Sheila's book 'Who's Who on Radio'(1983) was a mighty and unique effort to catalogue all of us operating at the time and was a great project with a lot of fun for those of us contributing unbelievable details which she filtered into a readable compendium. Her work in TV has been much underrated and she was a great character in regional TV. Never forgotten Sheila!

This is taken from The Times:

Sheila Tracy
Published at 6:43PM, October 3 2014

On July 16, 1974, the late-night news on Radio 4 drew an unusual complaint. It was not about any of the items featured — which included the Watergate scandal, the European “beef mountain” and mistaken reports of the death of Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus — but about its presenter, Sheila Tracy, the first woman to perform the job.

Looking back on the day, Tracy recalled that it had not been a straightforward business. “They had to make an excuse,” she said. “The presentation editor pretended that [newsreader] Bryan Martin was ill and I had to read the late-night news. I’d been agitating for months.”

The next day many of the papers put her on the front page, though they led on the red trouser suit she’d worn. It wasn’t just men who objected, either. A short time after, Tracy was at a lunch at Broadcasting House and spoke to Dame Barbara Cartland. When the romantic novelist found out her job, she told her: “I can’t stand women newsreaders, I cannot understand a word they say.” In later life, Tracy felt that the pendulum had swung a little too far. “I feel sorry for young men trying to make their way in TV today,” she said. “You just get the older men with the blonde bimbo sitting beside them.”

She was the furthest thing from a bimbo herself. “I always wanted to do what the men were doing,” she said. At first, this was to play swing music. After studying piano, violin and trombone at the Royal Academy of Music, she joined the Ivy Benson All Girls Band. She claimed that she was lucky to get the job as she knew next to nothing about dance music, as it was called. Although her era in the band, 1956 to 1958, was well after Benson’s wartime peak, Tracy learnt much from the woman she called “a tough cookie as well as a brilliant instrumentalist”.

She established her reputation with her next group, joining up with another of Benson’s trombonists, Phyl Brown, as double-act the Tracy Sisters. They moved between variety, including a tour with Mike and Bernie Winters, variety shows on radio and television — including Workers Playtime and The Black and White Minstrel Show — and cabaret residencies. engagement took them to Calcutta’s Great Eastern Hotel for three months over Christmas. This went down so badly with her partner’s husband that when their agent then offered them six months in Las Vegas, they were forced to turn it down, with dire consequences for their career.

Retaining her stage name, Tracy moved into broadcasting soon after, starting on television, but her musical career stood her in good stead when she moved on to Big Band Special on Radio 2. Starting in 1979, she presented the show for 21 years, travelling round the world with the BBC Big Band for up to 60 concerts a year. For shows not being broadcast, she would often join the brass section or take over as conductor in place of Barry Forgie, another trombonist. In 1992, she accompanied the band as MC on a three-week tour of America with her friend George Shearing (obituary, February 15, 2011) as a guest.

For many, though, she was the voice not of the news or music, but of long-distance lorry drivers. In 1980, she introduced a hugely successful 60-minute slot in her weekly Radio 2 show, running from 1am to 2am, that she called Truckers Hour. The idea had come from a trip to the US where she had read about a DJ called Big John Trimble, and involved her reading out messages in Citizens Band radio jargon from and to truckers and playing Country & Western records. CB was then a national craze and the show quickly became nightly, with Tiger Tim, as she was renamed, a hit not only with drivers but also with insomniac schoolboys.

Unfortunately, after a year, her bosses found it too much to stomach, perhaps because, as she told The Sun at the time, “Some of the blighters send me rude messages and I’ve read them out without realising.” But it was a testament to her natural warmth that, despite her well-modulated BBC tones, she made it work at all. Whether sharing her love of swing, reading the news or presenting on television, she had the great broadcaster’s gift of intimacy.

She was born Sheila Lugg in Helston, Cornwall in 1934 and raised in nearby Mullion. The place remained dear to her and in 1980 she published a book about the area, Around Helston & Lizard. Arriving at the Royal Academy of Music after Truro high school, she chose the tromb because the other girls were in the string section and “all the boys were up in the brass” . It didn’t occur to her that she’d never played a brass instrument before. “It all worked out. I’ve never been out of work.”

It was her mother who suggested she apply for a job at the BBC, where in 1962 she became one of the last “in-vision” announcers, linking television programmes while visible on screen. At first, this meant juggling the new job with her final booking with the Tracy Sisters, a tour with Frankie Vaughan and Harry Worth. When the BBC switched to using the image of a revolving globe instead, she moved to Plymouth to present the local news show Spotlight South West, following it with Points West in Bristol and South Today in Southampton. In the 1960s, she also co-hosted A Spoonful of Sugar on BBC 1, visiting hospitals with Michael Aspel and guests, and was also commentator for coverage of the Miss England competition.

Her radio career was broad, from music shows on the Light Programme in the 1960s to the first broadcast from Parliament in 1975 to correspondent on the travel show Breakaway. In 1995, she turned her many interviews with American big band leaders and musicians into a book, Bands, Booze & Broads (1995), which she followed with a British version, Talking Swing (1997).

Somehow, she also found time to review plays for The Stage. Her husband, John Arnatt, whom she married in 1962, was an actor, and a multitasker like her. An old-school character player who appeared in Doctor Who, a 1955 version of The Adventures of Robin Hood and numerous police shows, he also worked as a TV sports reporter and, briefly, a stand-up comic. He died in 1999. They had a son, Richard, born in 1965. A chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral as a boy, he was a stockbroker before pursuing a doctorate in finance at the University of Alabama.

Paying tribute, Bob Shennan, the Radio 2 controller, said, “Sheila was a wonderful broadcaster with an extensive knowledge and love of big band music. She was a voice on BBC Radio 2 for over 20 years and was much loved by the audience.”

Sheila Tracy, broadcaster and musician, was born on January 10, 1934. She died on September 30, 2014, aged 80