# Melanie McFadyean

Melanie McFadyean (24 November 1950 – 16 March 2023) was a British journalist and lecturer. She wrote for a wide range of papers, including The Guardian, The Observer, The Sunday Times and The Independent, particularly about asylum, immigration and human rights issues.
In the 1980s, McFadyean was a notable advice columnist for young people, serving as agony aunt (1983–1986) of Just Seventeen teen magazine, and going on to become editor of The Guardian newspaper's "Young Guardian" page. In her career as an investigative journalist, she was the recipient of awards such as the Amnesty International UK Media Award and the Bar Council's Legal Reporting Award. Also an educator, she worked as a part-time lecturer in journalism at City University, London.

## Early life

Melanie McFadyean was born in London, England, on 24 November 1950, the second daughter of Marion (née Guttman) and Colin McFadyean. Her father was an international business lawyer who served as a Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve during World War II, and was later recruited as a naval interrogator by Ian Fleming (creator of James Bond) to Britain's Naval Intelligence Division. At the end of World War II, Colin became head of the section and was involved in reading the terms of surrender to Admiral Karl Dönitz (Hitler's successor) in Flensburg.
McFadyean's mother, Marion, was a German-Jewish refugee and artist from the prominent Dresden banking family who fled to England from Nazi Germany in 1937. During World War II, she worked for a unit, forging documents for use behind enemy lines, but would later earn her living in everything from picture restoration to garden design.
McFadyean's parents were married from 1940 until 1960, after which her father married the post-war BBC television announcer Mary Malcolm who became known for her spoonerisms. McFadyean wrote about the struggles faced by her father in later life to cope with her stepmother's debilitating dementia and the disease in general.
McFadyean was educated at two all-girls independent boarding schools, at Sherborne School for Girls in North Dorset initially, before being expelled after a year, about which she recalled: "It was such a degenerate and lawless place that I had to go in search of the rules in order to break them. It took me two and a half years to get expelled." She then joined her elder sister at the former Cranborne Chase School, near Tisbury, Wiltshire, and later graduated from the University of Leeds with a first-class BA degree in English in 1974, followed by an MA.

## Career

After McFadyean left university in 1974 and returned to London, she had various jobs as a waitress, office girl, market researcher on trains and youth worker, before teaching art at a school in Hackney, East London. She switched to teaching English at Hackney College of Further Education in 1976. From the late 1970s, she contributed news articles to Womens Voice (1972–1982), a monthly socialist-feminist newspaper/magazine and organisation that fought for women's liberation. She also went to Belfast in 1979, to understand and write about women's lives in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
Working with her close friend Bert MacIver, McFadyean was involved in the launch of his monthly teen music magazine Kicks (1981–82). Receiving 12,000 letters a year in her postbag, she was the popular '80s agony aunt for the bestselling British teen-girl magazine Just Seventeen, aka J-17, from its inception in 1983 until 1986. Her "Dear Melanie" advice column brought comfort and practical advice to otherwise uninformed teenage girls (and sometimes boys). She supplied the introduction to the 1987 British AIDS education leaflet Love Carefully: Use a condom, with a cartoon strip, and statements from celebrities, which was given a second edition in 1990.
After 1986, McFadyean worked at The Guardian for five years helping other budding journalists, such as Nigel Fountain, Jay Rayner and Sarah Bailey, publish their pieces as commissioning editor of "Young Guardian". She also wrote articles for the paper. In one of her early articles in 1988, she remarked that "I'm amazed you can remember things that happened in 1896" when she interviewed her 100-year-old grandmother, Lady McFadyean. The piece is replete with her centenarian grandmother's reminiscences of the campaigning suffragettes and the deadly "Great War", the early term for World War I.
From 1991, McFadyean freelanced for The Guardian and in television, radio, and mostly in print for numerous newspapers, such as The Observer, The Independent, The Independent on Sunday, The Sunday Times, The Mail on Sunday, The Daily Telegraph, Daily Express, and Daily Mirror. She also contributed to many magazines and organisations, including The Guardian Weekly, The Sunday Times Magazine, Times Higher Education, New Society, New Statesman, City Limits, Company, London Review of Books, Granta, openDemocracy, Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Honey, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Elle, and The Oldie (for the latter writing a column called "Pearls of Wisdom").
McFadyean conducted numerous interviews with notable campaigners, celebrities and writers during the course of her journalistic career. From the late 1980s for The Guardian and "Young Guardian", she interviewed British women's health campaigner Vera Houghton, British comedian and actor Lenny Henry, and American writer Joyce Carol Oates.
In the early 1990s for The Independent, McFadyean conducted a series of "How We Met" interviews with Michael Moorcock, Andrea Dworkin, Ronnie Wood, Jo Wood, Ruby Wax, Ed Bye, Jonathan Meades, Harry Dodson, Ian McAlley, Shirley Conran, Magenta Devine, David Okuefuna, Paul Foot, and Ann Whelan. McFadyean also interviewed for the paper British actress Julie Christie, Kurdish activist Sheri Laizer, and Lisa Taylor, one of the two sisters wrongly imprisoned for the murder of Alison Shaughnessy.
After the 1990s, as The Oldie "Pearls of Wisdom" columnist McFadyean interviewed veteran British travel writer and novelist Colin Thubron, Lindisfarne island resident Reverend Canon Kate Tristram, British actor Dudley Sutton, and British author and illustrator Shirley Hughes. Others interviewed by McFadyean for the magazine were British journalist and columnist Katharine Whitehorn, British director and producer Stephen Frears, British medical doctor and politician Richard Taylor, and on YouTube British activist Erin Pizzey. McFadyean was herself interviewed by the British historian and espionage writer Helen Fry in relation to her parents' top-secret World War II past.
The focus of much of McFadyean's journalism was on refugees and asylum seekers, and she spoke of being initially inspired by her own family story: "My mother was a refugee from Nazi Germany. She escaped but she had an aunt and an uncle who didn't, so I grew up with it, knowledge of refugees. But the thing that got me in to it was someone rang me up and asked if I had heard this story about children disappearing... I have worked as a teacher, as an agony aunt and always had an affiliation with children and the idea that they were going missing..." She wrote about the 2010 hunger strike by women detainees at the Yarl's Wood Immigration Removal Centre, a detention centre for foreign nationals prior to their deportation from the UK. McFadyean also highlighted other issues, such as foreign prisoners in British jails, the detention and deportation of child migrants, and whether Gulf War syndrome in soldiers was the result of exposure to chemical warfare agents.
From 2001 to 2015, McFadyean was a part-time lecturer in journalism at City University, London. She ran the Investigative MA and later taught on the Magazine MA. Committed to non-violent conflict resolution and moved by the plight of asylum seekers and refugees, which she wrote especially about in 2006 for The Guardian and elsewhere, she embarked on a Conflict Resolution in Divided Societies MA, which offered a multidisciplinary, comparative study of national, ethnic and religious conflicts in deeply divided societies, at King's College London. In 2010, she also wrote about the International State Crime Initiative shining the spotlight on state-perpetrated crime in the Times Higher Education magazine.

