It’s goodnight from Nan, first woman to read the BBC news
REVOLUTIONS are not usually started by immaculately dressed ladies with cut-glass voices.
But Nan Winton was a trailblazer who in June 1960 became the first woman to read the BBC TV news.
The announcement of her death aged 93 yesterday opens a window on a world where presenters were expected to wear pearls and cocktail dresses – and that went for radio as well.
Although rival ITN had been using newscaster Barbara Mandell since its launch in 1955, Miss Winton’s appointment split the BBC audience and sparked national debate.
She was an experienced news journalist who was hired to read evening and weekend bulletins. Yet Miss Winton, who changed her name for TV from Nancy Wigginton, was still regarded as an ‘experiment’ by the BBC at the time. Corporation bosses believed she e was ‘serious enough’ to overcome prejudiced voices who claimed women were ‘too frivolous to be the bearers of grave news’.
Miss Winton, who had previously worked on news programmes Panorama and Town and Around, was hardly an unknown face.
Sadly her tenure on the flagship news programme was short-lived.
By October 1960, she had read the late bulletin seven times before she was taken off air.
Michael Peacock, a BBC television executive, called her into his office and fired her.
‘He didn’t say why... and I was furious,’ she recalled years later.
The truth was that she was let go partly because audience researchers found that viewers deemed a woman reading the late news as ‘not acceptable’.
Understandably, she left the Corporation to work for ITV in 1961 as a TV and news reporter until her retirement. She appears in a BBC publicity shot in September 1960 with three other journalists – Kenneth Kendall, Michael Aspel and Judith Chalmers – who all enjoyed much longer BBC careers.
Speaking to the Daily Mail in 1964, Miss Winton said she had suffered prejudice. ‘There were times when I was doing the announcing when I wanted to shout aloud like Shylock, ‘‘Hath not woman eyes, ears, sense?”’
She added: ‘In Italy and Spain they have women newsreaders who are beautiful and sexy too. We’re afraid of that here.’
Decades later in a BBC documentary about her career, she said she ‘didn’t realise at the time what a revolutionary thing it was’.
In footage from 1997 she also tellingly explained that her issues were not with the audience, but with the editorial staff of ‘men in their middle years’ who had come from Fleet Street.
It would be 1975 before another woman – Angela Rippon – became a Nine O’Clock News regular.
Miss Winton was married to Crossroads actor Charles Stapley who played Ted Hope. They had a son and a daughter but divorced in 1962. She lived in Bridport, Dorset, and died in hospital on May 11.