Last modified on Thu 4 Feb 2021 04.14 EST
Grace Robertson, who has died aged 90 of a stroke, made her reputation in the 1950s as a freelance photojournalist on the weekly editorial magazine Picture Post.
One story, titled Mother’s Day Off, has become her signature. Early in her career, in 1954, she accompanied a group of Battersea “charladies” on their annual charabanc excursion to Margate in Kent. She accompanied them too, as she proudly recalled when she and I last met, in 2015, pint for pint (beer and cockles) and joke for joke, as she recorded their “exuberance”. An iconic image of the women having a laugh and a singalong – one seated on the lap of another, wearing outsized pantaloons over her skirt – was, according to Matthew Butson, director of the Getty Images Picture Post archive, “her most popular story … certainly the one she’ll be best remembered for”.