Katharine Whitehorn

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 1 May 2005

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the journalist Katharine Whitehorn. Katharine Whitehorn was the first journalist to write a column about her personal and domestic life and draw broader truths from her experiences - it's the kind of material that is now commonly found on women's pages and is satirised in Private Eye's Polly Filler - but in the 1950s and 1960s it was a new phenomenon and she was its brightest and wittiest exponent.

She came to journalism through a circuitous route that took in Picture Post, Woman's Own and The Spectator, but it was on the Observer - where she worked for more than 30 years - that she really made her mark. She was at the vanguard of a generation of women who were told they could 'have it all' and she may even be the only one to have managed it - a successful, well-paid career, a happy marriage and complete family. While at the Picture Post she met Gavin Lyall - who went on to become a successful novelist - they had two sons and were married for 45 years until his death in 2002. She is now the agony aunt for Saga Magazine.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Slow movement of Double Violin Concerto by Johann Sebastian Bach Book: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson Luxury: A machine to distil whatever is there

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2005, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My costaway this week is a journalist for more than 35 years her articles for the observer newspaper came
0:35.0	to be identified with thoughts and behavior of a new breed of woman, one who could manage
0:40.5	everything, career, marriage, children, the lot.
0:43.6	Well educated, a series of different schools took her eventually to Cambridge.
0:47.6	She arrived via magazines including Picture Post and Woman's Own at the Observer.
0:52.3	Here she began to cut her own distinctive style,
0:55.6	writing about the things that really mattered to a woman as she struggled to bring order to life's
1:00.1	complexities. She famously admitted to being a bit of a slut fishing dirty
1:04.4	clothes out of the laundry basket and wearing them again and keeping her stockings up
1:07.8	with an aspirin in her suspender hook and she taught a whole generation of young
1:12.2	people how to cook in a bed-sitter. and she's always presented herself as someone who
1:13.0	to cook in a bed sitter.
1:15.0	An artful mixture of the trivial and fundamental.
1:18.3	She's always presented herself as someone who,
1:21.0	although she had it all, knew only too well at what price the possession of such riches came.
1:27.0	She is Catherine Whitehorn.
1:29.0	You were Catherine very much in the vanguard of such women in the mid 20th century who held down demanding jobs as well as being married
1:36.3	and producing babies. Do you recall designing it that way or was it something that simply
1:41.2	happened to you? No, I always thought I'd have a career because that was assumed in my family.
1:47.0	I think perhaps they were a bit ahead of their time because my aunt went to Cambridge in the 30s and didn't think it odd because her
	...

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