My friend Lorna Birchley, who has died aged 60, was an award-winning journalist with BBC news and current affairs programmes. Lorna worked with investigative programmes such as Face the Facts, where she helped to uncover the BSE scandal, and as a producer for Panorama and Newsnight, but she will be remembered for her early spirit in defending the rights of people with disabilities at work.
In 1982, Lorna, a trainee with the Westminster Press group, was sacked from her post at the Middlesex Advertiser when the company claimed she had failed to fill in her application form correctly by not disclosing her type 1 diabetes.
Lorna refused to accept this and her colleagues mounted a successful strike to reinstate her. Lorna’s resilience and determination in that dispute were an inspiration to many trade union activists and it was concerted action like this that paved the way for employment laws banning such discrimination.
On the picket line, she met a fellow journalist, Dick Bower, and they married in 1988. They had a daughter, Lizzie, born in 1993.
Lorna was born in Hillingdon, west London, the youngest daughter of Philip Birchley, a former police officer who became clerk at Uxbridge Magistrates Court, and his wife, Alma (nee Bird), who was a nurse until having her family. Lorna was academically gifted. She attended Bishopshalt grammar school in Hillingdon, but aged 13, she was diagnosed with diabetes, an illness that was to severely disrupt her studies. Despite that, she completed her degree in American studies at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.
After Westminster Press, she worked in BBC local radio, and moved to Radio 4’s In Touch programme, where she campaigned for the rights of blind and partially sighted people at work. Next she joined Radio 4’s investigation programme Face the Facts, where she worked on the story of BSE, a scoop which opened the doors to the BBC’s television current affairs programmes.
She went on to work for Panorama, interviewing the defecting KGB colonel and British secret agent Oleg Gordievsky, and covering the withdrawal of Soviet troops from eastern Europe. She also enjoyed stints at BBC Millbank, handling Westminster political stories. But as her health deteriorated, she had to give up her career.
She had pioneering treatment at Hammersmith hospital, where she had a kidney transplant donated by her sister. While she could, she continued to work as head of communications for the charity Classics for All, which campaigns for Latin and Greek to be taught in state schools.
Lorna will be remembered in many newsrooms as a journalist of impeccable integrity, whose commitment to justice went hand in hand with a determination to get the facts absolutely right.
She is survived by her husband and daughter, and by a brother, Philip, and sister, Flicka.
