Londoners Magazine

Londoners loved Carol Lesley Barnes.

The ITN newsreader passed away on Saturday 7 March at the age of 63 after suffering a stroke a week earlier.

Born in Norwich on 13 September 1944, she moved and went to school in Tulse Hill, London. She left school at 16 to train as a fashion buyer at Harrods, before deciding to study French at Sheffield University and going on to train as a teacher.

Barnes’s journalism career launched in 1973 when she started work at LBC, a new London radio station. Three years later she joined ITN as a reporter and covered hard-hitting news such as the 1981 Brixton riots - while she was pregnant. She also anchored ITV’s extensive 16-hour coverage of Princess Diana’s death.

She was with Denis MacShane, a former Labour Foreign Office minister from 1975 to 1982, and they had a daughter, Clare.

However, in March 2004 Clare died aged 24 when her parachute failed to open while on holiday in Melbourne.

After her relationship ended with MacShane, Barnes married Nigel Thomson, a cameraman, but they divorced in 1998. They had one son together, James, now 24.

James said: “My mum was a beautiful, kind and delicate person - a person loved by many and whom I am desperately proud to call my mother.

“She did everything in her power to love, care and provide for me, my sister and all those close to her. I am eternally indebted to her for what she has given us. I will always love her and she will forever be in my heart.”

Sir Trevor McDonald, a former colleague, said: “She was one of these people who was never overpowered by any sense of being a television star.”

She passed away at Royal Sussex County Hospital, Brighton, after suffering a stroke last Saturday, the day before she was due to go on holiday in South Africa.