Joyce Rose - obituary - Telegraph Clarke also had to make a U-turn over previous convictions. Joyce Rose declared herself vindicated, saying: "At the moment there are no persistent offenders because the Act does not allow you to say that." She also held out against efforts by Lord Mackay, Lord Chancellor under Margaret Thatcher and John Major, to exercise greater control over magistrates" courts that he regarded as amateurish and inefficient. When he criticised them for poor service, she retorted that the strict cash limits Mackay had imposed would prevent their improvement. Joyce Dora Hester Woolf was born in north London on August 14 1929, and went to King Alfred School, Hampstead, and Queen's College, Harley Street, before completing her education in America. She was a housewife of 34 when, in 1963, she was appointed a JP. She served on Watford juvenile panel and Hertfordshire magistrates courts" and probation committees, and from 1979 chaired the local Family Proceedings Panel. In 1990 she was appointed chairman of Watford bench, taking charge as the courts were overloaded by cases of non-payment of poll tax. That November she became chairman of the Magistrates" Association. An early challenge was discrimination by some employers against staff who were magistrates; blue-collar workers in areas of high unemployment were suffering most. She said the resistance came "not from the captains of industry but from middle managers; perhaps it is a question of jealousy." At the 1969 Liberal Assembly, she moved a resolution regretting the "increasingly permissive" climate towards the taking of soft drugs; surprisingly for the times, it was carried. She also called for curbs on the portrayal of sadism and methodical violence on television. Joyce Rose chaired the Women's Liberal Federation in 1972 and 1973, and became party president in 1979, in the wake of the Jeremy Thorpe affair and an election the Liberals had survived against the odds. She told that autumn's Assembly that 4.5 million votes provided a strong foundation for electoral advance. Installed as party chairman at the end of the 1982 conference, her term embraced the Liberal/SDP Alliance's failure to break through at the 1983 election, and the party conference that followed. From 1994 she served on the Liberal Democrats" federal appeals panel. Joyce Rose was at various times vice-chairman of the UK Committee for Unicef, and a board member of the Women's National Commission, the Apex Trust and local family and medical charities. She was appointed CBE in 1981, and a Deputy Lieutenant for Hertfordshire in 1990. Joyce Woolf married, in 1953, Cyril Rose, with whom she had two sons and a daughter. Joyce Rose, born August 14 1929, died November 3 2013