McFadyean's mother, Marion, was a German-Jewish refugee and artist from the prominent
Dresden banking family who fled to England from
Nazi Germany in 1937. During World War II, she worked for a unit, forging documents for use behind enemy lines, but would later earn her living in everything from picture restoration to garden design.[3][8][7][9][10] Her parents were married from 1940 until 1960, after which her father married the post-war
BBC television announcer
Mary Malcolm who became known for her
spoonerisms.[11][12][13] McFadyean wrote about the struggles faced by her father in later life to cope with her stepmother's debilitating
dementia and the disease in general.[14][15]
McFadyean was educated at two all-girls
independentboarding schools, at
Sherborne School for Girls in North
Dorset initially, before being expelled after a year, about which she recalled: "It was such a degenerate and lawless place that I had to go in search of the rules in order to break them. It took me two and a half years to get expelled."[16] She then joined her elder sister at the former
Cranborne Chase School, near
Tisbury, Wiltshire, and later graduated from the
University of Leeds with a first-class
BA degree in English in 1974, followed by an
MA.[3]
Career
After McFadyean left university in 1974, she returned to London and taught art at a school in
Hackney. She switched to teaching English at a further education college in the borough in 1976.[3] From the late 1970s, McFadyean contributed news articles to Womens Voice, an organisation fighting for women's liberation and socialism.[17][18][19] She also went to
Belfast in 1979, to understand and write about women's lives in
Northern Ireland during
the Troubles.[3]
Working with her close friend Bert MacIver, McFadyean was involved in the launch of his monthly teen music magazine Kicks (1981–82).[20][21] Receiving 12,000 letters a year in her postbag,[22] she was the popular '80s
agony aunt for the bestselling British teen-girl magazine Just Seventeen,[23] aka J-17, from its inception in 1983[24] until 1986. Her "Dear Melanie"
advice column brought comfort and practical advice to otherwise uninformed teenage girls (and sometimes boys).[22][25][26][27] She supplied the introduction to the 1987 British
AIDS education leaflet Love Carefully: Use a Condom, with a cartoon strip, and statements from celebrities,[28] which was given a second edition in 1990.[29]
The focus of much of McFadyean's journalism was on refugees and asylum seekers,[1] and she spoke of being initially inspired by her own family story: "My mother was a refugee from Nazi Germany. She escaped but she had an aunt and an uncle who didn't, so I grew up with it, knowledge of refugees. But the thing that got me in to it was someone rang me up and asked if I had heard this story about children disappearing… I have worked as a teacher, as an agony aunt and always had an affiliation with children and the idea that they were going missing…"[8]
From 2001 to 2015, McFadyean was a part-time lecturer in journalism at
City University, London. She ran the Investigative MA and later taught on the Magazine MA.[2][37] Moved by the plight of asylum seekers and refugees, which she wrote especially about in 2006 for The Guardian[38][39] and elsewhere,[40] she went on to study for a Conflict Resolution in Divided Societies MA, which offered a multidisciplinary, comparative study of national, ethnic and religious conflicts in deeply divided societies, at
King's College London.[2] In 2010, she also wrote about the
International State Crime Initiative shining the spotlight on state-perpetrated crime in the Times Higher Education magazine.[33][4]
Television
McFadyean made two appearances on the British television review programme Did You See...? (Season 9, Episodes 12 and 19), presented by
Ludovic Kennedy and first aired by
BBC2 on 17 January[41] and 20 March 1988.[42] In episode 12 of Did You See...?, she reviewed the British
television filmThe Vision (1988) which starred
Dirk Bogarde who uncovers sinister motives behind a new satellite TV channel.[43] In episode 19, she looked at the job opportunities open to
television presenters in commercials and corporate videos.[44] McFadyean also worked on The Lost Boy – part of the Cutting Edge series, about the disappearance of British toddler
Ben Needham, broadcast by
Channel 4 on 10 March 1997.[45][46] She co-wrote, with
Nick Davies, The Boy Business (Season 1, Episode 98) of the Network First documentary about British paedophiles who prey on homeless and vulnerable children, broadcast by
ITV on 26 March 1997.[47] She was consultant producer on the documentary film Guilty by Association, produced by Fran Robertson and broadcast by
BBC One on 7 July 2014.[48]
Radio
McFadyean's
BBC Radio 4 work included Thirty Years and More, a five-part series on couples who have been together for three decades and more, produced by Bob Dickinson and first broadcast from 20 to 24 June 2005.[49][50] Three of the episodes were also aired from 21 March to 4 April 2006.[51] Five months prior to the first broadcast, McFadyean had written an article about long-term relationships in The Guardian: "When people who have been together a long time talk about what has kept them so, there is usually something there you'd call love."[52] She also made Who Was Opal?, a documentary radio programme about the controversial American
nature writer and
diaristOpal Whiteley, whose childhood diary became an international bestseller in the 1920s, also produced by Bob Dickinson and broadcast on 5 January 2010.[53][54]
Awards
In 2001, McFadyean won an
Amnesty International UK Media Award for her piece "Human traffic" published the same year in The Guardian about unaccompanied asylum-seeking children,[55] and in 2007, she was shortlisted by
Amnesty International for her 2006 article "£ ... per incident: suicides in immigration detention" in the London Review of Books.[56][40] She also served on the panel of judges for the Amnesty International Media Awards.[57]
In 2014, McFadyean's work as part of an eight-month investigation into the use of the controversial legal doctrine of "
joint enterprise" in murder trials[35] resulted in a report for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that won the
Bar Council Legal Reporting Award. The investigation revealed that at least 1,800 people had been prosecuted for homicide using the little-known and unclear law of joint enterprise.[58][59][60]
Publications
McFadyean co-wrote, with Eileen Fairweather and Roisin McDonough, Only The Rivers Run Free: Northern Ireland: The Women's War (1984), described by The Women's Review of Books as "passionate, compelling and absolutely necessary".[61] She also co-authored, with Margaret Renn, a compilation of
Margaret Thatcher and
Conservative quotes entitled Thatcher's Reign: A Bad Case of the Blues (1984), arranged and annotated by subject and date.
