FASHION, FUN, AND FELICITY

23/04/2011

Due to exceptional demand Felicity Green repeated her evening at The Groucho for us on April 14^th

You can now watch Felicity’s talk at The Groucho on February 28th in its entirety at this link.

Listen to Felicity on Desert Island Discs, aired on Sunday April 19th at this link. 

Fashion, fun and Felicity

By Paul Prentice and Amie Tsang

If the 'glass ceiling' held women back from progressing their careers in a time when there were few women at the top of their professions, Felicity Green smashed through it. From early beginnings as a shorthand typist, Felicity rose to become Associate Editor of the Daily Mirror – and the first woman on the board of a national newspaper in the 1960s.

Introduced as someone to inspire 'respect and fear' to a Media Society audience by Geraldine Sharpe-Newton in the aptly stylish surroundings of the Groucho Club, Felicity now mentors protégés of her own at Central Saint Martin's. In 2005 she was named one of the top 40 British journalists of all time. And, although working on a big Fleet Street title has always required a certain discipline and hard-headed nature, Green is nothing other than charming, funny and fascinating to listen to.

As disappointing as it is to discover that only 7% of FTSE 250 board directors are women, Felicity offered a ray of hope to fledgling journalists, male and female. She was working in a world where men thought her contribution to journalism would be to add bows and flowers to the columns of her articles, but she proved that at the end of the day, journalistic talent trumps all. Before the event had started, Felicity had said, ‘You must be very kind’, but there was no need. Today’s journalists are up against a different set of difficulties, but Felicity’s inspirational talk proved she made it not in spite of being a woman, but because of the woman she was.

Although never having had formal journalism training herself, Felicity's enviable 140 words a minute shorthand skill earned her first big break at Women and Beauty magazine. In the days when an enthusiastic letter could earn an aspirant journalist a job, Felicity wrote to the editor, saying “this was the most amazing magazine I'd ever come across”. And, ever since, Felicity has attributed her successful career to “good mentors”.

“I was taught to be a fashion editor by editor in chief Phyllis Digby-Morton, and although I started off making the tea and walking an unwilling dog, I was to only promise one thing - pull your stomach in!”

“After the boss told me she was leaving for the States, she gave me a note addressed to the chairperson of Crawford’s, the famous advertising agency. It simply said: ‘This is Felicity - give her a job.’  And so she did. Felicity was to follow Digby-Morton and embark upon her own adventures in the States, and after a stint of doing PR for Dannimac raincoats – in which she even improved the product itself by calling in royal designer Hardy Amies – it was Fleet Street which was to be her best-known calling.

“I became associate editor on Women’s Sunday Mirror, the first modern newspaper for women, and after a year I was moved to the Sunday Pictorial, which shortly became the Sunday Mirror.”

Fashion journalism was in many ways a safe and accepting environment, but Felicity relished the challenge of being a young woman in a world dominated by older males as she took her next step.

“I met Hugh Cudlipp, the Mirror Group chairman and said 'I want to be Associate Editor on the Daily Mirror'”. And that's what she duly became. When there was nowhere for her to sit and the other men on the board refused to get up for her, he fetched her a chair and she became a member of the board (albeit on half the wages of other board members).

In the 1950s, the Daily Mirror had a circulation of five million copies a day, and a readership three times that number.

“It was a very, very exciting time in the world of tabloid journalism and The Mirror was influential world-wide. And it was a time of a lot of pride and fun.”

“But I was given a very valuable piece of advice. 'Look out for the rocks,’ my first editor warned me – ‘you’re going to have a lot of men older than you who find themselves working for a younger women and they’re not going to find it easy; so if you have to give a man a bollocking, make sure he leaves the room with his balls intact!’

Felicity's next big move was to be the Mirror Group's director of in charge of press, publicity and events as well as the company's television campaigns – so becoming the first female board member of any Fleet Street newspaper.

“I was creating promotions that readers could enjoy. One of those was a ball at the Royal Albert Hall for charladies – headlining little-known acts such as the Beatles and Cilla Black”.

“Hugh Cudlipp never understood me, but trusted me” says Felicity. But even he did not appreciate the big names that Felicity had lined up for the Albert Hall gig – dubbing the Beatles as “f***** louts!”.

Felicity left the Mirror after 21 years, and was even courted by one Rupert Murdoch – who had recently taken over Cudlipp's creation, The Sun. As the recent film Made in Dagenham tells us, equal pay was a struggle of that period. Felicity, as self-confessed feminist and active socialist, recalled:

“I was on £14,000 at that time, and when I found out that a new director got double what I did, I decided I was too young for this”.

We heard too about the lady who won a Mirror competition to have her portrait done and found herself a little unnerved that her head and shoulders painting had to be done with all her clothes off.

There were also the run-ins with figures like Margaret Thatcher and Mary Wilson.

With Mary Wilson she was unexpectedly invited into a bathroom to curl her hair.

With Margaret Thatcher, she had a conversation about pinning her brooch to her bra, which led to much consternation amongst the male board directors out of earshot who saw the Prime Minister pointing at her chest.

Apologetically, Felicity said, ‘It sounds a rather frivolous career’. Quite the opposite. Her anecdotes not only illustrated how enjoyable she found her job, but how progressive her work was.

There are few evenings like this that have been worthy of an encore. Felicity's goldmine of anecdotes and inspirational stories captured, entertained and enthralled her audience. And if there is one story worth telling both for future journalists and those more experienced who have followed Felicity's career, that would be a book worth buying.

Read more of Paul's writing on his blog.