A pioneer on postwar Fleet Street
“Have you ever taken anything back out of the dirty clothes basket because it had become, relatively, the cleaner thing?” So asked Katharine Whitehorn in 1963, in a column that made her famous. It was entitled
and in it she revealed that she was a “slut” – in the sense being of prone to slovenly habits – and described her tribe: “Those who have ever changed their stockings in a taxi, brushed their hair with someone’s nailbrush or safety-pinned a hem.” Such articles became commonplace as social attitudes changed, said The Observer, but in the buttoned-up early 1960s, Whitehorn’s writing – bold, frank, funny and insightful – was “groundbreaking”. As the journalist Rachel Cooke put it, she was one of
“those brave postwar women who took self-determination to dizzying new heights, and in doing so made it easier for all who would follow”.
Sisters Under the Coat,
Katharine Whitehorn was born into an intellectual, left-wing family in 1928. Her father taught classics at Marlborough College; her mother was a housewife who was bored by cooking (when it wasn’t mince for supper, her father would demand to know why). She was sent to Roedean, but didn’t care for it: she was happier at Glasgow High School. After that, she read English at Cambridge. Her background likely gave her the confidence to “take on the male bastion of journalism”, said Vanessa Thorpe in The Observer; it may also have been responsible for her voice
– described by Cooke as “two parts Diana Rigg to one part James Mason”. After graduating she ended up in London, living in bedsits and working in publishing. In 1956, she was asked by Picture Post photographer Bert Hardy to model for a feature he was doing on loneliness in London – which led to a job at the magazine, said The Daily Telegraph. There, she discovered her love for journalism – and met the love of her life, former RAF pilot and future crime writer Gavin Lyall, whom she married in 1958. In 1960, she wrote – a guide to entertaining with little money, and limited ingredients, on a one-ring stove. It was an instant bestseller. Around the same time, she took a job on the fashion desk at The Observer. Although she knew little about fashion, she wrote about it so well, she became the first female journalist to be given her own column in the paper. She remained there for almost 40 years.
Cooking in a Bedsitter
If in print she sometimes came across as rackety, she did not seem so in person. She was immaculately turned out, sat on various committees and boards (including BAA’s), contributed to an official parliamentary report, and was the first female rector of a Scottish university (St Andrews). Her schedule was frantic, but she was careful to make a stable home for her two sons; and she remained devoted to her husband until his death in 2003. “You don’t ‘get over’ the man, though you do, after a year or two, get over the death,” she said. “But you have to learn to live in another country in which you’re an unwilling refugee.”