A woman ahead of her time
Reporter with impeccable style found life an adventure
When Joy Roberts-White walked into the palace room in Addis Ababa, there sat Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie on his throne, two live lions on either side. Her heart must have hiccupped. As a reporter for Reuters between 1937 and 1945, Roberts-White landed the exclusive interview with the emperor because she was the only correspondent who could speak fluent French.
“When I said she had a lot of courage, she really did,” said Roger Thomson, estate executor and friend to Roberts-White late in her life. “She was a very courageous woman, very strong, very educated and well informed. She loved to share stories.”
Stories about interviewing movie star Jimmy Stewart while he was a member of the U.S. air force during the Second World War. Stories about representing six-time Academy Award nominee and star of The King and I Deborah Kerr while Roberts-White was the owner of a public relations organization in London from 1948 to 1953.
Roberts-White, a woman of impeccable style, a widow since age 39, immigrant to Canada at age 44, a writer and owner of an Edmonton accessories and hat shop, playwright and theatre reviewer, died Jan. 3 at the age of 102, holding the hand of friend Maureen Bedford.
“She was very strong-minded. She was feisty,” Bedford said of her friend, born in England on March 29, 1910. “She wasn’t hoity-toity at all, but she had certain standards. … She didn’t suffer fools gladly.”
Bedford said Roberts-White never considered following the career path most common for women in her day: working as a nurse or a teacher, or for Marks & Spencer.
“She was certainly unusual for that day and age,” Bedford said. “She just took it for granted.”
Sure, Roberts-White wrote about fashion and health, but she also hitchhiked north in the 1960s to the Distant Early Warning Line, or DEW line, to interview Canadian troops guarding radar stations set up to detect Soviet bombers during the Cold War.
Roberts-White was in Berlin for the 1936 Olympics and covered tennis at Wimbledon for Reuters. She was too educated and skilled to work in the munitions plants, since her family had sent her to private school. She could speak French and had a working knowledge of Spanish and German.
Decades later, she toured behind the Iron Curtain to see “people living under the shadow of the Kremlin” in Poland, Russia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, East Germany, also Austria and Holland, she wrote in a 1966 article for The Edmontonian.
Over the years, she worked for the BBC in London, then CBC, CKUA and CFRN (now known as CTV) once she came to Edmonton.
“She liked women who got out there and did things,” said Dixie Bullock, a music specialist and teacher who met Roberts-White at an Edmonton cathedral. “She was a very accomplished woman … and she had great faith in other women.”