Her father was a sanitary inspector and later chief inspector of the Public Health Department

Her father was a sanitary inspector and later chief inspector of the Public Health Department. Young Olive saw for herself the squalor and poverty of the homeless poor and the plight of people sleeping under railway arches. Her concern for the underprivileged, her belief in the potential of the ordinary person and her abhorrence of injustice and inequality were to be a driving force for the rest of her life Together, of course, with an irrepressible sense of fun. She had a huge, generous but unpretentious personality with a charm that all, male and female alike, found utterly captivating. She was also a good listener.She went up to Oxford in 1929 and before long found a soul-mate: Barbara Bells (now Baroness Castle of Blackburn).

Holidays were spent together, with politics the main source of conversation. Olive Shapley’s socialism developed, although in those formative years she indulged in a brief flirtation with Communism The Establishment did not forget. Even in her sixties she received regular visits from MI5, but looked forward to the officer’s visit and “always made him a pot of tea”.In 1934 she began her career with the BBC as Children’s Hour organiser, with the responsibility of producing five hour-long programmes every week. These included at least two full-length live plays a week and often one of the announcers, Wilfred Pickles, soon to become famous, would read some of the parts.Much of the Children’s Hour material originated in Manchester. At that time the programme director in the BBC North Region was another left-wing radical, Archie Harding, who had gathered around him a group of talented people producing a range of innovative features including Cotton, Steel, Wool and Coal by the aspiring poet and writer Geoffrey Bridson.

It was a creative environment entirely suited to the skills and personality of their newcomer Oxford graduate.With Joan Littlewood, Shapley produced The Classic Soil which purported to show that little had changed since Friedrich Engels described Manchester as “the classic soil where capitalism flourished”. Her other documentaries, including Homeless People and Miner’s Wives, further reflected Shapley’s concern for the disadvantaged to whom she increasingly offered the freedom of the air She never exploited the interviewee Not for her the glib soundbite. And when the microphone had been packed away she often remained in contact with the interviewees, many of whom benefited personally from her acts of kindness.In June 1939 Shapley and John Salt, the BBC’s north regional programme director who had replaced Archie Harding, announced their engagement and were married on the following Bastille Day. John Salt was the great-grandson of Sir Titus Salt, one of the great textile paternalists who founded Salts Mill and the model village of Saltaire on the outskirts of Bradford. As the BBC’s policy was not to employ staff married to each other, Shapley resigned from the BBC and instead operated as a freelance. The couple spent two years in London before moving to New York, where John took up a post as deputy North American director of the BBC.During the Second World War the couple rented Alistair Cooke’s spacious Fifth Avenue apartment at a “decidedly uncommercial rent”.