Lives Remembered: Professor Joyce Youings

Joyce Youings, Emeritus Professor of English Social History at the University of Exeter, was the eldest daughter of Harold and Ruby Youings. She was born in Barnstaple, Devon, on 11 September 1922 and attended Barnstaple Girls' Grammar School, where she excelled in the classroom and on the sports field, playing hockey for Devon County.

Youings resisted the opportunity to join the family concern, Youings Wholesale Tobacco. Rather, in 1941 she went to King's College, London (then evacuated to Bristol) to read mathematics. Within a week a chance conversation with a history student at a hockey match led her to change her course, an impulse she never regretted.

A First in 1944 set her en route to a PhD at University College. There, and at the Institute of Historical Research, lasting friendships were made with, inter alia, Rowena Carus Wilson, Joan Thirsk, David Quinn and Anne Cronne. Ambitious for university teaching, Youings took a safety-net Diploma in Education and taught a little. The doctorate completed, in 1951 – as a Tudor specialist – she joined the Department of History at the University College of the South West, happy to take on, too, the task of encouraging local-history studies across Devon. In 1965 the College became the University of Exeter....