Sally Holloway, who died on September 10 aged 84, was one of the first women news reporters to be employed by the BBC; in the course of a 70-year career in journalism, she also became historian of the London Fire Brigade.


Seeing her name in print ignited an interest in journalism. Despite the objections of both her headmistress and her mother, Sylvia returned to London when she was 16 and joined the Press Association (PA) as a reporter's telephonist, a job that involved accompanying a reporter on stories and phoning in his copy.

As her male contemporaries were called up, Sylvia Gray became a reporter herself. She covered the V-E Day celebrations in London from the roof of a telephone box in Trafalgar Square and was part of the four-strong team that covered the 1948 London Olympics for PA.

She met personalities ranging from Walt Disney to Winston Churchill (who was grumpy because she had gone to Chartwell to interview his wife). The Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, spotting her with a book about Thomas Aquinas for an evening class she was taking, advised her on further reading.

Sylvia Gray's news-agency training made her fast, accurate and adaptable. In 1949 she was sent to the Royal Opera House to write a news story about the Salvador Dali-designed production of Salome. She had never been to the opera before and she was thrilled. Her account of the performance headed "Salome Lost 7 Veils But Won 14 Curtains" was carried by every paper in Fleet Street.

The following year she took a job on the News Chronicle, the Left-leaning paper owned by the Cadbury family, joining on the same day as another young reporter, David Holloway. They travelled together to report the crash of a Tudor V airliner in south Wales and succeeded in beating the rival Daily Express to an exclusive eyewitness account. Two years later they married at St Bride's Church, Fleet Street.

In 1951 she was recruited by the BBC's news division to replace Audrey Russell, the only woman previously to hold a reporter's job. Sylvia Gray worked for Radio Newsreel and the fledgling television news service, covering stories ranging from the Coronation to the east coast floods.

Her "cockney" accent, which to modern ears sounds like cut-glass received pronunciation, was criticised, as were some of her reports. "When George VI was ill," she recalled, "I remember including 'Marina blue' and 'Gloucester green' in a report on a new colour dictionary – and was accused of 'mentioning the Royal Family in a frivolous context at a time of national anxiety'."

She left the BBC in 1954, "too pregnant to get within range of the studio microphone". As Sally Holloway (she had dropped Sylvia because fellow journalists kept calling her Sally), she wrote a column for the News Chronicle about pregnancy and motherhood, and freelanced for The Observer and the BBC's Woman's Hour.

Her father, Douglas Gray, the son of a London fireman, had been born in Old Scotland Yard fire station, and Sally Holloway had grown up with his stories of horse-drawn fire engines racing through the city's streets. In 1973 she wrote a popular history, London's Noble Fire Brigades, 1833-1904. This led to her being approached by the brigade to write an account of the 1975 Moorgate railway disaster, published in 1988. Courage High, a comprehensive history of firefighting in London, followed in 1992.

Remarkably, these and other books were written largely in Sally Holloway's spare time – often late into the night.

From the 1970s she edited Prospect, the newsletter of the lively Barnes Community Association in south-west London, her home since 1953; and shortly before her 80th birthday she was manning the information stall from five in the morning at the annual summer fair on Barnes Common.

David Hollway joined The Daily Telegraph in 1960 and was the paper's literary editor until his death in 1995. Sally Holloway is survived by their two sons and one daughter.


Source:-
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