Obituary: Jacqueline Guy

PICTURE RESEARCH is a special art, demanding creativity to conceive and match illustrations as commentaries and enhancements to the texts they attach to, and then dogged hard work to track them down. Jackie Guy, who had a career of over 30 years as picture researcher and art editor to the magazine History Today, was a peerless practitioner in the field.

Hers was a classic tale of the autodidact. Born Jacqueline Needham in Chester at the start of the Blitz, with a convent schooling that for all its harsh regime gave her a solid grounding in the three Rs, she started work as a secretary in solicitors' offices in Chester, and then got a similar job when making the move south.

London in the Swinging Sixties made an ideal growth hormone; to the end of her life she responded enthusiastically to the stimulations metropolitan life and culture could offer. The latest play at the Barbican would be trenchantly discussed by her over coffee at her desk the next day - and it was entirely appropriate that her last outing, 10 days before she died, was to see the Ian McKellen film Gods and Monsters.

The other crucial conjunction of time and place was her joining in 1968 the history magazine launched by Brendan Bracken in 1951 on the back of the Financial Times, and then still presided over by the founding editorial double act of Alan Hodge and Peter Quennell. The 11th Earl of Drogheda, History Today's patrician patron at the FT during those years, remarked in a 1979 festschrift for Peter Quennell that "History Today was fortunate from the start in its choice of intelligent young ladies who had the task of selecting illustrations for every issue". Jackie Guy was one of them.

Her first "cover" (which always illustrated one of the articles inside - as is still true to this day) was of an imposing and colourful effigy of Margaret, Countess of Lennox - commissioned from a dramatic overhead angle that must have given the photographer pause for thought to life and limb. As she grew into the job so casually acquired as History Today's picture researcher and expanded her skill and knowledge in the 1970s, Guy took full advantage of the generous budget then available via the FT empire to commission ambitious photography - and to send in to major museums, churches and galleries as was then possible to do, her own photographer. The core of History Today's own picture archive now stands as tribute to that foresight and to the skills of photographers such as John Freeman and A.F. Kersting.

Guy was never parochial about the agencies and picture libraries she scoured on the magazine's behalf. As well as the principal UK outlets, including the extraordinary Aladdin's cave of the Mansell Collection in Earls Court where she enjoyed unrivalled access as one of the family, she used Continental ones - Giraudon in France, Arxiu Mas in Spain, Ullstein in Germany, Alinari in Italy - and increasingly, after I joined the magazine as her sixth editor in 1985 and embarked on broadening our American history coverage, US ones as well.

But she was also prepared to seek out, hidden gems - and to unearth for History Today's world-wide readership a manuscript illustration or object nestling for decades in a little-known library or museum was a constant source of delight and renewal to her.

Her early years with History Today were key for some of the best "old school" values she absorbed during the reign of Hodge and Quennell - commitment to clarity and elegance in word as well as image. She could be formidably and justly harsh (when proof-reading for illustration ideas) on historical jargon and gobbledegook: many an author's text was improved as a result. A Mogul miniature, a Gillray or Rowlandson cartoon, or a great history painting like Benjamin West's Death of General Wolfe which I remember her showing me with beatific delight as a proposal (accepted) for the cover of a 1995 issue - these were some of her "favourite things".

She had a preference for articles that were strong on chronology and narrative and was innately suspicious of some of the sociological meandering of modern academics. As such she provided the editors who came after Quennell and Hodge with a valuable template in balancing History Today's scholarship with its continuing appeal to the ordinary reader.

Despite that innate conservatism, there was nothing stuffy about Jackie Guy - and no edge either. She treated the most distinguished historian or public figure writing for the magazine or nervous graduate student or amateur enthusiast preparing their first article with the same courtesy and directness when teasing out ideas for illustrations.

As a colleague she could be sharp, tempestuous and occasionally exasperatingly resistant to innovation - I remember that when I suggested we illustrate an article about the Vietnam War on the cover with a helicopter photo- clip from the film Apocalypse Now she initially responded as if it were the sin against the Holy Ghost.

But that intensity sprang from her deep commitment to the values and quality of the magazine. Once she was convinced that you were not violating those values, she came on board. It was entirely typical that in later years she cited the Vietnam cover as one of History Today's most effective and responded enthusiastically to the challenges of series that might demand a vintage Fifties American Coca-Cola ad or even a contemporary cartoon on the poll tax.

The 1980s brought Guy both professional and personal upheaval. Her husband Paul, whose early dates with her had included the greyhound races at Wimbledon and who had a distinguished career as a journalist at ITN and elsewhere, died suddenly and shockingly, of pancreatitis. Theirs had been a close and very happy partnership; his loss left her bereft. Over that same period History Today moved in uncharted waters: cast adrift from the security of Longman and the Pearson group to independent ownership in a Soho garret - 94 stairs and no lift - in Berwick Street.

Although, thanks to enlightened owners, the model of independence was to prove triumphantly successful, Guy played an important role in its early survival; as the lookout for potential new proprietors in the first place and then having rapidly to take on new responsibilities as production editor, monthly liaison with printers and typesetters, driving hard and necessary bargains, which continued through the years ahead. She also brought in a journalist friend to help create a customised subscription programme - in a time when off-the-shelf computer packages were unknown - safeguarding an international base whose loyalty and expansion was to prove essential to prosperity from the mid-1980s onwards.

It was hardly surprising then that Jackie Guy became the keeper of the flame for History Today - able to retail wonderful raffish anecdotes of Peter Quennell but also to sustain that sense of family in a small office. It was always Guy who had ideas for the New Year party location or chivvied presents into an office Christmas lucky bag. She was generous of her time to contributors - convivial and social qualities well on display when we developed collaboration with the Russian history magazine Rodina and its editors were invited to supper at her Kensington flat. She had a great gift for friendship.

She drove herself hard - and responded to being driven hard. The products were wonderful special issues stuffed with vibrant illustrations, like the Age of Chivalry issue produced in tandem with the mammoth Royal Academy exhibition in 1987 and featuring many of its choicest exhibits, or the remarkable tripartite issue produced in 1995 for the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War - for which Guy juggled illustrations, texts in translation and common illustrations flowing in from the magazine's German and Russian counterparts. Her catchphrase was so often "I'm awfully worried about . . ." as she set out in pursuit of cover ideas or a particularly arcane subject, but she never needed to worry: regularly month by month she would produce up to 200-250 illustrations from which an eventual 50 or 60 were selected - varied, intriguing and always appropriate.

Throughout the illnesses of her last year, she carried on with true grit and was active in the office until 10 days before she died. Knowing that she had at last to give up her beloved vocation was hard indeed - but tempered with pride justly expressed in a letter she sent just weeks previously - "It's impossible not to feel honoured to have been involved in something so worthwhile."

It is almost impossible too to believe that no longer at around 4.30 in the afternoon will History Today's stairs creak to her entry: the sound of great shopping bags of books, photographs and prints being hauled up, the fruits of a day trawling in the city she loved. Her monument lies in the nearly 400 covers and tens of thousands of illustrations in which Jackie Guy lives still, to enrich generations of history lovers.

Gordon Marsden

Jacqueline Mary Needham, art editor and picture researcher: born Chester 12 November 1940; married 1968 Paul Guy (died 1983); died London 9 April 1999.