The Daily Mirror was famous for promoting women journalists, such as Marje Proops and Felicity Green. Less well known, but just as significant, was Doreen Spooner, reputed to be the first female photographer to have a staff job on a popular paper.
Now 88, and almost 30 years after retiring from the Mirror, she has just written her autobiography, Camera Girl (an ironic choice of title, as will become clear).*
She tells of her various assignments, which included a variety of hard news stories, features portraits and fashion shoots.
Spooner was as much at home taking pictures in Northern Ireland during the troubles as she was snapping scantily clad models in the studio.
Newspapers were in her blood: her father, Len, was art editor of the Daily Herald. After a college course and a brief spell with a photo agency, she joined the Mirror in 1949 and soon after won an award for her portrait of playwright George Bernard Shaw at his garden gate.
She left to freelance, first in America and then in Paris. She met and married another photographer, Pierre Vandeputte-Manevy, had three children and returned to London in the late 1950s.
Marital difficulties, exacerbated by financial problems, persuaded Spooner to go back to work and she regained her Mirror position.
It was in the summer of 1963, during the Profumo affair, that she landed her first front page scoop, a candid shot of Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies in a pub before they gave evidence in the trial of Stephen Ward.
She managed to get off just one shot before she realised the landlord had spotted her. Before he approached, she removed the film and hid it inside her coat.
“I knew in my gut I’d got it,” she told the Sunday Mirror. “It’s easy to take photos – but so much harder to get ‘the picture’, the image that somehow captures the essence of the people in the frame.
“But right there in my lens I’d seen it – Christine Keeler, eyes down, fragile, and Mandy Rice-Davies looking straight ahead in a cocky blonde beehive. I’d got the contrast of personalities”.
Spooner was also relieved that the byline no longer said, as it had when she first joined the paper, “by Camera Girl Doreen Spooner”. She said: “That was a bloody cheek. I think they thought it endearing, but I wasn’t having it”.
She also talked of male-dominated Fleet Street being “Testosterone Alley”, saying “I like to think I played a small part in changing attitudes – never waving a feminist flag, just by getting on with my job...
“The excitement was intoxicating. I loved the buzz involved in creating a paper and getting it out to every corner of Britain”.
Among those jobs was coverage of the miners’ strike, the Greenham Common protests and the Zeebrugge disaster in 1987 when the car ferry, the Herald of Free Enterprise, capsized, killing 193 people.
Spooner took pictures of “poor traumatised people, lying in their hospital beds, poleaxed by the horror that had befallen them”.
She is, naturally enough, happier to recall less stressful assignments in which she took photos of celebrities. Some, however, were anything but helpful subjects.
Albert Einstein, for instance, “wasn’t a happy bunny”, and Sophia Loren “never cracked a smile”, although she looked beautiful all the same.
Several examples of her portfolio can be found here on the Mirror site and also on the BBC website, which includes a superb portrait of composer Leonard Bernstein.
Spooner did a great deal of studio work too. According to William Boot, who may not have been the most reliable of sources, a female model once remarked: “You never mind getting your kit off for Doreen. It’s like undressing in front of your granny”.
*Camera Girl by Doreen Spooner with Alan Clark (Mirror Books) can be ordered here, with free delivery.
