My mother, Kathryn Davies, who has died aged 79, was a presenter for the BBC World Service of flagship programmes including Newshour, Twenty-Four Hours and East Asia Today, as well as a correspondent for the Guardian and the Financial Times in south-east Asia and the Middle East. Journalism ran in the family: she was married to the BBC World Service correspondent Jack Thompson for 52 years, while I worked for the Times and the FT.
She was born in Caterham, Surrey, and grew up in Kent, the daughter of Mary (nee Ferguson), a carer and housewife, and David Davies, a teacher; she and her Scottish mother shared the middle name Burns, which Mary maintained was because the family were distant cousins of the poet (though she was elusive when pressed for details).
Kathryn went to Sherborne girls’ school, in Dorset, and then did a year at Reading University, studying English, but left after her father died so that she could look after her mother.
Her career as a broadcaster started in 1968 at Granada TV in Manchester, where she was a researcher and reporter on local programmes and for the popular All Our Yesterdays series; she then moved to the newly created Yorkshire TV. She met Jack – a BBC local radio pioneer – at Radio Sheffield.
In 1972 the couple moved to Thailand for an assignment as advisers to the Thai broadcasting authorities, setting up a training school for radio producers. Returning to London in April 1974, Kathryn made her name as a presenter of several World Service news and current affairs programmes, also doing stints as a presenter of Woman’s Hour and The World Tonight on Radio 4.
In the 1980s, when she was a foreign correspondent in south-east Asia, her most profound pieces came from repeated visits to Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia, with the region still reeling from war and the murderous Khmer Rouge years. Most of Kathryn’s Guardian output related to politics and conflict in Egypt and Israel/Palestine.
Always up for new adventures, in her 60s she gained a degree in Russian (from the University of Westminster), inspired by the appearance of Russian relatives via her daughter-in-law Anya Fadina, to whom I was married for 20 years. A spell with BBC Monitoring at Caversham Park, Reading, and in Moscow was followed by work translating contemporary Russian literature.
Before journalism, in the mid 60s, Kathryn had been a researcher for the Labour MP and later party leader Michael Foot, doing much work on his biography of Aneurin Bevan. After the Tony Blair years, she found her socialist instincts rekindled by the rise of Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum, and even started attending Momentum meetings in south-east London.
She is survived by Jack, me, and three grandchildren, Sasha, Maria and Wilbur.
