Tributes have been paid to the foreign correspondent Ann Leslie, the formidable British journalist hailed as “the most versatile of them all”, after her death aged 82.
In her 40-year career, Leslie carved out her space as one of the last of the great “firemen” correspondents dispatched by Fleet Street tabloids all over the world, covering historic events from the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Nelson Mandela’s long walk to freedom, China’s one-child policy and the conflict in former Yugoslavia.
“There’s almost a kind of sexual excitement when you land in a new place – you feel something,” Leslie told the Guardian in 2012. “You don’t feel it if you read Google, and a lot of people who write about foreign affairs have never been there. Probably Orpington is the most exotic place they’ve ever been to.”
Leslie’s career began in the Manchester office of the Daily Express in 1962, but much of it was spent working for the Daily Mail, where she thrived under the 20-year editorship of Sir David English. There she was promoted as its special correspondent at a time of few women in the industry, before giving up her staff job to become a freelance foreign correspondent in 1968.
A passionate believer in the free press, Leslie won nine British Press awards, two lifetime achievements awards, and the 1999 James Cameron award for international reporting. In 2007, she was appointed DBE for services to journalism. David Randall’s 2005 book The Great Reporters called her “the most versatile of them all”.
In her autobiography Killing My Own Snakes published in 2008, Leslie described one of the duties of journalism as shining a torch into dark areas. “Face the glacier in the cupboard, expose its coldness and cruelty to the bright, clear and humanising light of day.”
Journalism “has never been an ego trip for me”, said Leslie, who described her work as “the most exhilarating, exhausting, absorbing career that life can offer”.
The daughter of Theodora (born McDonald) and Norman Leslie, she was born in pre-partition India, in Rawalpindi, now in Pakistan, where her father was an oil executive. As a child she witnessed the killing trains of partition and at nine, was sent to Presentation Convent boarding school in Matlock, Derbyshire, and then to the Convent of the Holy Child Jesus in Mayfield, East Sussex.
“I was absolutely heartbroken,” she said of being sent away and rarely seeing her parents afterwards. “I’m quite cold-blooded. A bit of a hard-hearted Hannah. But I suppose that this was a survival mechanism – that’s a bit melodramatic, perhaps. It was a coping mechanism to not feel too much emotion about anything.”
She studied English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford – where she had tea with Agatha Christie – and after graduating in 1961, took a £20-a-week job on a whim in the Manchester office of the Daily Express, then owned by Lord Beaverbrook.
When speaking with the Guardian about the male-dominated industry in 2009, she said: “It sounds awfully vain, but a lot of this ‘officer class’ were all rather scared of me. I can be quite … chilling, if I wish to be. I never really had any trouble with them.”
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She is survived by her husband, Michael Fletcher, whom she met at Oxford and married in 1969, and her daughter, Katharine.
Following the announcement of her death, fellow journalists took to Twitter to pay tribute.
“I admired her humour, resourcefulness, outspoken nature and – of course – her amazing journalism. And she never missed a party. She was remarkable,” said Channel 4 News’s international editor, Lindsey Hilsum.
“I’m sad to hear Ann Leslie has died,” said Steve Richards, the author and broadcaster. “We used to do a programme called Head to Head when the BBC allowed discussion to breathe. This fearless war reporter once told me she was terrified about her next assignment the following day: a health farm where she couldn’t smoke or drink.”
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