image of person or book cover 5690781251300064615.jpg
Aust. Women's Weekly, 19 Aug. 1981, p.77
Nan Musgrove Nan Musgrove i(A147210 works by)
Born: Established: 1912 ;
Gender: Female
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BiographyHistory

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:

Most Referenced Works

Notes

  • Harry M. Miller and Computicket

    Nan Musgrove was the author of a newspaper article on Harry M. Miller, published in the Sunday Telegraph (28 March 1982) shortly before Miller stood trial on fraud charges as a result of the collapse of Computicket. While Musgrove herself does not seem to have been drawn into any investigations, Ita Buttrose, then editor of the paper, was called in front of the NSW Supreme Court to answer the question of whether the article was an example of 'trial by press'.

    See:

    'Miller Article Was Not Trial by Press, Editor Says', The Age, 28 April 1982, p.3.

Last amended 14 Oct 2015 16:10:32
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