Joan Stock, who has died aged 88, had a long career on the Guardian in Manchester from the early 1960s until her retirement in 1988. She had several roles, including providing administrative support to the picture desk, before moving to the editorial team as a subeditor.
As she often said, retirement allowed her, given that she worked nights and he worked days, to actually spend time with her husband, Peter Stock, a manager for the Co-operative Bank in Manchester, whom she married in 1969. The Guardian was however never, literally, far from her – as it landed on her doormat every day until her last weeks.
She was born in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, the daughter of Lulu and John Ratchford. Her father, a businessman, suffered from mental health problems and was confined to a psychiatric hospital until his death; her sister, Ann, took her own life. This early family tragedy was borne with stoicism and an innate sense of humour.
Joan was my mother’s oldest friend from Beechwood Sacred Heart school in Rochdale. I was told of mostly kindly nuns and an early postwar trip to Switzerland during which a vast over-indulgence in chocolate seems to have given her a lifelong taste for it.
The financial difficulties that resulted from her father’s illness meant that Joan had to give up any idea of continuing on to higher education and, after a variety of jobs, she joined the Guardian in Cross Street, Manchester.
I recall my childhood trips to her family home during the 60s where we would help her mother, Lulu, roll the week’s copies of the paper into firelighters, while I listened in to Joan’s tales of her work, the printers’ union Natsopa and its “chapel”, and of her many colleagues and friends.
I still smile at the thought of her conversation with me after her appearance last year on a BBC Radio 4 documentary on changes in working in Manchester.
According to the BBC team, she brought a “journalistic eye and a fascinating, lucid perspective to confronting change, not reactionary, just a perceptive intelligence. And she needed no retakes.”
But according to Joan, having promised they would not use everything they had recorded, the team broadcast her words on the Guardian’s move to London as “getting ideas above their station” and she was slightly worried the paper would take offence and “stop her pension”.
Despite some of the sadder aspects of her life, Joan usually made her friends smile; if only for the tales of her terrible driving and, among many other scrapes and exploits, her reputed demolition of Rochdale’s first car wash, a story we embroidered over many years to tease her.
Peter died in 2015.
