Joyce Pickard’s life of war and peace (From York Press)

Joyce Pickard’s life of war and peace

9:24am Wednesday 25th January 2012 in Features

For decades, Joyce Pickard has been speaking out against war, inequality and injustice. STEPHEN LEWIS meets a remarkable 90-year-old.

JOYCE Pickard doesn’t have much time for the bankers and top executives who feel they deserve their huge, fat cat salaries. Wicked, is the word she uses to describe the growing inequalities in society.

“There is this group of people who feel removed from the other parts of society,” she says. “They seem to feel ‘we’re not like those at the bottom’. They have no conception of how ordinary people live and their needs.”

Then she takes an effortless swipe at David Cameron. He talks of measuring happiness, she says. “If he asked me, I’d say ‘how can I be happy when there are so many people in our society who are unhappy, or have so little?”

Her views on war – and the hypocrisy of religions that accept or even support war – are equally trenchant.

“War is totally immoral and killing people is wrong and never the right way to solve problems,” she says. “That seems to me so blindingly obvious.” Yet often the established Anglican church seems to support the state when it wages war.

“I have not heard a word against war in the Anglican church. The Christian church talks of the Prince of Peace and Peace on Earth… but the main thing wrong with Christianity is that it seems easier to sing hymns than to live out the basic teaching of Jesus, which is to treat other persons as you would like them to treat you.

“We don’t want to be bombed out of our homes, we don’t want relatives killed, or nuclear explosions. All this seems so dazzlingly obvious…”

Such blazing convictions – and the clear-sighted force with which they are expressed – would be notable enough coming from an idealistic young university student. They are all the more remarkable coming from a 90-year-old retired public school headmistress. This is no ordinary retired public school headmistress, however. Mrs Pickard is a Quaker, for a start – and her radical convictions about war, hypocrisy and injustice are in the fine traditions of great York Quakers such as Joseph and Seebohm Rowntree.

Like them, she doesn’t just talk the talk: at the age of 90 she continues to walk the walk (although she’s more likely to be seen busily bicycling about York than sedately walking).

A quick search of The Press’s photographic archive shows that whenever there is a protest about inequality, or war, or racism, she’s there in the forefront: not strident or shouting, just calmly and patiently trying to persuade the rest of us to think a little more clearly. There she is in 2007, lying on the pavement in Exhibition Square to symbolise a casualty of war in an anti-war protest; there again in January 2009, sitting quietly in York Minster as part of the hunger strike to draw attention to children dying in Gaza; and there she is in 1992 – a youthful 70 – taking part in a one-woman campaign in St Sampson’s Square against pit closures in Selby. “I’m standing here for: social justice; Britain’s future; miners’ jobs!” says the carefully hand-lettered placard she’s holding. Most recently, she featured in The Press on the debate on the right to die, expressing – with typical clarity – her conviction that we should have the right to be helped to end our own lives should they reach a point when we feel we can no longer live with dignity or purpose.

She would certainly want to be able to end her own life painlessly if she ever got to that point, the former head of The Mount School said.

“I should like to have choice up until I die. If I had a terminal illness that was incurable and I was faced with a lingering death, with senility or immobility; if I was a toothless, failing, brainless elderly body lying in bed, I should want to cut out that phase. I should not choose to live on in a bed.”

In accordance with this view, she carries around in her purse at all times a note with her name, address, and details of her solicitor and doctor.

“In case of hospitalisation or serious injury, please note: advanced directive signed,” the note reads. “Do not strive officiously to keep alive.” She clearly loves that word officiously: giving a slight, mischievous smile as she repeats it.

I’ve come to visit her in her small flat just off Haxby Road to find out a bit more about this formidable campaigner for peace, equality and the right to die.

One of the first things I notice, when I walk in, is a small photograph on a shelf in her sitting room. It is of Mary Pickard, her late husband Alan’s first wife.

