Shelley Rohde

Gillian Shelley Mary Rohde(17 May 1933 – 6 December 2007) was a British journalist and author. She was best known inNorth West Englandas a reporter and presenter onGranada Reports,but she is more widely remembered as the biographer of the artistL. S. Lowry.

Early life

Rohde was bornGillian Shelley Mary Hall,on 17 May 1933, inPaddington,England,her parents being a scriptwriter father and an actress mother. Shelley took the surname of her mother's second husband, the pilot Douglas Rohde. She was largely brought up by her maternal grandmother, Patricia Reardon.

The path to adulthood led throughNottinghamshire.There had been many schools, and Shelley had contrived to be expelled from some. When she left school at 16, it was with no qualifications, and this was to impart a certain drive to her career.

Career

She secured her first job on theNottinghamshire Free Pressbefore gravitating toLondonand joining firstThe Starand later theDaily Express.TheExpresssent her to theSoviet Union,where at age 21 she became the first female foreign correspondent inMoscow.From her years in Moscow, not only did she learnRussian,but served as interpreter for the press when the Soviet leadersNikita KhrushchevandNikolai Bulganinmade their official visit to London in 1956.

Still only a young woman, she was a witness to the events of theHungarian Revolution of 1956.Her coverage of it is mentioned in James Michener's bookThe Bridge at Andau,in particular an incident where journalists waiting at the bridge to interview fleeing refugees heard a baby crying. Risking a bullet, Rohde crossed the bridge to help the baby and family to safety.

In the 1960s she moved north toManchesteras chief feature writer for theDaily Mailand from there joinedGranada Television,which gave her scope as a presenter of programmes and commentator of the local scene, chat host and debating chair, becoming a personality in her own right. She was a forceful personality, but generally treated her interviewees with sympathy and visibly entered into their enthusiasms and quirks. She had a memorable laugh. It was a mix of style that drew on the pioneering skills of the foreign correspondent and the knack of the local journalist in bringing out the interest in the lives of our neighbours.

L. S. Lowry

It was in this setting that she began to investigate the local artistL. S. Lowryand was eventually to become an acknowledged expert on him. Her documentary on him,L.S. Lowry: A Private View,was made after she had interviewed the artist personally, which she did several times during his later life. This was in itself an achievement, given that Lowry was known to be difficult to pin down to an interview appointment and to any clear content and was inclined to amuse himself by making up stories. He first told Rohde he had given up painting long ago, but it was noticed that the paint on a canvas was wet.

She was to write extensively about Lowry, including her bookA private view of L.S. Lowry(revised asL.S. Lowry: A Biography), and won the Portico Prize for literary excellence in 2002 with another book,The Lowry Lexicon: An A-Z of L.S. Lowry.However, she was not monomaniacal and went on to doA-Z of Van Gogh.

Personal life and death

Rohde married Donald J Weaver in 1958 and the couple went on to have four children together, but they subsequently divorced. Rohde had three grandchildren.

Before her death she named a selection of three Lowry works that then became the focus of the exhibitionExploding Picturesatthe LowryinSalford,the major holding of the artist's work.

Rohde died on 6 December 2007 aged 74, following a ten-year struggle against cancer.

External links

• Shelley RohdeatIMDb
• Obituary in the Manchester Evening Newson 12 December 2007
• Obituary in the Halifax Evening Courieron 14 December 2007
• Obituary in the Guardianon 15 January 2008