Nan Winton

Nancy Wigginton (6 November 1925 – 11 May 2019), known professionally as Nan Winton, was a British broadcaster, best known for being the first female newsreader to read the national news on BBC television.

Career Winton (born Nancy Wigginton) was born on 6 November 1925 in Southsea in Portsmouth, Hampshire, the youngest of the four children of the surveyor Frank Guy Wigginton and the homemaker Evelyn Caroline Frances . She left school at 15, to run the household; her mother having died. Before the end of the war, she joined the Women's Land Army, becoming a drill sergeant.

In the years after the Second World War, Winton toured Italy with a theatre company to entertain the troops and gained a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She was given the job of reading the 6pm news and weekend bulletins on Sunday evenings, in response to rivals ITN, who had a female newscaster, Barbara Mandell, from its launch in 1955. She was not the first woman to read the news on the BBC Television service: Armine Sandford broadcast on the BBC's West Region in Bristol from 1957. Winton herself recalled that she had problems with BBC editorial staff rather than the public. However, audience research concluded that viewers thought a woman reading the late news was "not acceptable". The press at the time were dismissive of Winton reading the news. She was removed from the role in March 1961. Michael Peacock was the BBC executive who sacked her. "He didn't say why", Winton recalled in 1997 "and I was furious."

After stepping down from reading the news, Winton moved to ITV in 1961, and remained a TV and radio news reporter and interviewer.

Personal life On 23 October 1948 Winton married the actor and The Rank Organisation sales representative Charles Stapley, who later appeared as Ted Hope in Crossroads. Their daughter and son were born in 1951 and 1953. She did not remarry. The cause of her death was given as congestive heart failure, hypertension, and frailty of old age.