It is typical of her that she clearly sees nothing unusual about having this photograph on display. She was friends with the pair of them – they, too, were both Quakers – long before Mary died, having met them when she first came to York. She visited the couple the day before Mary’s death.

A few years later, she and Alan decided to get married themselves, in a simple Quaker ceremony at The Mount School where she was headmistress. She was 55; Alan 14 years older.

“It was a great surprise to Alan and me that we decided to marry!” she says. “I was a maiden lady of 55!” Everybody was rather astonished, she admits. Until then, the thought of getting married had never really occurred to her. “I was far too busy with other things!” She recites a poem she says has always stuck in her mind. “If no-one ever marries me, and I don’t see why they should, for nurse says I’m not pretty, and I’m seldom very good…”

She later used to joke with Alan that she never quite understood how they came to be married, since he’d never got around to proposing to her. Yet despite this oversight on his part, the couple were together happily for 13 years, until Alan died at the age of 82.

Mrs Pickard was born Joyce Blake in 1921. Her maternal grandfather was a Methodist minister who tramped between remote village chapels in the Midlands. Her father was a captain in the First World War, who went on to join the railways and rose to become what she calls their “first ever welfare officer.”

Her mother left school at the age of 11, became apprenticed to a dressmaker, and went on to take the business over. Joyce grew up in Derby with her brother, Norman, who was later to die – of natural causes – at the end of the Second World War.

She was good at school, studying French and German in the sixth form of a girl’s grammar school. At the end of her first year in the sixth form she went to Munich for a few weeks to improve her German. It was summer, 1939. While there, she received a letter from the British consulate, informing her that, “in view of the present situation… we would urgently urge you to consider removing yourself at this time (from Germany)”.

The teenage Joyce took a train to Paris and travelled from there to Victoria Station in London, arriving penniless just as war was declared.

She managed to get in touch with a railway colleague of her father, who worked there. He gave her some money to get home: and more importantly rang her parents. “They had been trying to phone me in Germany, and were getting very anxious!”

After finishing school, she studied modern languages at the University of London’s Westfield College – which was evacuated to Oxford because of the war – completed a teaching certificate, then took a teaching post at a girls’ grammar school near Liverpool. A few years later she returned to Derby when her father died, so as to be with her mother, getting a job at a school there.

By this time, she had become a Quaker. She’d grown increasingly disillusioned with Christianity while at university, she says. “It just seemed extremely ritualistic and formulaic.” Something about the Society of Friends, however, appealed to her. She went to her first meeting – a small gathering of ten or so people – while living near Liverpool. “It felt to me so real and sincere. Whether you call it God, or whatever you call it… there was a process there…”

In 1959, prompted by other Quakers, she applied for the advertised post of headmistress at The Mount School in York. She only applied to shut them all up, she says, never dreaming she would get the job.

But she did – becoming, at the age of 38, a headteacher. “I was a classroom teacher in July, and head of a school in September!” She’s been in York ever since.

Her campaigning in her adopted city is legendary. She has been, at various times, member of CND, the York Peace Centre, the University of the Third Age, York Against the War, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the York Interfaith Group, and many more. In 2007, she was made an Honorary Freeman of the City of York. She may be scathing about David Cameron’s avowed intention to measure happiness, but she says she has found the secret to real contentment.

“It’s such a pleasure a), to be retired; b) not to be taking anyone else’s job; and c) to have enough money to live and to be able to go without the winter fuel allowance,” she says. “I seem to have the best of all possible worlds…”

Joyce Pickard on...

Menwith Hill and Star Wars, 2006: “We would be completely against any expansion (of Menwith Hill) which would be aggressive towards other nations and be part of America’s plan to dominate the world.”

On a protest about Israeli products in local supermarkets, 2008: “I am angry when I see Israeli produce grown or made on illegally-occupied Palestinian land… labelled ‘West Bank’.”

On the right to take your own life, January 2012: “If you believe that after death there is only extinction, then that is greatly preferable to a lingering, useless, pain-filled existence.”