October is Black History Month, so every day during October I will be posting up an introduction to an historical person of colour with a place in the history of the United Kingdom.
Moira Stuart is a British presenter and broadcaster, the second African-Caribbean female newsreader to appear on British television, having worked on BBC News since 1981.
Her mother was born in Dominica, and her father was a lawyer from Barbados. They divorced when Stuart was ten months old. Born in London, Stuart moved to Bermuda with family in her teens. She returned to the UK, and began working with the BBC in the 1970s and a production assistant, moving to become a continuity announcer and newsreader.
In four decades, she has presented many television news and radio programmes for the BBC, on every news bulletin devised on BBC Television apart from the Ten O’Clock News. The BBC announced her departure from BBC Television News in 2007.
From 2010 for nine years, she was the newsreader for The Chris Evans Breakfast Show on BBC Radio 2, where she hosted her own music show every Sunday. In February 2019 she joined Classic FM as a morning news presenter and, from July 2019, as a weekend presenter with her own Saturday show. She has also presented music programmes on various other channels.
In March 2020 she received the Broadcasting Press Guild’s Harvey Lee Award in recognition of her five decades of outstanding broadcasting, including news presentation on BBC radio and television, documentaries, entertainment shows and her current news and music programmes on Classic FM.
Stuart has served on various boards and judging panels including Amnesty International, the Royal Television Society, BAFTA, United Nations Association, the Orange Prize, the London Fair Play Consortium, the Human Genetics Advisory Commission, the Queen’s Anniversary Prize, and the Grierson Trust.
In November 2004, she was the subject of an episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, tracing her family history. This took her to the Scottish Highlands, and to Antigua (where her great-great-grandfather was enslaved) and Dominica, where her great-grandfather was born. She discovered the story of how her maternal grandfather met his wife when both were studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh – Stuart’s grandmother was the first black woman student there, though she did not finish her medical studies, using money intended for her course to pay their bills instead. The couple ultimately settled in Bermuda, where in addition to being a physician Stuart’s grandfather became a parliamentarian, civil-rights activist and labour leader.
In March 2007 Stuart presented the documentary In Search of Wilberforce for BBC Television, examining the role of anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the British bill that banned the slave trade.
More about Moira Stuart at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moira_Stuart