Dame Jenni Murray, broadcaster who was the distinctive voice of Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour for 33 years

Dame Jenni Murray, who has died aged 75, was the deep and reassuring voice of Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour from 1987 to 2020.

Humorous yet headmistressy, Jenni Murray was capable of switching from razor-sharp interrogation to flirtatious whimsicality and was equally at home presenting features on female genital mutilation as on home furnishings. She interviewed all the major political figures of her time – famously asking Edwina Currie when she last had a smear test, and Gordon Brown whether he would show his wife his tax returns.

She tackled Margaret Thatcher about her lack of interest in childcare provision and asked Tessa Jowell how, given her claimed feminism, the public could really believe that she had signed for a mortgage loan on her house for her husband, without knowing exactly how it was going to be paid back.

People opened up to Jenni Murray’s gentle probing in a way they never would to more overtly aggressive interviewers. She had a hypnotist’s ability to make people forget that there was a wider audience listening in to their cosy chat.

Quizzing the actor Jack Nicholson about his apparent distrust of women, she got him to say that he felt it stemmed from not finding out until he was 30 that the woman he believed to be his mother was really his grandmother and that his “sister” was the one who had “shamefully” given birth to an illegitimate son.

In 1999, Monica Lewinsky confessed that the reason she had kept unwashed the famous blue dress (that proved President Clinton was lying when he denied a sexual relationship with her) was that, as she had subsequently put on weight, she had left it in the wardrobe because she could no longer squeeze into it.

But people queued up to be interviewed by her. Marietta Higgs, the doctor at the centre of the Cleveland child abuse scandal, gave her first public interview to Woman’s Hour – as did Edith Cresson, the French Prime Minister, after she notoriously suggested that most British men are homosexual. And, despite some sticky moments under Jenni Murray’s forensic scrutiny, Mrs Thatcher gave the programme her last major interview before resigning.

Yet critics claimed that Jenni Murray had allowed the programme to become the mouthpiece for an embittered form of radical feminism: “Can a nice late-night slot be found for Jenni Murray’s Feminist’s Hour, and can we have Woman’s Hour back please?” asked a listener from London, on Radio 4’s Feedback.

The journalist Neil Lyndon likened listening to the programme to being “trapped underground, like Alice, in a twilight world where peculiar creatures conduct themselves entirely according to their own cock-eyed rules. Radio Moscow in the age of Leonid Brezhnev was not as narrow-minded as Woman’s Hour in the age of Sister Superior Jenni Murray and her feminist press gang.”

Some of the vituperation was undoubtedly due to an article she wrote in 1992 for Options magazine, headlined “Why No Woman Should Marry”. In this, she reflected on the failure, after seven years, of her own first marriage and concluded that the institution had made her a “kept woman – officially stamped a legal prostitute” (a quotation from Mary Wollstonecraft). “I believe that marriage is an insult and that women shouldn’t touch it,” she concluded.

The article created a furore, with tabloid reporters camping outside her home and Tony Marlow, Tory MP for Northampton North, tabling a Commons motion demanding that Jenni Murray be sacked. Though she never recanted her views, she later relented her opinions on the institution of marriage to the extent of marrying her long-term partner and father of her two sons, David Forgham-Bailey (though only “for tax reasons”).

Tony Marlow’s motion had described her as a “self-declared feminist with an unrepresentative lifestyle”, and so Jenni Murray took an impish delight in the subsequent revelation that Marlow’s own lifestyle was not exactly representative either. Marlow, it was revealed, had nine children, five by his wife and four by his mistress, and divided his time between the two women. If Jenni Murray did not put a high store by marriage, she always stressed the importance of fidelity.

An only child, Jennifer Susan Bailey was born on May 12 1950 in Barnsley, Yorkshire, where her maternal grandfather had been a winder at the local pit. Her father had trained as an electrical engineer but the key figure in young Jenni’s life was her mother, a housewife. She recalled, as a child, enjoying post-lunch hours alongside the family’s Bush wireless, listening to Woman’s Hour with her mother and being sent off to the kitchen on spurious errands whenever an item carried a “health warning” – a designation that covered such issues as the menopause, contraception and cohabitation.

