Annie Roycroft (2 May 1926 – 11 January 2019), was Ireland's first female newspaper editor, working for the County Down Spectator.

Biography

Born Annie Roslyn Roycroft in

Bangor, County Down Bangor ( ; ) is a City status in the United Kingdom, city in County Down, Northern Ireland, on the southern side of Belfast Lough. It is within the Belfast metropolitan area and is 13 miles (22 km) east of Belfast city centre, to whic ...

, in May 1926 Roycroft was the fifth of six children born to Kerry woman Annie Stephens and her husband, Cork man Tom Roycroft. He had worked in the

Royal Irish Constabulary The Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC, ; simply called the Irish Constabulary 1836–67) was the police force in Ireland from 1822 until 1922, when all of the island was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, United Kingdom. A sep ...

which had taken him to County Down. Roycroft got her education with Bangor Central Public Elementary School and Technical College before going on to get a job with the local newspaper, the County Down Spectator in 1941. Roycroft began as a junior office assistant but showed a journalists instincts and learned journalistic skills by typing up the reports dictated by the newspapers journalists. She began submitting local news stories and in 1952 she was taken on as a journalist despite misgivings among the teams locally about a woman working in the field. She then took a break working as a clerk for North Down Rural Council before being asked to return as the editor for the Spectator. A member of the

National Union of Journalists The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) is a trade union supporting journalists in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The NUJ was founded in 1907 and has 20,693 members. It is a member of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), Trades ...

, so that she knew how to pay her journalists properly, Roycroft had a reputation of standing her ground during reporting of the

Troubles The Troubles () were an ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland that lasted for about 30 years from the late 1960s to 1998. Also known internationally as the Northern Ireland conflict, it began in the late 1960s and is usually deemed ...

. She left County Down and her role as editor in 1983 when she married Joe Stephens and eventually moved to Cork. Roycroft was very involved in the

Church of Ireland The Church of Ireland (, ; , ) is a Christian church in Ireland, and an autonomy, autonomous province of the Anglican Communion. It is organised on an all-Ireland basis and is the Christianity in Ireland, second-largest Christian church on the ...

. She had been a Sunday school teacher from the age of 16. When she moved to Cork she turned her time to working with the church. Her husband died before her and Roycroft died in Beaumont, Cork in 2019. Roycroft wrote her memoirs, ''Memoirs of a Scribbler'', in 1995. She is remembered in the book ''Bangor In The Eighties'' which is dedicated to her.

References and sources

{{DEFAULTSORT:Roycroft, Annie 1926 births 2019 deaths Irish journalists Irish women editors People from Bangor, County Down Newspaper editors from Northern Ireland Writers from County Down 20th-century women journalists from Northern Ireland 21st-century women journalists from Northern Ireland 20th-century journalists from Northern Ireland 21st-century journalists from Northern Ireland Irish women memoirists