By Sue Cameron

Journalist Elsbeth Ganguin was nothing if not outspoken. Forty years ago, during the long battle between the trade unions and the Labour government, she so exasperated Harold Wilson, the prime minister, that at one Number 10 briefing he offered her a cigar “to keep her quiet”.

At the time it was still rare to find a woman covering the strife-torn world of industry – let alone one who enjoyed smoking cigars, as Wilson knew she did when he sent a flunkey to fetch one for her. Yet Ganguin, who has died at the age of 86, had trodden a remarkable road before becoming one of Wilson’s inquisitors. She had gone from aristocratic luxury in 1930s Germany, through war years that ended with her fleeing from the Russians with her baby, to the confines of a cramped semi in Manchester.

Dissatisfaction with the mundane life of a housewife drove her to find jobs in industry. Eventually she joined the Financial Times reporting staff. Sir Geoffrey Owen, former FT editor, said on Friday: “She was a heavyweight journalist who established a reputation for the FT in industrial training, which was extremely valuable.” She also documented the growing role of women in the workplace. “Thinning ranks of the household brigade”, read the headline of one of her stories. “Women and shift work – new laws needed”, said another. It was a world away from her youth, where the working woman she knew best was her lady’s maid.

Klara Ida Karoline Elsbeth Nennewitz was born into an upper-crust German family in 1921. Her father was charming but a ne’er-do-well and when her parents divorced she spent much of her time with her well-connected grandparents. She and her sister were urged to be kind to the little boy they played with – Prince Philip – because his “home life was so sad”. After five years at school in Hungary following her mother’s remarriage, she returned to Germany to study chemistry at university. There she married Karl Otto Ganguin – known as Peter – in 1939 and the couple had two daughters and a son.

Known as an anti-Nazi, she often sailed close to the wind – sometimes worrying her husband – but got away with it because she was a low-profile housewife. Only at the end of the war, with the Allies approaching, was she in real danger – the local Nazi party started hunting down people who might denounce them and hanging them from lampposts.

Later came a different kind of threat. Ganguin’s husband was working on the development of colour film for Agfa, an area of great interest to the Russians. The Ganguins found themselves in East Germany and learnt with horror the Russians planned to move Agfa scientists and their families to a research facility in the country.

While her husband and a colleague walked to the border with the West, Ganguin sent her eldest children there in a yeast van, from where their grandmother took them home by sledge through the snow. Ganguin made her way to Berlin, where the Americans put her on a train to the West.

Officially they were refugees but Peter was offered a job working on colour film for ICI in Britain, and the family joined him in a small house in Manchester. Initially they sometimes faced “Nazi” taunts but their Jewish neighbours welcomed them with chicken soup.

Increasingly restless at spending her days as a housewife, she took a series of technical jobs with companies such as Mather and Platt and Simon Engineering. Then in 1960 she applied for a job on The Manchester Guardian and became the first woman to be appointed to the industrial staff.

She joined the FT in 1963, covering political and trade union leaders, as well as captains of industry. Among the latter was Robert Maxwell, who, much to her disgust, put his arm round her, saying: “We immigrants must stick together.”

Former colleague Dennis Topping said on Friday: “Despite working with Sir Gordon Newton, who would sometimes tear up copy and throw it in the air, she loved the FT.”

Her husband died in 1987 but she is survived by her three children.