### Television

McFadyean made two appearances on the British television review programme Did You See...? (Season 9, Episodes 12 and 19), presented by Ludovic Kennedy and first aired by BBC2 on 17 January and 20 March 1988. In episode 12 of Did You See...?, she reviewed the British television film The Vision (1988) which starred Dirk Bogarde who uncovers sinister motives behind a new satellite TV channel. In episode 19, she looked at the job opportunities open to television presenters in commercials and corporate videos.
McFadyean worked on The Lost Boy – part of the Cutting Edge series, about the disappearance of British toddler Ben Needham, which she repeatedly returned to in radio and print, broadcast by Channel 4 on 10 March 1997. He was the 21-month-old child who vanished from the Greek island of Kos in 1991. Despite numerous claims of sightings, his whereabouts remain unknown. Her reporting on the case was widely commented upon and commended by other journalists.
McFadyean co-wrote, with Nick Davies, The Boy Business (Season 1, Episode 98) of the Network First documentary about British paedophiles who prey on homeless and vulnerable children, broadcast by ITV on 26 March 1997. As the former advice columnist for Just Seventeen, McFadyean appeared on I Love 1983 (Season 1, Episode 4) of I Love the '80s nostalgia series, presented by Roland Rat and broadcast by BBC Two on 10 February 2001. She was consultant producer on the documentary film Guilty by Association, produced by Fran Robertson and broadcast by BBC One on 7 July 2014.

### Radio

McFadyean's BBC Radio 4 work included Thirty Years and More, a five-part series on couples who have been together for three decades and more, produced by Bob Dickinson and first broadcast from 20 to 24 June 2005. Three of the episodes were also aired from 21 March to 4 April 2006. Five months prior to the first broadcast, McFadyean had written an article about long-term relationships in The Guardian: "When people who have been together a long time talk about what has kept them so, there is usually something there you'd call love." She also made Who Was Opal?, a documentary radio programme about the controversial American nature writer and diarist Opal Whiteley, whose childhood diary became an international bestseller in the 1920s, also produced by Bob Dickinson and broadcast on 5 January 2010. The overview of her life includes interviews with experts on Whiteley.

### Awards

In 2001, McFadyean won an Amnesty International UK Media Award for her piece "Human traffic" published the same year in The Guardian about unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, and in 2007, she was shortlisted by Amnesty International for her 2006 article "£ ... per incident: suicides in immigration detention" in the London Review of Books. She also served on the panel of judges for the Amnesty International Media Awards.
In 2014, McFadyean's work as part of an eight-month investigation into the use of the controversial legal doctrine of "joint enterprise" in murder trials resulted in a report for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that won the Bar Council Legal Reporting Award. The investigation revealed that at least 1,800 people had been prosecuted for homicide using the little-known and unclear law of joint enterprise.

