Our friend Gill Cox, who has died aged 63 of a heart attack while being treated for cancer, was a beady-eyed, resourceful and instinctively sympathetic journalist, specialising in health issues and those human problems that come under the trade term of “agony aunt” issues.
She started her career proper at the Family Planning Association, where she learned about sexual and other health issues, leaving as its press officer to cross the street into journalism. At the publishers IPC, she led the 14-strong team that was the readers’ services department at Woman’s Own. The problem page was part of that remit, and Gill learned at the feet of Angela Willans and Claire Rayner, two stars of the genre. She began to perform frontline duties on teen magazines before becoming an agony aunt in her own right at Woman’s Realm, a post she held for nearly 20 years.
Gill was born in Ealing, west London, and brought up with her younger brother, Clive, in Southall. Their mother, Vera (nee Scarbrow), worked for Midland Bank, their father, Charles, at Sellotape and later British American Tobacco. Gill attended Bishopshalt grammar school in Hillingdon. Her first job after school, a secretarial post at Taylor Woodrow, gave her the useful skill of shorthand and an unrivalled ability to speed-type, which served her well in later years.
By 1990, as well as agony aunt at Woman’s Realm, she was additionally the magazine’s health editor and then an associate editor. “Readers talk, we listen,” she told the Guardian. “Their issues become our features and campaigns.” But the new century brought an end both to the kind of magazine in which Gill had blossomed and to the dominance of staff appointments. IPC was acquired by AOL Time Warner in 2001 and Realm was merged with Woman’s Weekly, which had no use for an in-house agony aunt. Gill, the last of that breed, moved on.
As a freelance, she wrote widely on physical and emotional health issues, always trying to expand her range and knowledge, always willing to draw candidly on her own health issues to illustrate her writing. With Sheila Dainow, she wrote two useful and friendly books, Making the Most of Yourself (1985) and Making the Most of Loving (1988). She was a regular commentator on the television magazine shows presented by Trisha Goddard. In 2009, the Health Food Manufacturers’ Association named Gill health journalist of the year. To the end of her life, she gave generously of herself to friends and readers alike.
Gill married Keith Malkin (the actor Ian Keith) in 1985. The marriage was dissolved. She is survived by a son, Dan.
