A leading female journalist whose talent ran in the family has come under the spotlight in the Leicester Mercury.

Local writer Mary Stott, who began on the Mercury in the 1920s, went on to become women’s editor at The Guardian and found national fame through that and guest appearances on the radio.

She is regarded as a local lass by Leicester people and her life and times crop up regularly in the paper.

Locals of a certain age can remember her work – and her appearances on programmes like Any Questions?

Her life, as told in the autobiography Forgetting’s No Excuse, was revisited in the Mercury’s Mr Leicester diary column.

He wrote: “Her autobiography is a marvellous blend of memories, people and essays on life.

She grew up at Highfield Street, Leicester, which she described as “large, four-storeyed, long passaged, ill-lighted”.

By April 1925, aged 17, she started work at the Leicester Mail, her first job was to report on a concert given by Miss Constance Hardcastle’s pupils: she got the job, she reckons, because her uncle Harry was chief sub editor.

Journalism ran in the family, for although her grandfather, Walter Taylor Bates, ran a flour mill in Nuneaton, her mother’s grandfather was a printer, Thomas Pierce Waddington.

Her mother, Amalie Maria Christina Bates, was a journalist, meeting Mary’s father Robert Guy Waddington when they were both teachers – although Robert was already running Leicester magazine The Wyvern in his spare time.

He moved on to the Leicester Morning Post and then the Mercury – while uncle Harry did a stint on the Bombay Times!

Her early memories in Leicester include covering a murder in Braunstone Wood and writing a review of Pavlova dancing at De Montfort Hall.

At 19 she was heartbroken to be promoted to editing the women’s page, because she wanted to be a news reporter. But it was as women’s page editor on The Guardian that she eventually found national fame.

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