Annie Roycroft, Ireland’s first female newspaper editor, working for the County Down Spectator, is born on May 2, 1926, in Bangor, County Down, Northern Ireland.

Born Annie Roslyn Roycroft, she is the fifth of six children born to Tom Roycroft of County Cork and Annie Stephens of County Kerry. Her father works in the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), which is what prompts the move to County Down. She gets her education at Bangor Central Public Elementary School and Technical College before going on to get a job with the local newspaper, the County Down Spectator in 1941.

Roycroft begins her career with the County Down Spectator as a junior office assistant but shows the instincts of a journalist and learns journalistic skills by typing up the reports dictated by the newspaper’s journalists. She begins submitting local news stories and in 1952 she is taken on as a journalist despite misgivings among the teams locally about a woman working in the field.

Roycroft then takes a break working as a clerk for North Down Borough Council before being asked to return as the editor for the County Down Spectator. A member of the National Union of Journalists, so that she knows how to pay her journalists properly, she has a reputation of standing her ground during reporting of the Troubles. She leaves County Down and her role as editor in 1983 when she marries Joe Stephens and eventually moves to Cork.

Roycroft is very involved in the Church of Ireland. She is a Sunday school teacher from the age of sixteen. When she moves to Cork, she turns her time to working with the church.

Roycroft dies in Beaumont, Cork, on January 11, 2019. She is predeceased by her husband. She writes her memoirs, Memoirs of a Scribbler, in 1995. She is remembered in the book Bangor in the Eighties which is dedicated to her.

(Photo: From “Annie Stephens obituary: One of Ireland’s first female newspaper editors,” The Irish Times, http://www.irishtimes.com, February 16, 2019)