At 4am on 24 April 2019, 25 brass players, two percussionists and a conductor piled into a coach in Hull for a 200-mile drive to London. It was a Wednesday morning and it had been touch and go whether all of them would be able to get time off from their day jobs to make the trip. Seven hours later, they stood on the quayside at Greenwich, as Princess Anne swung a bottle of champagne at the looming yellow hull of the UK’s newest and biggest.
‘Wise, clever and kind, Katharine Whitehorn made it easier for all of us who followed her’ Vanessa Thorpe
Stylish, stimulating and life-affirming, Katharine Whitehorn, the
Observer writer and broadcaster who helped shape modern British journalism, was mourned by readers and former colleagues at the weekend.
Born in Hendon, London, in 1928, the columnist, the first woman to be given such a job at this newspaper, had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. She moved to a care home in north London in 2018 and was recently diagnosed with Covid-19, although it is not clear if this contributed to her death on Friday at the age of 92.