Felicity Green

Last updated

Felicity Green OBE (born 26 June 1926) [1] is a British fashion journalist and former newspaper executive.

Contents

Early life and career

Green was born in June 1926 and raised in Dagenham, Essex in rooms above a bike shop. [2] From an impoverished Jewish background, Green's father ran a local shoe shop while her mother, though deaf, was the more formidable parent. [3] Her father was cruel to her mother, although Green, their only child, attempted to control his behaviour. She did share a love of the cinema with him, and they saw two double features together each Thursday. From the movies, Green acquired her interest in glamour and fashion. [4]

Initially a short hand typist and secretary at Woman & Beauty in the 1940s, she was promoted to fashion editor within two years. [5] [6] [7] After this she joined Housewife, where she assumed the same post, and then W.S. Crawford, the advertising agency, for a time. [8]

Mirror Group journalist

In 1955, Hugh Cudlipp asked Green's opinion of Woman's Sunday Mirror, a publication for which he was responsible. Following a severe analysis, she was hired as Fleet Street's first female associate editor. [7] The title was short-lived, being folded into Woman magazine.

Green moved on to the Sunday Pictorial (as the Sunday Mirror was then named) in 1959 filling the same post as before. [7] [5] Since 1955, her immediate boss had been Lee Howard, and she became associate editor of the Daily Mirror in 1961 when Howard was appointed as the newspaper's editor. [7] Green recalled her new colleagues response to her: "They were all being as helpfully 'feminine' as they could, which was the last thing I wanted. My plan was to make the pages interesting to men, too." [5]

Her responsibilities included women's editor, and to promote the interests of women in all areas of the newspaper's activities. [9] Her writing for the paper included fashion, although Green wrote in 2011 that she is really more interested in style, and admitted to modelling herself on film star Audrey Hepburn. [10] For including the miniskirts of Mary Quant in the Mirror, Green was effectively threatened with the sack by Cecil King, then chairman of the International Publishing Corporation, of which the Mirror Group of Newspapers was a part. [9] Cudlipp, by then chairman of the Mirror Group, supported her. According to Roy Greenslade, Cuidlipp told Green in December 1964: "I don't understand what you're doing but I trust you. So I've decided to give you the front and back pages of the Mirror to tell our readers what the Swinging 60s are all about." [11]

Sex, Sense and Nonsense, published in November 2014, is Green's anthology of her 1960s work for the Daily Mirror. [11]

Executive posts and later career

Green feels she retained a distance as a journalist and avoided being fully absorbed into the fashion industry. "Fashion is not a bloody religion, as most fashion editors seem to think it is," she told Anna Murphy of The Daily Telegraph in 2014. "There is a difference between fashion and clothes. One is the real stuff, which is the clothes. Then there is fashion, which is some kind of mesmeric stuff out there that persuades the world to go in certain directions rather mysteriously. It's all big business. And I'd rather people spent money on clothes than arms." [4]

Later Green became executive women's editor across the three Mirror titles, and in 1973, the group's publicity director. She joined the newspaper's board, the first woman to achieve such a position, [6] at this point. Green had some initial trouble, as the only woman, using the directors' lift. She felt it was impossible to inform some wholesalers who objected that she was indeed so entitled. "You can't", she told Katharine Whitehorn for a 1978 article, "when you are five foot ome and a half." [3] She survived at the Miirror so long "by being nice to people. Don't start arguments. People can either help or hinder you. Well, you are an idiot if you cause them to hinder you. So I'm very tactful - if you are tactful people are always ready to help you."

In 1978 she resigned after discovering that a new male journalist had been appointed to the board at £30,000, more than twice her own salary of £14,000. [2] "Apparently, I was supposed to be honoured simply to be a director", she observed years later. [5]

Meanwhile, in December 1977, Green joined Vidal Sassoon as managing director of operations in Europe and Executive Vice-President of the American company. [3] Later she advised the board of the Telegraph and worked for the M&S (Marks & Spencer) magazine, which included interviewing Margaret Thatcher about her fashion interests. [12] In the early 1990s Green was a senior lecturer in fashion journalism at the Central St. Martins College of Art and Design. [2]

Personal life and honours

Green married the cigar importer Geoffrey Hill around 1952; the couple remained married until Hill died in 1992. [12] She received the OBE in the Queen's 2012 Birthday Honours for services to journalism. [13]

Related Research Articles

Page 3, or Page Three, was a British newspaper convention of publishing a large image of a topless female glamour model on the third page of mainstream red-top tabloids. The Sun introduced the feature in November 1970, which boosted its readership and prompted competing tabloids—including the Daily Mirror, the Sunday People, and the Daily Star—to begin featuring topless models on their own third pages. Well-known Page 3 girls included Linda Lusardi, Samantha Fox and Katie Price.

<i>Daily Mirror</i> British daily tabloid newspaper

The Daily Mirror is a British national daily tabloid newspaper. Founded in 1903, it is owned by parent company Reach plc. From 1985 to 1987, and from 1997 to 2002, the title on its masthead was simply The Mirror. It had an average daily print circulation of 716,923 in December 2016, dropping to 587,803 the following year. Its Sunday sister paper is the Sunday Mirror. Unlike other major British tabloids such as The Sun and the Daily Mail, the Mirror has no separate Scottish edition; this function is performed by the Daily Record and the Sunday Mail, which incorporate certain stories from the Mirror that are of Scottish significance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Katharine Whitehorn</span> British journalist, columnist, author, and radio presenter (1928–2021)

Katharine Elizabeth Whitehorn was a British journalist, columnist, author and radio presenter. She was the first woman to have a column in The Observer, which ran from 1963 to 1996 and from 2011 to 2017. She was the first female rector of a university in Scotland. Her books include Cooking in a Bedsitter (1961).

