Nancy (Nan) Musgrove was raised in Newcastle, Singleton, and Wingham, following the various appointments of her clergyman father. Nan was one of four children of the Rev. Percy de Laure Musgrove and his wife, Muriel Thacker: Charles, Richard, Nancy, and Meryl. Charles became a banker and Richard a public servant, while Meryl married (in 1949) a Mr Kimball Cottrell-Dormer, and moved to Tasmania (where she has not been traced further).
When Nan was born, her father was in charge of Wickham Parish in a suburb of Newcastle, which he held from 1910. After a move to Singleton from 1919, the family returned Wingham in 1921, when she was nine years old, when her father accepted the offer of St Matthews Church of England, Wingham, which he had briefly held in 1909-1910. Nan was educated at the Wingham Superior Public School (until 1924), Taree High School (from 1925), and Metropolitan Business College, Sydney (from around 1933) where the speed of her typing and her success in exams was used in advertisements for the business.
Her father died on 27 December 1936, and her mother subsequently moved to Turramurra. Nan had been living in Sydney since she began attending the Metropolitan Business College in around 1933: she appears to have left the college in 1935 after passing her senior exams, but her first few years of work have not yet been traced. By 1943, however, she was working in Canberra as a journalist for both the Truth and the Daily Mirror where she produced the Parliamentary Notes, among other pieces.
Nan Musgrove's real prominence as a journalist in Australia, however, is as a television critic, a job she took up from almost the moment at which television appeared in Australia in 1956: she began writing 'Television Parade' for the Australian Women's Weekly in 1957. (According to Susan Bye, it had been written by the owner's son, Clyde Packer, from its inception in November 1956, before Musgrove took it over.)
In 1978, she left Australia (where she has been working as news editor for the Australian Women's Weekly) for London, where she took up the post of London editor for the magazine. She was still working for them at the time of the wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer, an experience she reported in some detail for the magazine ('My (Royal) Week'.) No further work after this point has been traced as yet.
Sources:
- Bye, Susan. 'Watching Television in Australia: A Story of Innocence and Experience', Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 4.4 (2007): 65-83.
- 'My (Royal) Week', Australian Women's Weekly, 19 August 1981, pp.75, 77.
- 'Personal', Wingham Chronicle, 16 September 1921, p.4.
- 'Personal', Wingham Chronicle, 20 September 1949, p.2.
- 'Rector of Wingham Passes On', Wingham Chronicle, 5 January 1937, p.2.
- 'Wonderful M.B.C. Students' [advertisement], Sydney Morning Herald, 3 November 1934, p.29.
