Joan Cockin

Joan Cockin was the pen name of Edith Joan Burbidge Macintosh, PhD, CBE. She was one of the very first women to be a British diplomat. Brought up in America, educated at Oxford, and married in India – her career cut short, as was then the rule for women, by marriage there to a Scottish banker. She was part of the UK delegation at the founding of both NATO and the Council of Europe. Macintosh went on to have a second career as a trail-blazing consumer champion, co-founding the National Consumer Council and the Scottish Consumer Council, acting as Legal Ombudsman for Scotland, founding and chairing the Insurance Ombudsman service, and serving on a Royal Commission. As Cockin she only published three mysteries: Curiosity Killed the Cat (1947), Villainy at Vespers (1949), and Deadly Earnest (1952) - biography by Galileo Publishers.