Jacky Gillott

Jacqueline Anne Gillott (24 September 1939 – 19 September 1980), was an English novelist and broadcaster.[1] She was one of Britain's first woman television reporters.

Life and career

Born in Bromley, Kent, Jacky Gillott attended University College London. She worked as a journalist for a provincial newspaper before starting a television career with Independent Television News. She later presented programmes on the BBC. She also wrote five successful novels between 1968 and 1979.[2]

She was married to the television producer John Percival, and they had two sons. They moved to a small farm in Somerset in 1972 to live as near as possible to self-sufficiency; she wrote about their experiences in a book, Providence Place (1977).

Death

In 1980, after suffering from depression and marital troubles, she took her own life at her cottage in Pitcombe, Somerset.[3][4][5]

After her death, Jacky and John's friend and neighbour John Fowles described her as "a brittle, sexy, faintly raucous persona always", but noted that underneath there was somebody "ugly, confused, uncertain – all that she didn't sound on TV or radio".[6]

Books
  • Salvage 1968
  • War Baby 1971
  • For Better, for Worse: Marriage and the Family 1971 (non-fiction)
  • A True Romance 1976
  • Crying Out Loud 1976
  • Providence Place: Animals in a Landscape 1977 (non-fiction)
  • The Head Case 1979
  • Intimate Relations and Other Stories 1980

Her journalism included the posthumously published memoir "Twelfth Man", a contribution to Michael Meyer's cricket anthology Summer Days (1981), in which she wrote: "I have cricket to thank for the healing knowledge that nothing in this world lacks a comic profile and that it is more pleasurable to laugh in company than it is to laugh alone. Thus armoured, one can overcome the hurt and disappointment of many a thing ..."[7]

References
  1. 'Miss Jacky Gillott: Journalist, broadcaster and novelist', The Times, 22 September 1980
  2. "Jacky Gillott". Britannica. Retrieved 26 June 2018.
  3. Kriwaczek, Paul (10 February 2005). "John Percival". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 June 2018.
  4. Percival, Daniel (9 February 2005). "Obituary: John Percival". The Independent. Retrieved 26 June 2018.
  5. Udall, Elizabeth (10 October 1994). "Suicide: The loved ones left behind". The Independent. Retrieved 26 June 2018.
  6. John Fowles, The Journals: Volume 2, Random House, London, 2010, pp. 245–46.
  7. Michael Meyer (editor), Summer Days: Writers on Cricket, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987 (first published by Methuen in 1981), pp. 64–72.
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