Joan Vickers, Baroness Vickers

Joan Helen Vickers, Baroness Vickers, DBE (3 June 1907 – 23 May 1994) was a British Conservative Party politician.

Vickers was born in London on 3 June 1907, the eldest daughter of (Horace) Cecil Vickers (1882-1944), a stockbroker, and his wife, Lilian Munro Lambert Grose (1880-1923), a social worker, only daughter of Woodman Cole Grose, MBE, a civil servant. Her father’s family came originally from Lincolnshire and her mother’s from Cornwall.

Her father joined Nelke Phillips, a London stockbroking firm who counted Edward VII as one of their clients. He was elected to the Stock Exchange on 25 March 1904 and became one of their partners at their office at 4 Moorgate Street. At the end of the First World War, all the German stockbrokers were forced to resign. In 1917 he set up his own firm, Vickers, da Costa, which counted Sir Winston Churchill among their clients. Her brother, Ralph Vickers was later Senior Partner of the firm.

Vickers was educated at St Monica's, Burgh Heath, Surrey, and in Paris. She was trained as a Norland Nurse, working in the Margaret Macdonald and Mary Middleton Hospital, Notting Hill and was active in politics in Battersea and Islington. She was presented at court by Mrs Winston Churchill in 1926. She hunted in Leicestershire, rode horses for the Irish Free State Army to ladies classes and competed in the Dublin Horse Show as a jumper.She served with the Red Cross in South East Asia and was area welfare officer of the Social Welfare Department in Malaya. She was later chairman of the Anglo-Indonesian Society. She served as a London County Councillor 1937–45 and was UK delegate to the Status of Women Commission of the United Nations.

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