Lady Cudlipp
Vivacious journalist who became the third wife of the celebrated Daily Mirror chief Hugh Cudlipp
LADY CUDLIPP, who has died aged 97, was the third wife of Hugh Cudlipp, the editorial genius behind the postwar Daily Mirror, and a talented journalist in her own right.
As Jodi Hyland, she edited Girl magazine in the 1950s before becoming assistant to the editor of Woman, then the biggest-selling magazine in Britain. In 1959 she ran into Hugh Cudlipp and his second wife at a party, and shortly afterwards Cudlipp invited her to lunch.
After she had accepted his offer to edit Woman’s Illustrated, then owned by the Mirror, Cudlipp reached across the table, placed his hand over hers, and said: “I hope this will be the beginning of a long association.”
A vivacious and pretty blonde, Jodi Hyland was well aware of Cudlipp’s lady-killer reputation. The Mirror columnist Jean Rook, the so-called First Lady of Fleet Street, considered him the sexiest man alive, with a voice like a Welsh harp and the looks of Richard Burton crossed with Owen Glendower: “Wicked rumour among [the] female staff had it that he was a sexual fiery dragon, and every woman who worked for him secretly burned to see his forked and swishing tail.”
Even after she had married Cudlipp – when she was 42 and he 49 – she remained alert to his sexual magnetism, whispering “Drop that bone, Cudlipp” when his roving eye alighted on some new alluring female acquaintance. Cudlipp’s circle loved her, his biographer Ruth Dudley Edwards noted, “for although she behaved in many ways like a traditional wife in handling all domestic responsibilities and allowing [him] to take centre stage, she was also a great companion who hugely enjoyed the company of his friends”.
Although she confessed to being a political nincompoop, she accompanied Cudlipp to many official functions (meeting every prime minister from Harold Macmillan to Tony Blair except Sir Alec Douglashome, whose tenure was too brief). At a reception in 1992, she turned to find Margaret Thatcher hand-in-hand with Cudlipp in close and intimate conversation.
“As far as I knew they had very little in common, and certainly not their politics,” Lady Cudlipp recalled. “But I never found out what that exchange was all about. When I asked Hugh, all he said was: ‘Don’t really know. She just grabbed my hand as I passed her and wouldn’t let go. It certainly wasn’t to ask my advice. She doesn’t feel she needs any. Anyway, I couldn’t have got a word in. She does all the talking.’”
“I wasn’t worried that there was any love lost,” noted Lady Cudlipp. “Editing a woman’s weekly was child’s play compared with all this.”
In 1975 her husband became Lord Cudlipp of Aldingbourne, the Sussex village to which he and Jodi Hyland had moved. There she acted as chauffeur – he never learnt to drive – secretary, gardener, organiser and eventually housekeeper. In retirement she augmented his creature comforts by buying him a parrot called Bobbie that among assorted imprecations squawked: “No comment. Tell the press to go to hell”.
Joan Latimer Hyland was born on June 22 1920 at Rawdon, West Yorkshire, but at the age of three moved to Palm Springs, Florida, where her father, a civil engineer, had bought a plot of land. Her beautiful mother, known as Fling, claimed to have once cleaned up in a card game partnering Al Capone.
When her father died unexpectedly of war wounds, young Joan earned pin money washing bottles for a woman bootlegger who lived next door, but when she was 12, her mother returned to Britain and settled at Southport in Lancashire where she married a local solicitor, David Jones.
With an ambition to be a news reporter, Jodi (as she was always known) eventually got a job on the weekly Southport Visiter, working as a junior reporter and then as a columnist, specialising in theatre and cinema. When war came she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, drove an ambulance, and served at Bletchley Park as a member of Sixta – Six (as in Hut 6) Traffic Analysis – which trawled German army and Luftwaffe communications for information that would help the codebreakers of Hut 6 to break into various Enigma ciphers.
After the war she moved to London to work on Woman’s Own as chief feature writer and spent two years in Australia as a reporter in Sydney before returning to Fleet Street to edit Debutante, progressing to Girl and finally Woman. Her first approach from the Mirror, coming from the group’s austere chairman, Cecil King, was unpropitious. “Do you read the Mirror?” he asked her. “I did this morning,” she replied. “Well,” said King, terminating the interview, “I daresay we can struggle along without your tuppence halfpenny.”
Once Cudlipp had taken her on to edit Woman’s Illustrated, Jodi Hyland became friendly with his then wife, Eileen Ascroft, who warned her about Cudlipp’s black moods and demanding and irascible ways. “If you ever go out to dinner with Hugh,” Eileen advised, “always eat up your first course, because you may not be there for your second.”
By the time she confided in Jodi Hyland that she intended to leave Cudlipp for someone else, Jodi and Cudlipp had started an affair of their own, she having dumped a married man she had met at Bletchley Park during the war and whom she had continued to see.
When, early in 1962, Eileen suddenly died of a drug overdose, it was Jodi Hyland who (as Cudlipp recalled) “gently picked up the pieces and put me together again”. Although he teased her for being what he called “a Southport Tory”, they married the following year.
Jodi Hyland’s marriage to Hugh Cudlipp lasted 35 years until his death in 1998. There were no children of the marriage.
Lady Cudlipp, born June 22 1920, died August 9 2017