Catherine Stott
Dynamic Sunday Telegraph women’s editor and travel writer
CATHERINE STOTT, who has died aged 75, was an award-winning journalist with long experience of Fleet Street and a pedigree which counted as newspaper aristocracy.
Her mother, Mary Stott, was the founder of the Manchester Guardian’s women’s page, and her father, Ken, had been night editor of the News Chronicle. Her maternal grandparents had also been journalists.
Funny, flamboyant, and full of joie de vivre, Catherine Stott was for 10 years woman’s editor of the Sunday Telegraph, for which she wrote many perceptive and engaging interviews.
An only child, she was born at Stockport in Cheshire on April 14 1943. At Withington Girls’ School she was something of a rebel, and a glamorous figure. Bored by school life, she left at 16 to go to Switzerland, and subsequently spent some time in Rome and Paris, learning Italian and French.
At 18, she won a Vogue competition for which the prize was a job on the magazine. Vogue in the early 1960s, she recalled, was “a heady, rarefied atmosphere for a little provincial girl, but tremendous fun, and it enabled me to acquire a patina of sophistication”. From there she was hired by the Daily Express as a feature writer. It was “the beginning of a roller-coaster ride in Fleet Street”.
In one early interlude she moved to the Scottish Daily Mail and, aged 20, married George (later Sir George) Reid, a broadcaster and subsequently an SNP MP. There was a daughter, Caroline, but the marriage was not a success and within five years Catherine was back again in Fleet Street, this time on The Guardian a profile writer.
She won the Catherine Pakenham Award for Young Journalist of the Year, and a What the Papers Say award. In 1972 she married Peter Lewis, an erudite critic and author. They had a daughter, Charlotte, and lived in Blackheath, in a home which Catherine furnished with great style.
In 1977 she was appointed The Sunday Telegraph’s women’s editor, only the second since the paper was founded in 1961. She was responsible for fashion, beauty, food, wine, human interest and women’s page columnists, and she carried it off with élan. But as with all working mothers, there as was “juggling”, and once when she could not find her typewriter, her young daughter confessed: “Mummy, I’ve buried the ‘I’m busy, darling’ in the garden!”
Her marriage to Peter Lewis was dissolved, although in the latter years of his life – he died in 2016 – they were good friends.
In the second half of her journalistic life, she pursued travel writing with gusto, calling it “my most enjoyable job … sitting at the front of the plane, staying in five-star hotels from Acapulco to Zanzibar.”
In 1994, she married John Grigsby, long-serving local government correspondent of The Daily Telegraph. They lived in an idyllic house at Selling, Kent. When John developed cancer in 2011, she nursed him with great devotion until he died in 2012.
Moving to Canterbury she had some happy years in the companionship of Ian Cooling, as well as many friends, and was involved in the life of her daughters and grandchildren.
Catherine Stott was extremely kind. In the early 1960s one of her schoolgirl peers was found to be pregnant out of wedlock – shocking at the time – and Catherine took the girl to live with her in London to spare her from local disapproval. Though herself the daughter of a formidable feminist, Catherine Stott was not a particular enthusiast for the feminist cause, having flourished in a Fleet Street environment in which men and women worked together in gregarious harmony. The hostility to men which was a thread in feminist thinking was not to her taste.
When cancer was diagnosed in 2017, she chose to keep it as private as she could.
Her daughters survive her.
Catherine Stott, born April 14 1943, died July 15 2018