Cate Haste, writer and TV producer whose projects explored among other subjects the role of women in the 20th century – obituary

Cate Haste: held in great affection by friends and colleagues - Chris Barham/Daily Mail/Shutterstock
Cate Haste: held in great affection by friends and colleagues - Chris Barham/Daily Mail/Shutterstock

Cate Haste, who has died aged 75, was an acclaimed author, biographer, historian and documentary film maker – and the second wife of the writer and broadcaster Melvyn (now Lord) Bragg.

A determined but unshowy woman, Cate Haste preferred to be known by her maiden name and built a career behind, rather than in front of the camera, becoming one of the few early female film producer-directors in television.

Her work – mainly documentaries about 20th century history – was notable for being based on diligent research and where possible featuring interviews with surviving eyewitnesses which often yielded new insights. She had an unrivalled knack of putting people at ease.

She produced Death of a Democrat (1992), about the mysterious “suicide” in 1948 of the Czechoslovak foreign minister Jan Masaryk in Channel 4’s award-winning series Secret History, and directed five films in Jeremy Isaacs’s 24-part series Cold War (CNN and BBC Two, 1998), as well as Thames Television’s Munich: The Peace of Paper (1988), a meticulous examination of Europe between the wars ending in Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland.

Cate Haste at the Lord Byron Poetry Hour at the British Library with her husband Lord Bragg in 2007 - Alan Davidson/Shutterstock 
Cate Haste at the Lord Byron Poetry Hour at the British Library with her husband Lord Bragg in 2007 - Alan Davidson/Shutterstock

She also directed Hitler’s Brides in the series Nazi Women (Channel 4, 2001), which included harrowing interviews with women who had lived under the regime’s so-called family-orientated leadership.

One of these was Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge, who had been in the bunker with the Führer and typed his final letter. She had given few interviews before, but after meeting Cate Haste she agreed to be interviewed by her and opened up. The following year Traudl Junge published her memoirs, which informed the Academy Award-nominated film about Hitler’s last days Downfall (2004).

Cate Haste’s books, some of them spin-offs from her television work, often explored the experience and changing roles of women in the 20th century, beginning in 1977 with Keep the Home Fires Burning, about British propaganda on the home front in the First World War.

Rules of Desire (1992), a history of British sexual mores in the 20th century (for which, as part of her research, she spoke to prostitutes in King’s Cross), was praised by one reviewer as “a must for anyone who wants to understand how the concept of individual happiness replaced, bit by bit over decades, the straitjacketed world of sexual exploitation and misery.”

Nazi Women (2002): ‘comprehensible and compelling, and at times deeply moving’
Nazi Women (2002): ‘comprehensible and compelling, and at times deeply moving’

Nazi Women: Hitler’s Seduction of a Nation (2001) expanded on her television documentary and was praised in The Sunday Telegraph by the historian Richard Overy as an “unpretentious book that opens up the bizarre moral universe of the Third Reich in ways that are at once comprehensible and compelling, and at times deeply moving”.

Later on she turned to biography, writing well-received monographs of the Expressionist landscape painter Sheila Fell, the Scottish colourist Craigie Aitchison and, most recently, a biography of Alma Mahler, the composer and muse to creative giants of the early 20th century.

She edited the memoirs of Clarissa Eden, widow of the former Tory prime minister Anthony Eden
She edited the memoirs of Clarissa Eden, widow of the former Tory prime minister Anthony Eden

She also persuaded Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon, the widow of the former Tory prime minister Anthony Eden, to publish her memoirs, based on diaries which she originally requested should remain unpublished until 10 years after her death. The memoirs, which Cate Haste edited, were published in 2007.

But inevitably Cate Haste earned most column inches owing to her marriage to Melvyn Bragg, particularly during the Blair era, when she and her husband were said to dine regularly with the prime minister and his wife Cherie. Their friendship led to Cate Haste’s collaboration with Mrs Blair on a book about prime ministers’ spouses, The Goldfish Bowl (2004), a book which, however, disappointed by pulling up at the Blairs’ arrival at No 10.

Cate Haste in youth
Cate Haste in youth

Catherine Mary Haste was born in Leeds on August 6 1945 to Eric Haste, a civil engineer, and the former Margaret Hodge, a lecturer at a technical college. She spent seven early years in Australia, where the family emigrated as “ten pound Poms” in 1949.

Having failed to find the better life (their first antipodean dwelling was on stilts in an encampment on the edge of the bush, plagued by poisonous spiders, snakes and insects), they returned to Britain in 1956. Cate, who rose to high rank in the Girl Guides, attended Thornbury Grammar School, Bristol, going on to read English at the University of Sussex before beginning her career in television.

She reportedly met her husband when his first marriage, to Lisa Roche, was already in trouble. After Lisa committed suicide in 1971 she was said to have helped him cope with his grief. They married in 1973 and as well as giving her husband a son and daughter, she helped him to bring up Marie-Elsa, his daughter from his first marriage.

“I couldn’t have gone through those early years without Cate,” Melvyn Bragg was quoted as saying. “She helped me bring up Marie-Elsa and to bring some normality into our lives.”

Cate Haste's 2019 biography of Alma Mahler
Cate Haste's 2019 biography of Alma Mahler

Cate Haste was good-humoured, practical (she never went out without safety pin and plasters in her handbag), frugal, and no-nonsense (she once told her daughter that she was sick of watching BBC News interviews about how people feel; the news, she maintained, was not about how people feel).

She was held in great affection by friends and colleagues. None the less it was widely known that her husband had affairs – to which she responded by building up a successful career of her own. However, the marriage ended in 2018, Melvyn Bragg explaining that it “ground to a halt, very slowly, for all sorts of reasons that will take a long time to unravel.”

Cate Haste loved nature and gardening and her diaries were full of references to the leaves and the sky, the birds and the flowers. During lockdown she embarked on learning bird song. When a friend tested her while she sat in the garden, she was very pleased she had got them all right.

She is survived by her children.

Cate Haste, born August 6 1945 April 29 2021