Biography of Jo

Jo grew up in Cheshire, attended Manchester University in 1957 to study geography and then became a teacher at a grammar school in Cheshire. She moved to Rye in 1967.

 Jo was the first in her family to attend university and she was one of only three girls in her year – the remainder (thirty) were male. She remembers a geography field trip to Galway in Ireland in 1958 where the local people would not speak to her and the other women in the group as they, ‘should be at home having babies.’

Jo already had her first child when she moved to Rye and she went on to have two other children but she did do supply teaching at Thomas Peacocke (now Rye College) and when the youngest was ten, she was ‘persuaded’ to go back to teaching full-time.  She taught geography and history. Her biggest challenge in her working life was, she says, ‘balancing everything out,’ especially as her husband went back to sea. She relied on friends to help with child-care.

In the latter part of her career she taught at Battle Abbey and history at Brighton University, ‘it was a lovely end to a career.’

Jo has always been interested in local history. She joined the Rye Castle Museum, where she still works, in 1968. She became Chairman in 2009. Her ‘Rye Memories’ came out of a school project she started in the mid 1980’s where pupils interviewed local old people. ‘We now have that as a resource,’ she said. She also produced a book for the Millennium for Rye Town Council, where she interviewed people from every organisation in town.

She was also a JP for twenty-seven years and she says it gave her ‘huge insight into the difficulties that people were facing all the time’

Audio of interview with Jo