Anne Hilda Symonds (née Harrisson; 22 August 1916 – 6 February 2017) was an English broadcaster on culture and politics for the BBC World Service.
The widowed Hilda moved to Boars Hill in Berkshire to live with her mother,[6] and became an accomplished painter of landscapes in oil and portraits in pencil,[4] a friend of Stanley and Gilbert Spencer and of Paul and John Nash, as well as Robert Bridges, John Masefield and Robert Graves – who used to buy Anne sweets at the village shop.
With the Quakers, she set up a home for evacuee children in Torquay, Devon, and then worked briefly with her cousin Tom Harrisson on Mass Observation.
As the war in Europe ended, she was dispatched to Austria, working in Vienna and Carinthia on copy for Austrian newspapers, where she met the executioner Albert Pierrepoint.
In 1948, Symonds was divorced from her husband and applied for a job with the BBC Overseas Service, commissioning talks and making arts and other programmes.