Members of the CSPA Scarborough Group last year toasted the 100th birthday of their fellow member Jocelyn Lovett. Until a couple of years ago, Jocelyn was an active member of Scarborough Group, travelling 20 miles from her home in Malton by train to meetings. She always took part in discussions about issues such as the digital divide and toilets closing.

Jocelyn celebrated her birthday in her care home with her son Bob, friends and Scarborough Group chair Joyce l’Anson. Her birthday cake (pictured), made by care home staff, featured daffodils as a symbol of her native Wales. It was all edible, even the flowers and the plant pot! Jocelyn was born in the coastal town of Fishguard, Pembrokeshire, Wales in 1924.

Her grandmother’s house was in the ‘Lower Town’ – down a steep hill and by the old fishing port. She visited there often as a young girl to help her gran, who was a champion Corgi breeder and Crufts judge.

One of her weekly errands was to go to the market in the town to buy sheep’s heads her grandmother cooked for the dog! It was quite a trek up and down the hill. She went on to live in the Cambrian Inn, a pub run by her parents in the main town. It had stables for the horses and traps of the clientele.

Jocelyn went to school in Fishguard, but later moved to Derby just before the outbreak of World War II, where she attended a commercial college and developed a skill with numbers.

In her career, she always had clerical administrative roles. The first job was with the LMS railway company in Derby. It was on the railway that she met husband Ron, as she travelled to Fishguard with her grandmother on a very crowded train. The handsome, uniformed Chief Petty Officer offered his suitcase as a seat as all the compartments were full. The rest is history. They later married in Fishguard. Jocelyn and Ron moved to Portsmouth where Ron joined the police force. She had a number of jobs there, including working in the NAAFI responsible for ordering and victualling Royal Navy ships (including monitoring the supply of tax-free cigarettes and rum).

She also worked as a wages clerk, an administrative manager for a newspaper wholesaler, a civil service tax officer and a switchboard operator at a local solicitor’s office. When widowed, she moved to Yorkshire to be close to her son. At her care home, however, she confuses the residents and staff now and again by
speaking in Welsh!