Biography
Hocquard was born as Joan Eileen Reynolds in Holland Park, an area of Kensington, London, England, on 29 March 1908. She spent much of her childhood in Kenya, where her father was a colonial officer in charge of shipping on the Great Lakes in east Africa. Her brother was born there in 1913.
After attending a boarding school in Sussex, she got a job as a cook in a French hotel near Geneva in Switzerland. Just before World War II started, she returned to England, where she met her husband, Gilbert Hocquard. During the war, she drove ambulances in London before moving to the south coast of England (near Eastbourne) with her husband. The couple travelled across Europe in a camper van and went on yachting holidays until her husband’s death in 1981. Following his death, she moved to a flat in Lilliput. In 1987, she met a widower Kenneth Bedford at the Bournemouth Gramophone Society, who was 20 years her junior. They never married, but started living together in Poole.
Hocquard passed away in Poole, Dorset, England, on 24 October 2020, at the age of 112.
