With a part-time job as a production editor on the Guardian Opinion desk and a growing private practice as a counsellor, Joanna Clarke-Jones, who has died aged 53 of glioblastoma, combined a love of language and news with an open-hearted commitment to helping other people.
Her 20-year career at the Guardian began on Public magazine, from where she moved, in 2013, to become production editor of the Society section, which carried news and features on the NHS, local government and the voluntary sector. She brought this expertise with her to the Opinion desk, along with a lively interest in politics, the arts, development and social justice. A calm, skilful and easygoing presence in a high-pressure environment, she earned colleagues’ affection as well as respect.
After undergoing treatment for breast cancer in 2016, she felt drawn to a more personal kind of work, and embarked on a parallel career in therapeutic counselling.
Born in north London, Joanna shared a room with her sister, Lorna, in the family’s top-floor Hampstead flat. Her mother, Rosemary (nee Vining), was a secretary at a university. Wilfrid Clarke-Jones, her father, became a personnel manager in a timber business, after giving up a career as a singer. Music became a big part of Joanna’s life; she began cello lessons at eight, and piano soon after.
Journalism was her ambition from childhood. We became friends at Hampstead comprehensive, during a turbulent period of strikes and anti-Thatcher protests. She studied English and politics at Swansea University, graduating in 1994, then took a journalism diploma at Harlow in Essex. Her first job was at the Camden New Journal, an independent local paper, where she thrived in a small team reporting on the borough she grew up in.
She left to become press officer at a reproductive rights charity – a cause in which she strongly believed. After a spell freelancing for Nursing Times, and a voluntary project in Tanzania, she did her first sub-editing shift at the Guardian in 2005.
Joanna stopped eating meat as a young adult, practised meditation and enjoyed tennis. She belonged to the same book group for 30 years, wrote poems, played cello in the Westminster Philharmonic Orchestra, and sang in choirs including the Guardian Angels, rehearsing in the office at lunchtimes.
She had a son, Theo, with Nathan Goulbourne. After their separation, and her diagnosis with breast cancer, Joanna wrote in the Guardian about how therapy helped her to let go of inhibitions and find her voice. She began a counselling course at the Mary Ward Centre in 2018 and, when the pandemic moved it online, carried on. She was in the process of increasing her face-to-face work with clients when she was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2023.
She had an introverted side, but was frank, warm and fun to be around. Her closest friends were those made in childhood, including her downstairs neighbour in Hampstead. During two years of illness her concern for those around her, and appreciation of the life she had left, surprised no one who knew her.
Joanna is survived by Theo and Lorna.
