A diffident pioneer

Now Saga’s agony aunt, Katharine Whitehorn, has for more than 50 years been a trail-blazer in British journalism.

Starting out as a member of the talented writing team on Picture Post, she went on (stopping off only briefly at Woman’s Own) to found the celebrated ‘Roundabout’ column in The Spectator before being scooped up by David Astor’s Observer. There, under one guise or another, she spent a remarkable 36 years until falling foul of some trendy young fly-by-night installed by the Guardian in 1996. If never perhaps the most renowned female journalist of her day, she was arguably the most distinguished — the pioneer who pushed the frontiers of women’s pages forward and turned newspapers into a unisex trade.

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From the outset she enjoyed one great advantage. Although never happy at Roedean, where she stayed only two years during its wartime evacuation period in the Lake District, she ever afterwards contrived to carry around with her something of the aura of the grande dame. That could also, of course, have been the product of her parental background — her father, after all, was both the senior classics master and a housemaster at Marlborough — but it certainly gave her an edge over most of her colleagues and friends. Not for her, for example, any such vulgar title as ‘the first lady of Fleet Street’: her status spoke for itself.

Yet in this candid and engaging autobiography she makes it clear that none of this came about without a struggle. At least initially she badly lacked self-confidence, something she built up as a young woman largely through the encouragement of a Cambridge don (later Vice-Master of Trinity), Jack Gallagher. Gallagher, ‘my guru and greatest friend ever’, would, one gathers, have liked to marry her, just as she in her turn would have married another don, Colin Leys of Balliol, had he only asked her.