Anne Sharpley

Anne Sharpley (1928-1989) was an English journalist.

In the 1940s, she attended art school in York. While there, she won a Vogue magazine competition, which led to a career in journalism.[1] During the 1960s, she was an investigative reporter with London's Evening Standard.[1]

She was known for scooping other reporters with her account of Winston Churchill's funeral, by vandalising a telephone after filing it, thereby delaying her rivals' reports.[2] She reputedly told Ann Leslie that a female foreign correspondent should:[3]

First, sleep with the resident Reuters correspondent and then with the chief of police. That way you'll pick up stories before anyone else.

She appeared as a castaway on the BBC Radio programme Desert Island Discs on 2 January 1967.[4]

Memorial in St John's Lodge Garden

Six photographs of her, five in a 1961 series by Ida Kar and one from 1965, by Jorge Lewinski, are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery.[1] A memorial to her, in the form of a planted urn on a stone plinth, stands in St John's Lodge Garden, Regent's Park, London.[5] The plinth is inscribed with the words:[6]

In affectionate
memory of
Anne Sharpley
1928—1989
journalist
who
loved this garden

William Stevenson described how she was nicknamed "Shapley Sharpley" by Randolph Churchill.[7]