In 1987, McFadyean published a collection of short stories entitled Hotel Romantika & Other Stories for the
Virago Press Upstarts imprint for teenagers,[62] In 1997, she published Drugs Wise: A Practical Guide for Concerned Parents About the Use of Recreational Drugs, which aims to encourage drug users and their parents to speak about their experiences as well as offering practical professional advice.
McFadyean co-authored and researched, with David Rowland, on the
private finance initiative (PFI) process for the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust in relation to consultation procedures in local PFI projects, published as three reports for the
Menard Press in 2002: PFI vs Democracy? The Case of Birmingham's Hospitals, PFI vs Democracy? School Governors and the Haringey Schools PFI Scheme,[63] and Selling off the Twilight Years: The Transfer of Birmingham's Homes for Older People.[4]
From 2011 to 2023, McFadyean was a trustee of the Baobab Centre for Young Survivors in Exile, a charity that offers a clinical and support service to young asylum seekers and refugees: children, adolescents and young adults and sometimes to parents and families. In 2011, she wrote about the charity's clients in The Guardian: "You would never guess that these youngsters have been trafficked, caught up in wars, forced to be child soldiers, seen their parents murdered, been betrayed by them or never even known them."[72][73][74][75]
Illness and death
In 2005, McFadyean was first diagnosed with
breast cancer, and wrote a witty and incisive
cancer journal of her ordeal from onset to remission in The Guardian: "I have dark hair and had I not had cancer and gone bald, I would never have known how much fun it is being blond. I bought a cheap but stylish platinum wig from World Of Wigs. My son said I looked like
Pauline Fowler in
EastEnders. I sometimes cover my driving mistakes with rude hand gestures, but as a platinum blonde I had no need."[76][77]
In 2006, McFadyean gave the reasons for writing the cancer journal the previous year and wished that people with other cancers would write about them more. She explained in The Guardian: "I took swiftly to print when I got it and wrote a piece for The Guardian. This was part exorcism, part because as frightening as it is to be healthy one day and have the threat of death hanging over you the next, the cancer journey isn't dull."[78]
In 2012, McFadyean followed up her original cancer diary with a second article about cancer underfunding in the
UK in The Guardian: "Two things come to mind. The first is that, if a disease is on the increase, so should programmes to treat it be on the increase. The solution is a thought I return to time and again."[79]
In 2019, McFadyean had
recurrent cancer in the form of
metastatic breast cancer that had spread to her lungs, liver and brain, but which appeared to be in remission and under control. She emailed a letter to The Guardian critical of the American poet and essayist
Anne Boyer's harsh breast cancer treatment and the heartless privatisation of cancer care in the
US compared to the UK: "If any more of the
NHS is sold off US style, our medical world will lose the heart that contributes to keeping so many of us alive." By contrast, she had been treated with patience, respect and empathy (even when she had been difficult) by the NHS: "My treatment has been delivered by people whose medical expertise is underpinned by something that feels, dare I say it, like a kind of love."[80][81]
Melanie McFadyean died in London, England, from cancer on 16 March 2023, at the age of 72.[3]
Bibliography
Books
With Eileen Fairweather and Roisin McDonough: Only The Rivers Run Free: Northern Ireland: The Women's War,
Pluto Press, 1984,
ISBN0-86104-668-4.
"The hunt for Ben Needham and the family that won't give up searching", The Guardian, 28 April 2013.[101]
"Opinion: 'As I got into the small print of joint enterprise it seemed I had wandered through the looking glass'",
Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 31 March 2014.[102]
With Maeve McClenaghan and Rachel Stevenson: "Serious concerns emerge over joint enterprise laws",
openDemocracy, 1 April 2014.[103]
"In the Wrong Crowd", London Review of Books, Vol. 36, No. 18, 25 September 2014.[104]