This is taken from The Guardian:

Barbara Brown, nee Hooper
by Kenneth Brown
Wednesday 27 June 2012 08.41 EDT


Under her maiden name of Barbara Hooper, my wife, who has died aged 83, was a BBC radio and TV reporter in the 1950s – only the third female reporter in the BBC's history.

Barbara, born in Northwood, Middlesex, studied English and Anglo-Saxon archaeology at Westfield College, London University, where the principal was Mary – later Baroness – Stocks, star of the BBC's Any Questions programme. Many years later Barbara wrote her biography, Mary Stocks 1891-1975: An Uncommonplace Life (1996).

When she graduated in 1950, Barbara was determined to be a reporter, but press and broadcasting then were dominated by men.

She wrote to editors all over the country before securing a post as the sole female reporter on the Cheltenham evening paper, the Gloucestershire Echo.

When in 1955 the BBC advertised for a female reporter, her appointment was clinched, she thought, when one of the interviewing board, who appeared until then to have been asleep, looked up and asked: "Do you drive?" Few women did then.

She reported for Radio Newsreel, the BBC's flagship news programme, Eye Witness and the early TV news from Alexandra Palace. There were 10 reporters, nine of them men.

Barbara interviewed Margot Fonteyn, Richard Burton, John Gielgud, Hardy Amies, Spike Milligan, Henry Moore, John Betjeman and Liberace, and was constantly at Heathrow airport, then a collection of huts, interviewing in a noisy little room with a curtain pulled across the entrance. She broadcast on the early Today programmes, presided over by Jack de Manio.

After our three sons were born, she switched to lecturing in media studies at Amersham College, Buckinghamshire, where one of her students was Zoë Ball. Barbara wrote a number of books, including Cider With Laurie (1999), a biography of Laurie Lee; Time to Stand and Stare (2004), a biography of the poet-tramp WH Davies; and two novels.

She gained an MA and MPhil from Warwick University, volunteered for Oxfam and the National Trust, was a Lib Dem councillor in Hertfordshire and at the time of her death, president of Stroud Lib Dems. She is survived by me, two of our sons, Martin and Julian, and a grandson, Benjamin. Our oldest son, Stephen, died last December.