Kiwi forged path as an editor of Financial Times
with the pressures applied by his record label and management. Booked for another American tour in early 1970, he sacked the Grease Band, calculating that without a backing group, there was no way he could be forced to do the tour. When it transpired that he could not get out of the commitment, he turned to Russell to assemble a new touring outfit – Mad Dogs and Englishmen, one of the wildest touring circuses in rock’n’roll history. Instead of recruiting a regular group, Russell summoned horn players, backing singers and no less than three drummers so that when the tour set off for its first date in March 1970, 43 people boarded the plane. Yet despite its chaotic nature with dogs and small children roaming the stage, the Mad Dogs tour was a huge success, causing Time magazine to note that in the brief months since Woodstock, Cocker had become ‘‘the most popular white male blues singer in the US’’.
The tour also spawned a million-selling double live album and a feature film. Unfortunately, the experience left Cocker physically and emotionally drained. He fell out with Russell and was left disillusioned when his final earnings from the tour after all deductions came to just £500.
BY the end of 1970, he was back in Sheffield where he remained for the next year, spending his time drinking and taking drugs. Cocker eventually returned to the stage in 1972, but he was not in good shape. When he toured Australia, he was arrested for drugs in an incident that escalated to 10 further charges including assault, resisting arrest and offensive behaviour. He was deported.
By 1978, he was £500,000 in debt to his record company and unable to pay a UK tax bill. Cocker relocated to LA, but had to wait until 1983 to achieve further success, with the duet Up Where We Belong with Jennifer Warnes. It won a Grammy and reestablished his name. ‘‘I absolutely hated the song when I first heard it,’’ he confessed. ‘‘But I could tell as we were putting the track down that it was going to be a big record.’’
In 1987, he married Pam Baker, who had played a key part in his recovery from drink and drugs. They set up home on a ranch in Colorado where he was happy fishing and walking his dogs. In 1994 he was the only artist from the original Woodstock bill to appear at the 25th anniversary celebration.
In 2002, he performed at the Queen’s Jubilee concert at Buckingham Palace, attracting compliments from Tony Blair. He never lost his Yorkshire accent and happily recalled his early days in Sheffield performing as Vance Arnold in the evenings while working as a gas fitter during the day.
‘‘One of the best things that ever happened to me was when I was gas fitting,’’ he said. ‘‘I went to someone’s house and the woman said to her husband, ‘Oooh, come and have a look – Vance is putting our fire in’.’’ Stephanie Robyn Gray, journalist: b Wellington, June 9, 1951; m Michael Swindell (diss), m Stewart Dalby, 2d; d London, July 27, aged 63.
STEPHANIE GRAY was a quiet, modest New Zealander, a characteristic that made her an unlikely candidate for lofty repute in the high-powered newsroom of London’s Financial Times.
She had nothing to be modest about, but it was typical of her that she responded with selfdeprecating humour to accolades earned as a specialty editor on the world’s leading finance journal.
Gray was a Wellington girl. She trained as a journalist in the newsroom of The Dominion, where she blossomed into a reporter respected and loved by colleagues.
The Financial Times snapped her up soon after she had moved to London in 1978 to try her luck. She stayed with ‘‘the pink one’’ for 34 years.
Retirement came in September 2013. She summoned colleagues to her farewell with a typically wry invitation to join her in a ‘‘few snifters to celebrate the reupholstering of an old piece of institutional furniture’’.
Praise of her nature and professionalism were lavished on her at her retirement function.
‘‘She was incredibly generous and kind, always looking after people – even if she was busy,’’ one co-worker recalled.
It was an energy and empathy too soon stilled: Gray died 10 months later, after a short illness.
At her memorial service in St Brides, known as the London journalists’ church in Fleet Street, colleagues spoke of her inspirational presence at the paper. The Revd Canon Alison Joyce said the ‘‘exceptional nature of the contribution she made, particularly in relation to issues in Africa and the Middle East, is widely acknowledged and universally respected’’.
Later, family and friends together with people from the Financial Times and other London newspapers – where she was wellknown and admired – raised their glasses to her at a reception at Lutyens wine bar on Fleet Street.
The paper’s obituary shortly after her death described how, as an editor, she championed the coverage of ‘‘obscure civil or cross-border conflicts’’, because she believed them important for Western policy makers and investors.
‘‘Gray was constantly in search of FT angles on what might otherwise have been dismissed as small wars. The coverage that she initiated was of benefit to readers with a stake in those areas or the commodities they produced.
‘‘But as an array of international missions began to intervene in previously underreported strife, her work in bringing such issues to global attention is likely also to have helped to save ives.’’
Gray joined the paper in 1978, as it began trying to expand around the world.
One effect was a ‘‘boom in international adver tising’’, which funded more foreign reporting.
‘‘She contributed to many of these during assignments abroad. A 1989 special report on Nigeria, for instance, bore her name on no fewer than five lengthy articles,’’ the FT reported.
Gray’s natural, understated beauty and her long, thick hair and grey-green eyes turned heads in The Dominion newsroom in the early 1970s. Her style even then was to dress English posh – an ever-present string of pearls and earrings, a navy or sage-green twin-set and comfortable, flat R&B tan brogues. It was to be her lifelong cool style.
She joined The New Zealand Herald in 1974 and was the sole mainstream media journalist invited to travel the length of the country with Dame Whina Cooper on the historic Maori Land March of 1975.
She told of the honour of being on the march and the difficulty of getting copy out to Auckland from the many stops and stays at maraes en route to Parliament.
Gray and her ex- Dominion husband Michael Swindell lived in Hampstead after moving to Britain, The marriage ended, and later in Dublin she met her second husband, Stewart Dalby, at that time a FT foreign correspondent.
Dalby and their daughters Lily and Julia survive her, as do her brothers Jamie and Peter and stepdaughter Thea.
Gray was devoted to her large Exmoor lurcher crossbreed dog, ‘‘Goose’’, walking her with a strong coterie of mostly media women along the winding paths of Wormwood Scrubs, near her West Kensington home. Husband Dalby owned a terrace cottage in the historic East Sussex town of Lewes, where she often spent family weekends unwinding from Fleet Street stresses on the Downs with Goose.
From 2002, Gray took on a number of editorial projects, some far from her earlier expertise in Africa and the Middle East. One was the FT’s lucrative regular supplement on watches and jewellery. Gray joked that she had ‘‘finally become a profit centre’’.
Her last special assignment for the FT was to be covering the Scottish referendum – sadly, illness intervened and that was not to be.
She was thrilled in recent years to discover a deep affection and attachment with the Shetland Islands, ancestral home of her forebears.
She negotiated with island authorities and produced her genealogy so that she might be permitted to purchase and renovate a croft, her small, ‘‘delightful’’ cottage standing alone on the windswept isle of Unst that she loved.
She is buried there, as she wished. A Life Story tells of a New Zealander who helped to shape their community. If you know of someone whose life story should be told, please email obituaries@dompost.co.nz.