My friend and colleague Julie Reid, who has died of a brain tumour aged 56, was an outstanding production editor of the Guardian’s weekday G2 supplement. She was creative, calm and ever ready with the perfect pun for a headline, or an amused eye-roll for one that fell flat.
Warm and fiercely principled, she readily spotted colleagues who needed her support, whether professionally or personally. Her energy was upbeat, her attitude can-do, and she understood the human stories that connect with readers.
I first met her more than three decades ago, when we worked for Michael Heseltine’s publishing organisation, Haymarket. Julie, in her first full-time job, was working on the picture desk at Campaign magazine. She was great fun and quietly formidable, not least as mother of chapel for the Haymarket branch of the National Union of Journalists, negotiating against bigwigs twice her age with half her savvy. When she was 27, in 1995, she went to the Guardian as a subeditor, and remained there.
In a striking feature in 2006, Julie wrote about growing up in her birthplace of Kenilworth, Warwickshire, with her parents, Etta (nee Redpath) and Fred Reid, who are blind. Both lost their sight when they were young, and met at a school for blind children in Edinburgh. Her unflinching but celebratory account conveyed how normal her upbringing was.
Etta worked as an NHS physiotherapist, and Fred was a senior lecturer in the history department at Warwick University. Julie, her twin brother Les, who also became a journalist, and older brother Gavin, later a scientist, became her parents’ eyes. When the family went on holidays to Japan and the US, the twins described the magnificent views. Julie had a particular gift for detail, and the two of them wondered if that experience gave them a taste for journalism.
At home, they helped their parents in more prosaic ways. One of the few things they resented was the dreaded cry from Etta to “come and inspect the tatties” for bad bits, usually when they were watching Grange Hill.
Julie’s politics were inherited from Fred and his communist Clydeside parents; her paternal grandfather, also Fred, worked on the railways and was a trade union activist. Mealtimes were spent discussing CND, the miners’ strike, the Falklands war, football (her bedroom walls painted bright green and yellow in honour of West Brom’s away colours) and the relative merits of Bucks Fizz and the Pogues.
At Kenilworth school, a 14-year-old Julie showed her capacity for empathy when a teacher ran out of a lesson in tears after being harassed by pupils. She left the class to comfort her while others laughed.
When she reached Bangor University, Julie studied philosophy and met Mark Cain, who went on to become a reader in the subject at Oxford Brookes University. They married in 2002, had two children, Mikey and Theo, and lived in High Wycombe.
Beyond the office, Julie had a big life, caring for her family, playing tennis and watching the badger-cam in her garden. When she realised she had a set of badger babies, she filled a cake stand with treats and filmed them enjoying a late-night feast.
In later years, Julie found new love with her partner, Martha Blackwell. After her cancer diagnosis in late 2022, Mark and Martha were united in caring for her.
They survive her, along with her children, siblings and parents.
