund and others, the Interaid Committee for Children from Germany in 1936, and wrote A Great Adventure: The Story of the Refugee Children's Movement (1944). She wrote all of her works under the name John Presland. These include such local history guidebooks as Lynton and Lynmouth (1917) and Torquay: The Charm and History of its Neighbourhood (1920). She also wrote a social history, Women in the Civilised State (1934), as well as biographies of Sir Wyndham Deedes and Ludwig von Benedek.
