Joyce Rugg Gunn

Rugg Gunn was born in Tottenham,^[2] the daughter of Andrew Rugg Gunn^[3] and Gertrude Martha Smith. Her father was a physician, an eye specialist, born in Scotland.^[4][5] Her older brother Mark Andrew Rugg Gunn was a Navy surgeon.^[6] She attended Sherborne School for Girls, Girton College, Cambridge, and Bonn University in Germany.^[2]

Rugg Gunn worked in the legal department of a bank and with Sybil Campbell at the Ministry of Food as a young woman.^[2][7] She was "the first woman to enter the legal service in the British Colonial Office" when she became deputy registrar of the Supreme Court of Kenya at Mombasa in 1946.^[1] She was appointed acting resident magistrate at Mombasa in 1947.^[8] She was acting chief registrar of the Supreme Court of Kenya and the Court of Appeal for Eastern Africa in summer 1950.^[9]

After Kenyan independence, Rugg Gunn was solicitor for the London County Council (LCC),^[10][11][12] and later for its successor, the Greater London Council,^[13][14] into the late 1970s.^[15]