Remembering Joyce Hicks (née Loveridge) – 1926-2025

AT THE END of February, we received the sad news of the passing of one of our long-time postal subscribers, Joyce Hicks. Joyce was born in July 1926 in Reading to Horace and Mary Loveridge. Horace owned an ironmonger’s store in central Reading at the time.
Joyce attended Malvern House School in Addington Road and then The Abbey School – she was evacuated with the school to Clevedon for a year during the war. After a period as a trainee nurse at the John Radcliffe Hospital Military Ward, nursing young soldiers, she took a post at Barclays Bank in Reading and Henley. She later moved to the BBC in London and then to Berkshire County Council Libraries, becoming the personal assistant to the Head of Libraries.
She led an active social life, enjoying concerts and plays, and her holidays. During a walking holiday in Austria, she met her future husband, Ernest Hicks, a senior scientist working in atomic energy in Lancashire.
They married in 1977 at Mapledurham and moved to the Lancashire coastal town of Lytham St Annes. Joyce was 50, Ernest was 59. Joyce maintained links with Caversham through her postal subscription to the Caversham Bridge, and would sometimes respond to articles with beautifully handwritten letters. She wrote about swimming in the River Thames at the Caversham Lido at Freebody’s (close to Caversham Bridge) for our June 2022 paper.
Ernest died in 1997, and Joyce remained in the same house in Lytham until the summer of 2024, enjoying the social life there and continuing as an active member of the Women’s Institute. Recently she moved to a Residential Care Home in Northamptonshire close to her nephew, where she died 1 February. She was buried at the family grave in the Henley Road Cemetery 12 March.