Felicity Green (born 26 June 1926) is a British fashion journalist and former newspaper executive.
Early life and career
Green was born in June 1926 and raised in Dagenham, Essex in rooms above a bike shop. From an impoverished Jewish background, Green's father ran a local shoe shop while her mother, though deaf, was the more formidable parent. Her father was cruel to her mother, although Green, their only child, attempted to control his behaviour. She did share a love of the cinema with him, and they saw two double features together each Thursday. From the movies, Green acquired her interest in glamour and fashion.
Initially a short hand typist and secretary at ''Woman & Beauty'' in the 1940s, she was promoted to fashion editor within two years. After this she joined ''Housewife'', where she assumed the same post, and then W.S. Crawford, the advertising agency, for a time.
Mirror Group journalist
In 1955,
Hugh Cudlipp
Hubert Kinsman Cudlipp, Baron Cudlipp, OBE (28 August 1913 – 17 May 1998), was a Welsh journalist and newspaper editor noted for his work on the ''Daily Mirror'' in the 1950s and 1960s. He served as chairman of the Mirror Group group of ...
asked Green's opinion of ''Woman's Sunday Mirror'', a publication for which he was responsible. Following a severe analysis, she was hired as Fleet Street's first female associate editor. The title was short-lived, being folded into ''
Woman
A woman is an adult female human. Before adulthood, a female child or Adolescence, adolescent is referred to as a girl.
Typically, women are of the female sex and inherit a pair of X chromosomes, one from each parent, and women with functi ...
'' magazine.
Green moved on to the ''Sunday Pictorial'' (as the ''
Sunday Mirror
The ''Sunday Mirror'' is the Sunday sister paper of the ''Daily Mirror''. It began life in 1915 as the ''Sunday Pictorial'' and was renamed the ''Sunday Mirror'' in 1963. In 2016 it had an average weekly circulation of 620,861, dropping marked ...
'' was then named) in 1959 filling the same post as before. Since 1955, her immediate boss had been Lee Howard, and she became associate editor of the ''
Daily Mirror
The ''Daily Mirror'' is a British national daily Tabloid journalism, tabloid newspaper. Founded in 1903, it is part of Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN), which is owned by parent company Reach plc. From 1985 to 1987, and from 1997 to 2002, the tit ...
'' in 1961 when Howard was appointed as the newspaper's editor. Green recalled her new colleagues response to her: "They were all being as helpfully 'feminine' as they could, which was the last thing I wanted. My plan was to make the pages interesting to men, too."
Her responsibilities included women's editor, and to promote the interests of women in all areas of the newspaper's activities. Her writing for the paper included fashion, although Green wrote in 2011 that she is really more interested in style, and admitted to modelling herself on film star
Audrey Hepburn
Audrey Kathleen Hepburn ( Ruston; 4 May 1929 – 20 January 1993) was a British actress. Recognised as a film and fashion icon, she was ranked by the American Film Institute as the third-greatest female screen legend from the Classical Holly ...
. For including the miniskirts of
Mary Quant
Dame Barbara Mary Quant (11 February 1930 – 13 April 2023) was a British fashion designer and icon. She became an instrumental figure in the 1960s London-based Mod and youth fashion movements, and played a prominent role in London's Swingi ...
in the ''Mirror'', Green was effectively threatened with the sack by Cecil King, then chairman of the
International Publishing Corporation
TI Media Ltd. (formerly International Publishing Company, IPC Magazines Ltd, IPC Media and Time Inc. UK) was a consumer magazine and digital publisher in the United Kingdom, with a portfolio selling over 350 million copies each year. Most of it ...
, of which the Mirror Group of Newspapers was a part. Cudlipp, by then chairman of the Mirror Group, supported her. According to
Roy Greenslade
Roy Greenslade (born 31 December 1946) is a British author and freelance journalist, and a former professor of journalism. He worked in the UK newspaper industry from the 1960s onwards. As a media commentator, he wrote a daily blog from 2006 to ...
, Cuidlipp told Green in December 1964: "I don't understand what you're doing but I trust you. So I've decided to give you the front and back pages of the ''Mirror'' to tell our readers what the Swinging 60s are all about."
''Sex, Sense and Nonsense'', published in November 2014, is Green's anthology of her 1960s work for the ''Daily Mirror''.
Executive posts and later career
Green feels she retained a distance as a journalist and avoided being fully absorbed into the fashion industry. "Fashion is not a bloody religion, as most fashion editors seem to think it is," she told Anna Murphy of ''
The Daily Telegraph
''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a British daily broadsheet conservative newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed in the United Kingdom and internationally. It was found ...
'' in 2014. "There is a difference between fashion and clothes. One is the real stuff, which is the clothes. Then there is fashion, which is some kind of mesmeric stuff out there that persuades the world to go in certain directions rather mysteriously. It's all big business. And I'd rather people spent money on clothes than arms."
Later Green became executive women's editor across the three Mirror titles, and in 1973, the group's publicity director. She joined the newspaper's board, the first woman to achieve such a position, at this point. Green had some initial trouble, as the only woman, using the directors' lift. She felt it was impossible to inform some wholesalers who objected that she was indeed so entitled. "You can't", she told
Katharine Whitehorn
Katharine Elizabeth Whitehorn (2 March 19288 January 2021) was a British journalist, columnist, author and radio presenter. She was the first woman to have a column in ''The Observer'', which ran from 1963 to 1996 and from 2011 to 2017. She was ...
for a 1978 article, "when you are five foot one and a half." She survived at the ''Mirror'' so long "by being nice to people. Don't start arguments. People can either help or hinder you. Well, you are an idiot if you cause them to hinder you. So I'm very tactful - if you are tactful people are always ready to help you."
In 1978 she resigned after discovering that a new male journalist had been appointed to the board at £30,000, more than twice her own salary of £14,000. "Apparently, I was supposed to be honoured simply to be a director", she observed years later.
Meanwhile, in December 1977, Green joined
Vidal Sassoon
Vidal Sassoon (17 January 1928 – 9 May 2012) was a British hairstylist and businessman. He was noted for repopularising a simple, close-cut geometric hairstyle called the five-point cut, worn by famous fashion designers including Mary Quant ...
as managing director of operations in Europe and Executive Vice-President of the American company. Later she advised the board of the Telegraph and worked for the ''M&S'' (
Marks & Spencer
Marks and Spencer plc (commonly abbreviated to M&S and colloquially known as Marks & Sparks or simply Marks) is a major British multinational retailer based in London, England, that specialises in selling clothing, beauty products, home produc ...
) magazine, which included interviewing
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher (; 13 October 19258 April 2013), was a British stateswoman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party (UK), Leader of th ...
Green married the cigar importer Geoffrey Hill around 1952; the couple remained married until Hill died in 1992. She received the
OBE
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding valuable service in a wide range of useful activities. It comprises five classes of awards across both civil and military divisions, the most senior two o ...