Carol Sarler, who has died aged 70 with an obstructed bowel, was my friend and sometime journalist colleague for nearly five decades, ample time for me to admire the energy, empathy and bloodymindedness that made her special as both reporter and columnist and the generosity, loyalty and magnetism that many will sorely miss.
She wrote for newspapers broadsheet and tabloid, rightwing and left (many times for the Guardian) on subjects great and small. Her 11-page 1991 Sunday Times Magazine report on Romanian orphanages was probably her masterpiece, graphically detailing the horrors of neglect, cruelty and racism but, typically, she didn’t stint in criticising the soft-hearted but soft-brained who sent “aid” that was often worse than useless.
Carol was an enemy of what she regarded as soppiness. As a woman in her 60s she contrasted her own generation’s feminism “all about what women could do” with “today’s ninny version all about what women can’t do, the ridiculous MeToo brigade”. She also argued that treating all rapes as the same and giving rape victims anonymity was wrong. It was what made successful prosecutions so rare. Such views did not make her universally popular, which was just fine.
For a couple of generations on the standup circuit she was, thanks to her “absurd but enduring fondness for comedians”, a hero. In the 1980s, in this newspaper, she became the first broadsheet reviewer of standup; on the Edinburgh Fringe she acted as catalyst, enabler and supplier of drinks, conversation and hospitality. With Jo Brand, Arthur Smith and others at the Comedy Store in London, she staged fundraisers to send much-needed play therapists to Romania.
She was born in Hong Kong, to Tegwyn (nee Ace) and Eric Sarler. Her father was a major in the Royal Army Pay Corps, who was stationed in Hanover and then Benghazi before the family returned to the UK when Carol was eight. She did O-levels at Farnham girls’ grammar school, A-levels at Guildford Tech and later a sociology degree at Goldsmiths in London.
Her first job was on the weekly girls’ magazine Petticoat. After a brief stint in Australia with her then-husband Andy Cowell, during which their daughter, Flynn, was born, she returned to London in 1973. Soon she was single, and from that point onwards, she and Flynn, a journalist turned teacher, lived together as a brilliant two-woman team, joined 10 years ago by Flynn’s daughter, Milly. They, along with Carol’s sister, Biddy, survive her.
