Anne Leuchars

Anne Leuchars (born 2 August 1953) is an English former broadcaster, journalist and news reader who has worked for the BBC and ITN. A graduate of the University of Liverpool, she began her journalistic career at the Coventry Evening Telegraph and Bristol Evening Post newspapers. Leuchars then worked on regional television news/magazine programmes and then spent ten years at ITN as a newsreader and reporter. She went on to work at Northumberland National Park in Hexham as its information officer.

Early life Leuchars was born in Kampala, Uganda on 2 August 1953. She is the daughter of a tropical forester who was working for the Forestry Commission in Uganda at the time of her birth. Leuchars was brought up in Uganda until she and her family moved to England when she was nine. She was educated at Farnham Girls' Grammar School and graduated from the University of Liverpool with a Bachelor of Arts honours degree in geography. and later at the Bristol Evening Post newspaper as a reporter and specialist in theatre drama criticism from July 1978 until 1979. Leuchars reported on events such as terrorist bombings in Coventry, the 1980 St Pauls riot in Bristol and at an army camp on Salisbury Plain. Leuchars also worked at Central Television in Nottingham because she wanted an area that produced more news and was the presenter of Mary Chipperfield and Friends. Leuchars read her first news bulletin for ITN in August 1983 as her colleague Norman Rees was on assignment abroad, and the last bulletin she read was broadcast on 11 October 1992. She covered royal events such as the visit of Princess Anne to The Gambia and Upper Volta in 1984, the 1986 wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson from the village of Dummer, Hampshire, and the four-day visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales to Hungary in 1990. Leuchars also reported on the 1984 United States presidential election, The Troubles, the Hungerford massacre, Pan Am Flight 103, bombing raids in Africa and on the Contras in Nicaragua.

Leuchars went freelance and began a two-year part-time conservation course at the University of Oxford. the six-part series Big Business on Yorkshire Television, the Anglia Television countryside programme Countrywide, and the eight-week Granada Television environmental series The Big Green Boat Show during the 1990s. Becoming interested in the environment, Leuchars returned to television, stepping in for Carol Malia on BBC Look North for three months in late 1998. In 2015, Leuchars released a walking book on hiking with her friend Debby Waldron called You Take the High Road; Northumbrian Walks.