My friend Joyce Rimmer, who has died aged 87, was a social worker and probation officer who spent her adult life campaigning for justice.
Joyce was born in Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire, and grew up nearby in Hillesley, where her parents, Nellie (nee Carter) and Lionel Bennett, were farmers. After attending Katharine Lady Berkeley’s grammar school in Wotton-under-Edge she took a history degree at Bristol University and then studied social work at the London School of Economics.
While there she supported the settlement movement by living in various “settlement houses” – places where social reformers would share accommodation with deprived families – trying to support them.
In 1956 Joyce moved to Birmingham and became a probation officer there. Her overriding aim was to keep women out of prison, as she recounted 60 years later, in a letter published by the Guardian. “I supervised many women offenders on probation,” she wrote. “All cared for their families and did not offend again. Nowadays prison very rarely works. The probation service needs to be given proper recognition again.”
Joyce was naturally academic and in 1963 she became a lecturer in social work at Birmingham University, where, in her spare time, she wrote a history of the Birmingham settlement movement called Troubles Shared: Story of a Settlement, 1899-1979, published in 1980.
After retiring from the university in 1990, she got more involved with Cruse Bereavement Care’s Birmingham branch, which she had helped start in the early 1970s. She chaired it from 1991 until 1994 and remained involved for years afterwards. In 1991 she was appointed MBE, and in 2009 was awarded a League of Mercy medal.
Her intense interest in public policy remained with her all her life and she would follow current affairs avidly, with particular attention to stories about prison conditions.
Although serious in nature, she had a ready sense of humour that shone through in her work as an amateur artist. Her paintings featured everything from stormy seas and church interiors to the people in her exercise class.
One of her most recent paintings showed a queue of bedraggled people waiting for a bus; she sent it to transport officials, along with a letter explaining that her local hospital really needed a bus shelter. As a result, the officials agreed to put an electronic noticeboard in the hospital foyer, showing patients when the next buses were due. That way they at least did not have to wait outside.
Joyce met Douglas Rimmer at Birmingham, where he was head of West African studies, and they married in 1970.
Douglas died in 2004. Joyce is survived by his two children from a previous marriage and by her two nieces.
