Jenny Hughes
Diplomat, television presenter and translator who broke down barriers long before Women’s Lib
JENNY HUGHES, who has died aged 92, was a member of the first generation of women to be appointed to the diplomatic corps; subsequently she made her name as a journalist, freelanced as a television presenter, and occupied senior roles in publishing, on pay review boards and on NHS trusts.
Finally, after teaching herself Russian, she and her late-life partner, the Russian émigré and writer Kyril Zinovieff, published critically acclaimed translations of works by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and, in 2003, The Companion Guide to St Petersburg.
Jenny Hughes always maintained that she had never really had a career, merely filling in around her first priority, her family of four children. None the less, in the postwar era – when women’s choices were constrained by the Beveridge report’s emphasis on traditional marriage and the nuclear family as a foundation of the new welfare state – she helped to push frontiers in the role of women well before Women’s Lib.
When, at the age of 26, she was appointed foreign editor at The Spectator, the veteran literary editor of the New Statesman, Janet Adam-smith, took her aside. “Maintain a professional life and bring up a young family?” she said. “Can I give you three words of advice? Don’t Make Puddings”.
Jenny Turner was born in London on January 16 1927 into a distinguished legal family and educated first at St Paul’s Girls’ School and then, after evacuation to Dorset in 1939, at Sherborne, from where she was awarded a scholarship to Oxford at the age of 16.
After a year in London, she went up to read PPE at Lady Margaret Hall, where she led, in the words of her cousin Mary Warnock, “an impossibly glamorous social life”. Both graduated with Firsts.
She joined the Treasury in 1947, transferring the following year to the Foreign Office, where she specialised in the Middle East. According to the rules of the time, however, she was obliged to leave a year after her marriage in 1949 to the economist Jan Nasmyth.
She worked for The Economist from 1950 to 1952 but, in the days before statutory maternity leave, had to give up her job after the birth of her first child. She joined The Spectator as foreign editor in 1953, but again had to leave after the birth of her second child in 1955.
She moved on to The Manchester Guardian, first as a reporter, then as a feature writer; her first assignment was to Holloway Prison to cover the hanging of Ruth Ellis. Then as a Middle East specialist she covered the Suez crisis. Earlier she had published an article in The Middle East Journal on “Israel’s Distorted Economy” and contributed a chapter on economics and finance to a book, The New State of Israel (1954).
As her first marriage foundered, she moved with her three children and Helga, her East Prussian refugee housekeeper, to the Woodford valley near Salisbury.
In 1961 she married Billy Hughes, a lawyer to whom she had been introduced by Martha Gellhorn. Initially at Woodford then, from 1963, at Old Wardour House (near Tisbury in Wiltshire) they dispensed warm hospitality to a shifting cast of writers and intellectuals including Sybille Bedford, Rosamond Lehmann, Peter Shaffer, Laurie Lee, Frances Partridge, “Freddie” Ayer and Iris Origo.
Over a 14-year period Jenny Hughes freelanced as a television interviewer, beginning in 1957 by presenting afternoon programmes for BBC’S Mainly for Women series. She chaired current affairs discussion panels and presented episodes of Arena and documentaries for This Week, produced for ITV by Jeremy Isaacs.
In 1971, as her children grew up, she was appointed founding editor of Faculty, a weekly magazine for university staff. When the magazine (which became the Times Higher Education Supplement) was sold by Rupert Murdoch, she moved to Macmillan, becoming personnel director in 1974.
There, at a time of growing union militancy, she became chief negotiator in the annual pay round with ASTMS, the NUJ, the NGA and SOGAT. Though 30 per cent of Macmillan’s 800 staff were members of militant unions, the company had far fewer problems at that time than the rest of the industry.
In 1978 she was appointed non-executive director of the Prisons Board and in 1980 of the Armed Forces Pay Review Board, for which she was appointed OBE. In 1986 she was appointed to the Nurses and Midwives Pay Review Board. In 1993 she became chairman of Parkside NHS Trust, and in 1998 chairman of Riverside Mental Health Trust. She was appointed CBE in 1996.
Billy Hughes died in 1990 and their daughter Polly, a professional violinist, died from a brain tumour in 1997.
The following year, aged 71, Jenny Hughes bought a house with Kyril Zinovieff, a widowed writer she had first met in her FCO days when he was working in the Joint Intelligence Bureau, and with whom she had always shared a mutual, if unfulfilled, affection.
Jenny taught herself Russian so that she could read to Kyril (who was by then blind); he would orally translate, she would type it up, knock it into literature and read it back. Together they published translations of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Hadji Murat and Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. Their Companion Guide to St Petersburg is considered by many to be the city’s best intellectual travel guide.
Kyril died in 2014, a few days short of his 105th birthday. At her own 90th birthday three years later, Jenny Hughes observed that many talented individuals had tried to change the world by grand gestures only to resent how little difference they had made. “The most effective things I have ever achieved … were done in small steps,” she said.
Jenny Hughes is survived by two sons and a daughter from her first marriage.