Family past inspires newsreader Sally’s tale
IN her day job, she has become a household name as one of Scotland’s most recognisable BBC presenters.
But Sally Magnusson has disclosed that she never takes her career for granted after learning that her female relatives had to fight to survive.
As part of research for her new novel, the presenter discovered that her great-grandmother, Annie McEachern, was evicted from her island home during the Highland Clearances, and that her own mother was forced to quit her career as a journalist because she married.
Miss Magnusson, 64, said: ‘Life was hard for women like my greatgrandmother, who arrived in Glasgow in the 1860s aged 13 to find work.
‘Three of her four sons and her husband died of tuberculosis.’
Annie, who worked as a domestic servant and took in laundry to survive dire poverty, inspired one of the broadcaster’s main protagonists in her new book, The Ninth Child.
The character, Kirsty McEchern, also has had to leave Mull in the Clearances. Her husband finds work at Loch
Katrine waterworks in the Trossachs, which is the setting for the novel.
The heroine, Isabel Aird, is from the other end of the social spectrum, a woman who has had miscarriages and whose husband is doctor to the waterworks being built to provide choleraridden Glasgow with clean water.
Miss Magnusson said: ‘I’m conscious of the advantages I’ve had and how wonderful it’s been to have my four children. I wanted to imagine what that would be like in the social context where that was all you had to do.
‘There was no role other than motherhood for a middle-class woman in the Victorian era.’
To explore her character’s frustration, Miss Magnusson delved into her mother Mamie Baird’s experience of having to give up a stellar career at the Scottish Daily Express.
She said: ‘My mother was a workingclass girl, the daughter of a school janitor – Annie’s surviving son.
‘There was no money to send her to university so she became a journalist.
‘But the convention was that women had to give up their careers when they married. My mother’s editor was so anxious not to lose her, he asked her to work as a freelance.
‘She’d met my father [broadcaster and presenter of the BBC’s Mastermind] Magnus Magnusson at the newspaper and he stepped into her role as chief features writer. He joked he only married her to get her job.’