Valerie Anand

Valerie Anand was born in 1937, before the war. When war broke out her father knew he would have to go into the forces, so he gave up their rented home in Kent and left her mother and Valerie with his Aunt Clara in Leatherhead, Surrey, just south of London. Valerie grew up, didn’t go to university, joined a publishing house as a secretary but turned herself eventually into a trade journalist, specializing at first in business systems and equipment. Eventually she became an industrial editor, and ran the house magazine first for Heals, the furniture retailer in Tottenham Court Road, and later for Matthew Hall, a big engineering group. They did everything from put the services into pharmaceutical plants and new office blocks to putting the topsides on oil platforms. It was very interesting.