Bel Mooney

Beryl Ann "Bel" Mooney (born 8 October 1946 in Liverpool, Lancashire) is an English journalist and broadcaster. She currently writes a column for the Daily Mail.

Mooney was born in Broadgreen Hospital to Gladys (née Norbury) and Edward Mooney. She spent her earliest years in Liverpool on a council estate called The Green on Queen's Drive. She passed her 11-plus and went to Aigburth Vale Girls' High School (merged with another school to become Calderstones School in 1989). Mooney moved to Wiltshire at the age of fourteen, when her parents bought their first house. She then attended school in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, at Trowbridge Girls' High School (a girls' grammar school which merged with a boys' grammar school to become the comprehensive The John of Gaunt School in 1974). She passed eight O levels and took English, Latin and Art at A level. She applied unsuccessfully to the University of Oxford (at that time nobody from her school had been admitted to Oxford), and went on to study English Language and Literature at University College London, where she obtained a distinguished First in 1969. She met philosophy student Jonathan Dimbleby while they were both working on the student newspaper Pi. Dimbleby became her first husband; they married in February 1968 in Kensington after knowing each other for four months.

Giving up her idea of postgraduate work, Mooney became a journalist in 1969, contributing first to the Bath Chronicle and the Times Educational Supplement (whilst teaching part-time in Bath) then got her first job on Nova Magazine as Assistant to the Editor. In the early 1970s, Mooney wrote for the New Statesman, the Daily Telegraph Magazine, Cosmopolitan and many others. From 1979–80 she was a columnist on the Daily Mirror. She has also been a regular columnist for The Times (2005–07), The Sunday Times (1982–83) and The Listener (1984–86). From 1970 to 1979 she was a freelance journalist. (Her reference to Margaret Thatcher in Nova magazine in 1973 as a 'possible future Prime Minister' is believed to have been the first suggestion of its kind in the media.) In January 1976 she wrote a deeply personal article for the Guardian newspaper about the experience of having a stillborn child. This article was to have far-reaching effects as it was the first time a journalist had written on the subject with such raw feeling, and it directly inspired a shift in the awareness of how to treat stillbirth as well as the foundation of the Stillbirth Society, later to be known as SANDS. As well as her fiction (see below) Mooney has written many other books, including 'Bel Mooney's Somerset' (1989) and a memoir about love, loss, recovery – and dogs: 'Small Dogs Can Save Your Life' (2010).

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