## Publications

McFadyean wrote a father-daughter contribution, "Looking for Daddy", for the anthology Fathers: Reflections by Daughters (Virago, 1983), edited by Ursula Owen. She co-wrote, with Eileen Fairweather and Roisin McDonough, Only The Rivers Run Free: Northern Ireland: The Women's War (Pluto Press, 1984), described by The Women's Review of Books as "passionate, compelling and absolutely necessary". She also co-authored, with Margaret Renn, a compilation of Margaret Thatcher and Conservative quotes entitled Thatcher's Reign: A Bad Case of the Blues (Chatto & Windus, 1984), arranged and annotated by subject and date.
McFadyean published a collection of nine short stories illustrated by Anne Magill and entitled Hotel Romantika and Other Stories (Virago Upstarts, 1987) for teenagers – "a collection which captures the humour, chagrin and sheer exuberance of finding one's way in the world." She published Drugs Wise: A Practical Guide for Concerned Parents About the Use of Recreational Drugs (Icon Books, 1997), which aims to encourage drug users and their parents to speak about their experiences as well as offering practical professional advice.
McFadyean co-authored and researched, with David Rowland, on the private finance initiative (PFI) process for the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust in relation to consultation procedures in local PFI projects, published as three reports for the Menard Press in 2002: PFI vs Democracy? The Case of Birmingham's Hospitals, PFI vs Democracy? School Governors and the Haringey Schools PFI Scheme, and Selling off the Twilight Years: The Transfer of Birmingham's Homes for Older People.

## Personal life

In 1990, McFadyean had a son with her long-term partner Malcolm Blair, a builder whom she met in Hackney and married in 2007. She wrote an evocative and picturesque travelogue about their trip to his native New Zealand to usher in the new millennium when she reviewed the Aucklander Charlotte Grimshaw's debut crime novel, Provocation (1999), and second upcoming novel, Guilt (2000), for The Guardian. In a unique musical collaboration, McFadyean and her son provided the opening mother-son voice-overs for the jazz-inspired fourth track, "Return To Patagonia", of Lost Horizons, the second studio album from the British electronic music duo Lemon Jelly, released on 7 October 2002. The opening lines were sampled from the idyllic Swallows and Amazons (1974) British film adaptation of the 1930 children's adventure novel of the same name by The Guardian journalist-turned-novelist Arthur Ransome. The album was certified gold on 25 July 2003 by the British Phonographic Industry for shipments exceeding 100,000 copies, and nominated the same year for the Mercury Prize. It was also nominated for the BRIT Awards 2004.

### Charity work

From 2011 to 2023, McFadyean was a trustee of the Baobab Centre for Young Survivors in Exile, a charity that offers a clinical and support service to young asylum seekers and refugees: children, adolescents and young adults and sometimes to parents and families. In 2011, she wrote about the charity's clients in The Guardian: "You would never guess that these youngsters have been trafficked, caught up in wars, forced to be child soldiers, seen their parents murdered, been betrayed by them or never even known them." McFadyean also collaborated with Fran Robertson in 2015 on the short film Ade’s Story – part of the charity's Baobab Voices interview series, about the trafficking of children in the UK.

### Illness and death

In 2005, McFadyean was first diagnosed with breast cancer after a routine mammogram, and wrote a witty and incisive cancer journal of her ordeal from onset to remission in The Guardian that was widely commented upon. With comedic Monroesque élan, she recounted her novel experience as an arresting platinum blonde during the course of her chemotherapy treatment: "I have dark hair and had I not had cancer and gone bald, I would never have known how much fun it is being blond. I bought a cheap but stylish platinum wig from World Of Wigs. My son said I looked like Pauline Fowler in EastEnders. I sometimes cover my driving mistakes with rude hand gestures, but as a platinum blonde I had no need."
In 2006, McFadyean gave the reasons for writing the cancer diary the previous year and wished that people with other cancers would write about them more. She explained in The Guardian: "I took swiftly to print when I got it and wrote a piece for The Guardian. This was part exorcism, part because as frightening as it is to be healthy one day and have the threat of death hanging over you the next, the cancer journey isn't dull."
Refreshingly reflective of her own non-violent stance on international conflicts, McFadyean's uplifting metaphor for cancer as a journey, not a battle, won wide acclaim: "Why should people with cancer be expected to take up arms? It is better to see cancer as a journey. Everyone says that being positive helps you to come through, and being positive during a journey seems easier to me than being positive during a war in which the enemy is all around you."
In 2012, McFadyean published a piece about cancer underfunding in Britain for The Guardian: "Two things come to mind. The first is that, if a disease is on the increase, so should programmes to treat it be on the increase. The solution is a thought I return to time and again."
In 2019, McFadyean had recurrent cancer in the form of metastatic breast cancer that had spread to her lungs, liver and brain, but which appeared to be in remission and under control. She emailed a letter to The Guardian critical of the American poet and essayist Anne Boyer's harsh breast cancer treatment and the heartless privatisation of cancer care in the US compared to the UK's National Health Service (NHS): "If any more of the NHS is sold off US style, our medical world will lose the heart that contributes to keeping so many of us alive." By contrast, she had been treated with patience, respect and empathy (even when she had been difficult) by the NHS: "My treatment has been delivered by people whose medical expertise is underpinned by something that feels, dare I say it, like a kind of love."
Melanie McFadyean died in London, England, from cancer on 16 March 2023, at the age of 72.