Nan Winton was born Nancy Wigginton in Portsmouth on 6 November 1925, the youngest of four children. She left school at 15 to run the household after her mother died. During World War II, she joined the Women’s Land Army, becoming a drill sergeant.
After the war, she toured Italy with a theatre company to entertain the troops and gained a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. The BBC spotted her working as a presenter at the Ideal Home Exhibition and hired her to co-present Information Desk, a programme to answer viewers’ questions, and Mainly for Women, a daytime television magazine show.
Winton was a BBC TV continuity announcer from 1958 to 1961 and also worked as a journalist on Panoramaand Town and Around.
In June 1960, she became the first female newsreader to read the national news on BBC television (reading the weekday 6 pm news and Sunday evening bulletins) as a response to rivals ITN, who had a female newscaster, Barbara Mandell, from its launch in 1955.
She was removed from the role – without explanation – in March 1961. According to the BBC, audience reaction at that time indicated that women were considered too frivolous to read serious news and that objectivity was associated with masculinity.
Nan moved to ITV as a television and radio news reporter and interviewer and remained the only woman to have read the national news on BBC television until 1975, when Angela Rippon became the first female BBC newsreader to be appointed permanently.
Winton died on 11 May 2019, aged 93, three days after a fall at her house in Dorset. The cause of her death was given as congestive heart failure, hypertension, and frailty of old age.
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In June 1960, she became the first female newsreader to read the national news on BBC television (reading the weekday 6 pm news and Sunday evening bulletins) as a response to rivals ITN, who had a female newscaster, Barbara Mandell, from its launch in 1955.