Jenni was educated at Barnsley Girls’ High School, where she was described as “good at writing but a bit loose on facts”, and advised that she “should do well in journalism”. At Hull University, where she took a degree in French and drama, Woman’s Hour alerted her to Mary Quantand Vidal Sassoon. Courting her mother’s disapproval, she bobbed her hair and took to wearing the skimpiest of mini-skirts.

But it was to avoid her mother’s disapproval that she decided to get married – to her architect student boyfriend, Brian Murray – in 1971. They had travelled round the world together and decided to share a flat. Convinced her mother would go “absolutely bonkers” if she knew her daughter was “living in sin”, Jenni asked Brian to marry her. The marriage lasted seven years.

In 1973 Jenni Murray joined BBC Radio Bristol as a copytaker, later becoming a reporter and presenter for BBC Television’s South Today. Her latent feminism was awoken when, despite possessing a respectable income in her own right, she was refused a mortgage without the signature of a husband or father.

Coincidentally, she had been listening to a Woman’s Hour feature on the new Sex Discrimination Bill, due to be enacted in 1975. She went back to the building society, threatened them with the full power of the law if they refused her a mortgage, and secured her loan.

In 1983, she joined BBC Newsnight. Two years later she moved to Radio 4 as a presenter on Today and launched the Saturday programme with John Humphrys in 1987. That year she took over as the main presenter of Woman’s Hour from Sue MacGregor. Latterly she disdained the surveillance of studios by webcam, defiantly draping her pashmina over the one installed in hers.

She had never hired an agent to bump up her salary, trusting that whatever she was paid to do a job she loved, and that fulfilled a public service, must inherently be reasonable. When the BBC pay gap was revealed, however, she negotiated her salary up to £100,000, only to learn that less experienced presenters were earning twice or three times as much.

In 2020, she left Woman’s Hour, later telling the Daily Mail that she had been “cancelled” for writing a 2017 Times article in which she asked trans activists to acknowledge the difference between a trans woman and a woman, and to respect women’s right to safe single-sex spaces.

The BBC ticked her off publicly and thereafter prevented her from debating the trans issue on Woman’s Hour. She was also forbidden from covering the 2019 election after breaching impartiality rules by writing an article expressing regret over Britain’s decision to leave the EU.

Murray pointed out that the BBC had until recently defined impartiality differently, and had even actively encouraged its broadcasters to express their opinions in articles and books, so long as they remained impartial on air. “A woman like me has knowledge, wisdom and experience. She was not in a BBC studio for any reason but to present the crucial issues of the day and elicit opinion from her guests, never broadcast her own. But she has opinions – sometimes controversial ones – and she will not be silenced.”

A large, graceful woman, always elegant in cleverly designed flowing clothes, Jenni Murray struggled with her weight and underwent bariatric surgery in 2015. She was an inveterate smoker, latterly stationing herself at the door of Broadcasting House where a minion would spark up her cigarette with a throwaway lighter. She was the author of The Woman’s Hour (2006), a history of women since the Second World War; a book on the menopause, Is it Me, Or Is it Hot in Here? (2003); and That’s My Boy! (2003), about how to bring up sons.

Her Memoirs of a Not So Dutiful Daughter appeared in 2008 and her last book, Fat Cow, Fat Chance, in 2020. She also wrote columns for various newspapers and magazines. In 1996 she won the Broadcasting Press Guild award for Radio Broadcaster of the Year. She was appointed OBE in 1999, advanced to DBE in 2011.

She held honorary degrees from the Open University and Bradford, Sheffield, Bristol, St Andrews, Huddersfield and Salford Universities.

In 2006, when Jenni Murray revealed with characteristic lack of fuss that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, the BBC was deluged with messages of sympathy from female fans and also from an army of devoted male listeners, who, during her 33 years at the helm of Woman’s Hour, accounted for an astonishing 40 per cent of the programme’s audience.

The condition had been diagnosed when, on a visit to the hospital where her mother lay dying of Parkinson’s disease, Jenni Murray decided to stop off for a mammogram.

Her marriage to Brian Murray was dissolved in 1978. In 2004 she married David Forgham-Bailey; they had two sons.

Dame Jenni Murray, born May 12 1950, died March 20 2026

[Source: Daily Telegraph]