Jean Stead, who has died aged 90, was one of the outstanding figures in Guardian journalism from the 1960s to the 80s. She helped to transform the paper’s news coverage after it began to print in London, and went on to establish a dynamic tradition of investigative journalism on which others have built since.
Her work as a staff reporter from 1963 onwards was wide-ranging, but she immediately took a special interest in housing, alerting the public and the government to the problem of slum landlords. “Rachmanism” was a particular evil in the Notting Hill district of west London, and Jean revealed how alsatian dogs and armed thugs were used to prise higher rents out of impoverished West Indian tenants. The evidence she provided for Whitehall resulted in a change to the law on evictions.
Jean became deputy news editor in 1966, halfway through my stint as news editor. I had concentrated on reorganising the brilliant, but occasionally chaotic, news coverage provided by the paper’s home specialists. She added a determination to strengthen the general news service, and used her enthusiasm to galvanise a generation of younger reporters.
Her people skills were highly developed and young reporters who were taken under her wing, as many were, quickly learned the value of doggedness in pursuit of a story. She could communicate her enthusiasm to others and had a rare capacity to see the things that needed to be investigated. She would not take no for an answer.
Jean always feared that a Guardian tendency to concentrate on debate and analysis would divert us from the daily grind of news-gathering. From time to time she would say that “some of us have to get on with the work and not have opinions” – while simultaneously throwing a couple of strongly held prejudices over her shoulder. She was always an amusing and loyal comrade.
There was a tendency on the paper to revere “writers” above reporters that left her impatient, and she saw it as her role to assert the primacy of news-gathering. Like me, she grew weary of the frequent jibe by Cecil King, who was in charge of the Daily Mirror as chairman of IPC, that “what the Telegraph reports today, the Guardian comments on tomorrow”. She played a major part in changing that.
Jean succeeded me as news editor in 1970, and held the post for eight years, along the way also becoming an assistant editor of the paper. As well as covering everything that came out of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, her newsroom produced a series of outstanding exclusives that had an influence on public policy.
In 1971 the Australian journalist Peter Harvey revealed that inquiry agents had made a business out of eliciting private information from the Inland Revenue and other Whitehall departments, the Criminal Records Office, and from banks. The prime minister, Edward Heath, ordered an inquiry, though for long periods it seemed that Scotland Yard was __more interested in discovering the Guardian’s sources for the story than in finding what lay behind the breaches in privacy. Eventually the government ordered tightening of security in the leaky departments.
Another investigation began in 1973, while the reporter, and later author, Adam Raphael was on leave with his wife’s family in South Africa. He showed that leading British companies were paying their African workers wages often below the starvation level. When he returned to London with the results of this investigation, Jean at once recognised its significance and promoted it within the paper. Eventually, after many threats of legal action, most of the companies held their hands up, especially after a select committee of the House of Commons, chaired by Bill (later Lord) Rodgers, took up the issue. Higher, if still insufficient, wages for many African workers were the result.
Jean had a shrewder knowledge than most journalists of her own strengths and weaknesses. Her great quality was enthusiasm. She demonstrated often her ability to convert a quiescent reporter into a zealot for information. But she recognised that this enthusiasm needed a rein, and she often found this in the editor, Alastair Hetherington, who would insist on all necessary checks being made before the Guardian embarked on her latest campaign. It was a formidable partnership.
When Hetherington retired in 1975, Jean applied for the post, keen that a woman should be among the candidates. In the event, it went to Peter Preston and Jean thought of giving up the news editor’s job. Her husband, John Bourne, the lobby editor of the Financial Times, and a former Guardian man, had suffered a medical accident in 1971 that left him partly paralysed.
However, she continued in the job until 1978, when she moved to being special projects editor. In addition to supervising investigative reporting, she wrote on the nuclear disarmament movement, particularly in Germany, and on the women’s protest against the siting of US cruise missiles at Greenham Common, Berkshire. While covering a Scandinavian women’s peace march across the Soviet Union, she interviewed dissident writers under house arrest.
Her enthusiasm was given a new stimulus when, in 1983, she became Scottish correspondent, based in Glasgow. The excitements of a new country, with the devolution debate, the miners’ strike of 1984-85 and the decline of industrial Clydeside providing her with abundant news, kept her happily occupied until her retirement in 1988. She also developed a late interest in motorcycles, covering grands prix across mainland Europe and amazing her colleagues by coming into the newsroom in racing leathers: having bought a motorbike herself, she was taught to ride it by a Guardian printer.
Born in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, Jean was the only daughter of Jessie (nee Hobson) and Harry Stead. Harry was a Royal Artillery officer in both world wars, and ran the family building contractors’ firm with Jean’s brother, Peter.
Childhood illness prevented her from having a conventional education until she was 12, when she went to a boarding school, Hunmanby Hall, in east Yorkshire. When she left, she knew straight away that journalism was what she wanted to do. She learned her craft as the only woman in the Yorkshire Post newsroom in Leeds at the time, and later she moved to its London office.
In 1954 she married John, and after having her two children, Victoria and Matt, began to seek occasional work on the Guardian. Soon she was doing regular reporting shifts, and eventually persuaded the paper to give her a permanent job, by pointing out that the Yorkshire Post wanted her to come back full-time. (In those days, before maternity leave, re-employment was far from automatic.)
On leaving the post of Scottish correspondent, Jean divided her time between London and Cornwall. But she also wrote on archaeology for the Guardian, after protests about the burial of London theatre sites associated with William Shakespeare – the Rose and the Globe. She reported on discoveries in Britain and abroad, notably at the site of the Berlin Wall.
Jean was an instinctive feminist. On one occasion she gave a female reporter a hard time for asking that women on night duty be allowed to take taxis home. She and others had fought for the right of women to do night duty on equal terms with men and she was not about to have that principle watered down. Though she was well to the left politically, her feminist zeal caused her to admit to a guilty enthusiasm for Britain’s first female prime minister, even if this stopped well short of approving of Margaret Thatcher’s policies.
Her book Never the Same Again (1986) told the story of women in the miners’ strike, and her campaigning instincts persisted. While working in Scotland, she was actively hostile to the Faslane nuclear submarine base, and in 2002 she supported the UK Women’s Link With Afghan Women. A coordinator of Grandmothers for Peace International, in 2006 she organised an exhibition at the Guardian’s Newsroom visitor centre to mark the 25th anniversary of the Greenham Common protest.
John died in 2012, and Jean is survived by Victoria and Matt, and her grandchildren, Dorothy, Flora and Edward.
• Jean Laura Stead, journalist, born 30 May 1926; died 2 December 2016
• John Cole died in 2013