Lynda Murdin

It was a love of the theatre, instilled by reviewing productions at Hull New Theatre while still a trainee reporter, that led to her becoming a drama critic and theatre feature writer on the London Evening Standard. But she was a versatile journalist and also worked as a Royal reporter, covering several state visits abroad by the Queen, notably to China which was the first by a British sovereign, in 1986.  

Having a good shorthand speed, her first assignments on the Standard were to report cases at the Old Bailey, where she covered the trials of many notorious criminals.  

Miss Murdin was born in Hull, the only child of Harold and Olive – known to everyone as Mollie – Murdin. Her father worked for Reckitt and Colman in their Dettol department and her mother was a silver service waitress, something Miss Murdin was always very proud of.

She was brought up in East Hull where she was educated at Cavendish Primary School then Newland High School for Girls, and began her career in journalism as a trainee reporter on the Hull Daily Mail in the early 1970s, before going on to Fleet Street where she spent most of her career.

In the 1990s she returned to East Yorkshire to help care for her elderly parents, until her father died in 2002 and her mother died in December 2009 aged 100.

Miss Murdin set up home near Market Weighton and continued to work as a freelance journalist, writing features for national publications including the Daily Telegraph and The Times, as well as the Yorkshire Post.

She was a very thoughtful person with a fine sense of humour, but she was also a very private person and always kept in the background, never pushing herself into the limelight.

As a lover of the arts in general away from her working life she was involved with the Friends of the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull, and was a keen opera and theatre-goer, usually with various friends.

One of her great joys was hearing Pavarotti sing and she visited Milan Opera Festival some years ago.

She never missed the pantomime at York Theatre Royal.

Miss Murdin also appreciated wines and was a member of the Hull branch of the Yorkshire Sommeliers. She had also been secretary of OSPREY – Osteoporosis Research in East Yorkshire – which was founded in 1992 to raise money for research into the brittle bone disease.

She had only relatively recently retired from full-time work, although she worked part-time for a while for the Holderness Gazette.

In retirement she had planned to travel, which was one of her great loves, but she was taken ill while in Cyprus in December last year and died in Dove House Hospice, Hull.

Her funeral will be held on Monday at 2.30pm, at Chanterlands Crematorium, in Hull.