Press Gazette, formerly known as UK Press Gazette (UKPG), is a British trade magazine dedicated to journalism and the press. First published in 1965, it had a circulation of about 2,500 before becoming online-only in 2013. Published with the strapline "Future of Media", it covers news about newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, and the online press, dealing with launches, closures, moves, legislation and technological advances affecting journalists.

The British Press Awards is an annual ceremony that has celebrated the best of British journalism since the 1970s. A financially lucrative part of the Press Gazette's business, they have been described as "the Oscars of British journalism", or less flatteringly, "The Hackademy Awards".

Hubert Kinsman Cudlipp, Baron Cudlipp, OBE, was a Welsh journalist and newspaper editor noted for his work on the Daily Mirror in the 1950s and 1960s. He served as chairman of the Mirror Group group of newspapers from 1963 to 1967, and the chairman of the International Publishing Corporation from 1968–1973.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cecil Harmsworth King</span> British publisher

Cecil Harmsworth King was Chairman of Daily Mirror Newspapers, Sunday Pictorial Newspapers and the International Publishing Corporation (1963–1968), and a director at the Bank of England (1965–1968).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roy Greenslade</span> British academic and journalist (born 1946)

Roy Greenslade is a British author and freelance journalist, and a former professor of journalism. He worked in the UK newspaper industry from the 1960s onwards. As a media commentator, he wrote a daily blog from 2006 to 2018 for The Guardian and a column for London's Evening Standard from 2006 to 2016. Under a pseudonym, Greenslade also wrote for the Sinn Féin newspaper An Phoblacht during the late 1980s whilst also working on Fleet Street. In 2021, it was reported in The Times newspaper, citing an article by Greenslade in the British Journalism Review, that he supported the bombing campaign of the Provisional IRA. Following this revelation, Greenslade resigned as Honorary Visiting Professor at City, University of London.

Evelyn, Lady Lloyd, is an English author and journalist, and has been the editor of several tabloid newspapers.

Bernard Shrimsley was a British journalist and newspaper editor.

Paul Michael Dacre is an English journalist and the former long-serving editor of the British tabloid the Daily Mail. He is also editor-in-chief of DMG Media, which publishes the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday, the free daily tabloid Metro, the MailOnline website, and other titles.

Percy Cudlipp, was a prominent Welsh journalist and editor of the Evening Standard, The Daily Herald, and the New Scientist.

Wendy Henry is a former British journalist and newspaper editor.

<i>The Sun</i> (United Kingdom) British tabloid newspaper

The Sun is a British broadsheet newspaper, published by the News Group Newspapers division of News UK, itself a wholly owned subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. It was founded as a broadsheet in 1964 as a successor to the Daily Herald, and became a tabloid in 1969 after it was purchased by its current owner. The Sun had the largest daily newspaper circulation in the United Kingdom, but was overtaken by freesheet rival Metro in March 2018.

The Sydney Russell School is a coeducational secondary school and sixth form located in Dagenham, London, England.

Dennis Hackett was a British magazine and newspaper editor whom many would say played significant roles on game-changing publications that reshaped the language of British journalism.

Leon Alexander Lee Howard (1914–1978), known as Lee Howard, was a British newspaper editor.

Lisa Markwell is a British journalist. She was the editor of The Independent On Sunday for three years, from April 2013 until its closure in March 2016. She was appointed by proprietor Evgeny Lebedev as the first of three new editors for his ESI Media portfolio; he announced the appointment in a tweet. From 2018 to 2021 she was the food editor of The Sunday Times. She is now the editor of The Telegraph Magazine.

Eleanor Mills is a British journalist formerly associated with The Sunday Times and The Times. She was the editorial director of The Sunday Times and editor of its magazine until March 2020. Mills was employed by Times Newspapers for 22 years.

Alison Phillips is a British journalist and the Editor of the Daily Mirror since 2018.

References

  1. ↑ Who's Who 2021: Green, Felicity, (Mrs Geoffrey Hill)
  2. 1 2 3 Greenslade, Roy (13 February 2013). "Why Felicity Green, Fleet Street's first lady, quit the Mirror board". The Guardian.
  3. 1 2 3 Whitehorn, Katharine (4 January 1978), "The Little Lady is Walking Tall", The Age, Melbourne, p. 11
  4. 1 2 Murphy, Anna (2 November 2014). "Felicity Green: the fashion journalist made in Dagenham and revered on Fleet Street". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 11 November 2014. Retrieved 14 November 2014.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Kendall, Paul; Williamson, Charlotte; Holehouse, Matthew (17 July 2011). "Ambition used to be considered unfeminine". The Sunday Telegraph. Retrieved 8 October 2016.
  6. 1 2 Krieger, Candice (15 October 2009). "Felicity Green returns to fashion journalism at the age of 83". The Jewish Chronicle.
  7. 1 2 3 4 Greenslade, Roy (2004). Press Gang: How Newspapers Make Profits From Propaganda. London: Pan. p. 367. ISBN   9780330393768.
  8. ↑ "Felicity Green on Women and Media". The MBS Group. 22 July 2011. Archived from the original on 29 November 2014. Retrieved 26 June 2014.
  9. 1 2 "Interview with Felicity Green". Victoria & Albert Museum. March 2006.
  10. ↑ Green, Felicity (13 November 2011). "How to get stylish". The Observer.
  11. 1 2 Greenslade, Roy (14 November 2014). "How Felicity Green shaped the Daily Mirror - and Britain - in the 1960s". The Guardian.
  12. 1 2 Short, Steve (March 2011). "First Lady". Vantage (St John's Wood ed.). pp. 10–11.
  13. ↑ Jackman, Josh (20 June 2012). "Pioneer journalist's 'delight' at OBE". The Jewish Chronicle.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.