Newsreader Sally Swinfen retires after 37 years

When newsreader Sally Swinfen hopped off a bus to start a temporary job at BBC Radio Derby on 4 April 1989, she had no idea she would still be there 37 years later.

Sally, who hails from Dumfries in Scotland, would go on to be a permanent fixture on the station, breaking news to the people across Derbyshire and East Staffordshire for four decades.

As she plans to read her last news bulletin at 13:00 GMT on Friday, she has outlasted 27 Derby County managers and has reported on 10 Prime Ministers.

Sally said: "It's been such a good job. I said I wanted to read the news on the radio when I was younger, and I did that."

Sally said she never set out to be a broadcaster, but her love of radio was instilled in her from being a child.

"It was really from the fact we grew up without a TV, so the radio was on 24/7," Sally said.

"My dad listened to the Today Programme, the World at One and PM. When I came home from school, John Dunn was on, and I used to sit with my mum and listen to all the amazing people that he interviewed.

"So the radio was always on, my dad was always shouting at it, but it was always on.

"But I actually wanted to be a speech therapist, that's what I set my heart on. I went for an interview to get on a course and it turned out I hadn't done the right subjects."

Not sure what she wanted to do, she left school and continued to work in a hotel and went to college the year after.

During a meeting with a careers advisor, Sally said she was interested in journalism.

"He looked at me really strangely, but he then said 'you've got a lovely voice, have you ever thought about radio?'

"I didn't really know I could do that."

A stint at university and a postgraduate degree in radio journalism in Portsmouth, she gained a work placement as a student on BBC Radio Leicester.

"That's where I learnt about real life," she said.

Sally went to work for Radio Tay in Dundee in 1987 for her "first proper job" and said it was an "eye opener", but gave her a really good grounding in radio.

In 1989, Sally saw a job advert the BBC had posted wanting reporters at radio stations in Stoke-on-Trent, Lincoln and Derby.

She put Lincoln "at the top of the list", but after an interview, she was told her Scottish Borders accent was "too strong" for them.

But she was told to interview for the role in Derby and was handed the position.

Sally has seen radio news go through monumental change. She remembers shifts "where you had to physically cut tape with a razor blade before playing it out and ringing the office, telling a producer the copy over the phone".

She has been involved in all the big stories across the patch.

"You think of Toyota, Bombardier, Derby County, you know these stories affect so many people and you're part of it, telling the story.

"I vividly remember when Alison Hargreaves had disappeared on the mountain in 1995 - we'd followed her story and everyone wanted her to do well, and then the reality is she was a mother who did not come back.

"My first weekend working was the Hillsborough disaster, I stayed later to do a extra news bulletins because you knew it was something massive."

Reflecting on her career at the BBC, Sally said the power of local radio was still so big... "the stories we tell, we reflect from the amazing people in this city and the wider region cannot be underestimated".

"But it's not just me, this place is a proper team effort."

Sally added she will "not miss the 04:20 alarm", and is looking forward to some more gardening, as well as spending more time at her holiday home in France.

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