Her brilliant career was ended by RSI
BARBARA DALZELL — her London friends called her Dazzle — was a trailblazer for women in the once male-dominated world of the newspaper sub-editors’ desk. Coming from New Zealand in 1972 she moved rapidly through newspaper offices to become the first woman chief sub-editor on any London daily paper.
In almost every office Dazzle was the first woman sub to be employed. Received wisdom had been that the subs’ desk was a place of a male discourse too brutal for feminine sensibilities. If there was any truth in that, it was not a problem for Dazzle, who could effortlessly respond to banter — and any hint of real sexism would be contemptuously dismissed.
She could also shift impressive quantities of alcohol and tobacco, a gift that sadly contributed to her death from throat cancer in May, at the age of only 57.
Dazzle was a born sub; not just a grammatical pedant but a technician, a component in a fast-running machine. She always got her pages through on time — and pages that “fitted”, in the old hot metal sense, that needed little revising work. This was partly due to her positive relations with the printers, whom she treated with proper respect.
Dazzle got her first job at the New Zealand Press Association. Aged 19 she married Andy MacIver and they both went to work on the Timaru Herald — where she was the first woman sub-editor.
When they came to England, Dazzle became the first woman sub on the Bedford County Times, as she was when, within a year, she was taken on at the London office of the group that owned it, Westminster Press. There she was a militant Mother of the NUJ Chapel and an active member of London Central Branch.
From 1974 she had a spell on the Guardian — as the second woman sub on the paper, as far as can be discovered — and from there went to the FT, where in 1984 she became the first woman chief sub — not bad for a 34-year-old non-graduate Kiwi woman on a very Oxbridge, public-school staff.
In 1986 the FT made her production editor of its new weekend supplement. It might have looked like promotion, but Dazzle missed the buzz of daily production and her rapid rise came to a stop. After the paper went over to computerised production in 1987 she contracted severe RSI and endured pain in her arms for the rest of her life. She had to stop work in 1989. She was only 38, but never worked again, apart from some part-time journalism teaching.
Instead she put her energy into the NUJ’s work for RSI sufferers, helping to establish a sufferers’ group and organise supportive activities.
In 1992 she semi-retired to live with her partner Sinclair Robieson, another a sub on the FT, in a flat overlooking the sea at Bexhill in Sussex.
Tim Gopsill