Former Cape journo Audrey D’Angelo dies
FORMER Cape Argus, Cape Times and Business Report journalist Audrey D’Angelo died yesterday aged 87.
“She was a brave and perceptive and clever woman, a good reporter, with a wealth of experience, who could pick new things up quickly for herself without having to be taught them,” her son, Alex D’Angelo said.
“There is little I can tell of her experiences on Cape Town papers that other reporters of those times cannot also tell, covering the struggles of poverty and the corruption of wealth, standing gagged in Burg and Adderley Street against the Botha-era bans on the press, and seeing the golden pen of freedom won by Tony Heard as part of that struggle, for example,” he said.
Scottish by birth, D’Angelo began her career as a reporter for newspapers in London in the 1950s.
“They were the first generation of women to work seriously as street reporters rather than as ladylike gossip columnists,” her son said.
“There was resistance to this from some of the older male reporters – the ‘younger’ male reporters were all for it, mind you – and an old chief reporter made a point of sending Audrey and Ruth (Rendell) on the toughest stories he could find – house fires with the bodies still to be dug out of the wet ashes, and train crashes with the floors awash in blood, for example.
“Coming from that particular train crash, Audrey and (her friend and novellist) Ruth sat on their desk eating hamburgers, casually swinging their legs, with their shoes and white stockings stained with blood, until the old reporter became unwell and had to leave the newsroom. He never lived it down, apparently.
“Audrey worked at various times in some deeply impoverished areas of the 50s and 60s of London. She told me that the line between reporter and social worker was non-existent in such matters as pushing for access to contraception for poor Irish women against serious, and sometimes violent, opposition from the patriarchy.
“On another occasion she was instrumental in brokering a deal between the Tory/Labour factions of a hung council, who opposed each other’s policies on principle, to ensure that any new council housing built must include a safe space for children to play,” he said.
“On the upside, London seems to have been a joyful anarchy for young reporters, at least by today’s standards.
“One close friend of hers, a male reporter who had fought with the partisans behind German lines in Yugoslavia, felt that he rode his Harley far more intuitively when slightly drunk, so tried to stay in that state more or less permanently.
“Mum used to ride behind him side-saddle and without a helmet (beehive hairdo). At one point as they rode over a latticed bridge he leaned back and remarked that if he lost control at that point they’d come out as chips. Mum never told me how she answered this, but it was probably in Glaswegian.
“The world is poorer for her passing,” Alex said.