The former Kent Messenger reporter Rosemary Burnett has died.

Mrs Burnett (nee Dixon) was born in Aylesford in 1930 and went to the Teapot Lane school until the age of nine and then to the Sacred Heart Convent in Boxley Road, Maidstone, until she was 16. The convent later became the Russell Hotel, but has since been demolished.

Her school-girl memories of the Second World War involved taking cover in air-raid shelters and the grisly discovery of a human foot found near a downed Messerschmitt.

She stayed on at the convent for a year as a “pupil tutor” - a kind of classroom assistant - for which she received a single payment of £50 at the end of her 12-month stint.

Afterwards she moved to Loose Road and in 1947 she joined the Kent Messenger as a trainee reporter at the company’s Maidstone office, then based in Week Street.

She always had fond memories of her time there, despite the need to snuggle up to one of the radiators - there being only two to heat the whole building.

She was given Snodland as her patch to cover, but as she was young and pretty, she also found herself being photographed amid a field of snowdrops as the KM's Miss February 1948.

She later recalled earning two black marks at the paper: one was when the editor emerged to ask what a “teenager” was - and she burst out laughing. (The term was not then in common parlance.) The second was when she sent the Bishop of Rochester to a “revue” instead of a “review.” He subsequently complained loudly that he had never set foot inside a theatre in his entire life!

Her training at the KM stood her in good stead as she went on to pursue a career in journalism that lasted well into old age.

She went first to work in the London offices of The Times of Ceylon and the Ceylon Observer.

She gained an insight into a country newly independent of the UK, meeting many Sinhalese politicians, artists and intellectuals visiting London. She also covered the funeral of King George VI and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

She met the writer and founding father of self-sufficiency, John Seymour, who became a firm friend.

She was regarded as something of a female pioneer in the predominantly male environment of Fleet Street.

She had married Alan Howe from Rochester, the son of a Cecil Road shopkeeper, and had one son with him, but in 1950 took the decision to divorce, braving the stigma still associated with that action at the time.

She moved to Porlock Weir on the edge of Exmoor to work with Lord Lytton, recording his memoirs. During this time she kept the toll-house at Ashley Coombe.

She married a second time to Jeremy Burnett, a thatcher, and moved to a remote farm in Norfolk in the Breckland area near Thetford, three miles from the nearest road. It was largely a self-sufficient life with no electricity, the house lit by oil lamps, with goats for milk, ducks, hens, pigs and geese. Her pioneering life there was filmed by the BBC.

The couple had one son together. While on the farm she wrote for the Eastern Daily Press, the BBC, She Magazine and edited the woman’s page of the East Anglian Farming World.

'A cultured lady with perfect grammar'

She moved to Norwich, then Middlesbrough, as press officer for Teesside Social Services, then to a smallholding in Devon, keeping goats, ducks, hens, pigs and geese yet again. She divorced a second time and worked on the Cornish and Devon Post, the Western Morning News and Western Evening Herald in Plymouth.

On retirement, she settled in Minehead, Somerset, with a life-long friend, the artist Ralph Copleston, who died in 2021 at the age of 101.

She was proud to have taken part in the women’s protest vigil at Greenham Common in the 1980s.

Back on the edge of Exmoor, she wrote, taught a creative writing class, published poetry and enjoyed French language lessons.

Fiercely independent, she was described by many colleagues as a cultured lady with perfect grammar, but she could still scandalise by skinny dipping in the sea.

She died on January 19. She was 91.

She is survived by sons Philip and Roger and six grandchildren.