Joyce Gutteridge CBE
Joyce Gutteridge CBE was the first female legal adviser to the Foreign Office, whose varied career plumbed not only the limits of human behaviour, but the depths of the ocean and the farthest reaches of space.
Joyce Ada Cooke Gutteridge was born on the 10th July 1906 in Bromley, Kent. Her father was Harold Cooke Gutteridge (1876-1953), first Professor of Comparative Law at Cambridge and author of the first English-language textbook on the subject. After attending Roedean, Joyce won a place to read History at Somerville in 1925. She matriculated just five years after Oxford women, prominently led by Somerville’s Principal Dame Emily Penrose, won the right to receive their degrees, and six years after the ‘Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919’ allowed women to be called to the Bar. Despite these breakthroughs, Joyce was not called to the Bar until 1938. Little is known of her biography in the years between graduation and her call.
In 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War, Joyce became an army lawyer with the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS). Her wartime work led to her recruitment to the Foreign Office (as it was then known) in 1947 by Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice, in the temporary role of legal researcher. As a member of the British delegation to Geneva in 1949, she played a pivotal role in drafting the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Her work on the Conventions sparked a lifelong interest in the work of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement.
In 1950, Joyce was made ‘Assistant Legal Adviser’ to the FO, the first woman ever to hold that position. It was during her time as Assistant Legal Adviser to the Foreign Office that she represented the UK government in the 1958 Convention on the Continental Shelf, which sought to codify the rules of international law relating to claiming sovereignty over and the right to exploit the continental shelves. Joyce later spent considerable time in Iceland dealing with fisheries disputes between the UK and Iceland known as the Cod Wars, and her aptitude to acquire new practice specialisms such as Law of the Sea, and advise on factual situations that did not fall neatly into textbook legal categories, is one of the qualities which her legal colleagues esteemed most highly.
In 1960 she was promoted to the role of Legal Counsellor, in which capacity she served at the UN Permanent Mission in New York (1961-1964). This was at the height of space exploration, and Joyce duly came to specialise in the Law of Outer Space, becoming one of the pioneers in the field and helping to draft the highly influential 1966 Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies.
Having been made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1962, Joyce continued to perform her legal duties as a Legal Counsellor until her retirement in 1966. She maintained an advisory role with the Foreign Office, including a significant role in drafting the UK’s legal position following the 1967 SS Torrey Canyon oil spill off the coast of Cornwall, one of the first incidents of its kind. On her retirement, Joyce Gutteridge was the highest-ranking woman in the British Diplomatic Service. After her death, she became one of only two women posthumously memorialised in the British Yearbook of International Law (correct as of 2025).
Did you know? Joyce Gutteridge’s pioneering work with the UN Outer Space Committee earned her the affectionate nickname ‘Our Lady in Outer Space’ among Foreign Office colleagues.
Please note: this profile is indebted to Luiza Leao Soares Pereira’s article ‘Working From “Rooms of Their Own”: For a Realistic Portrait of Joyce Gutteridge CBE and Other Trailblazing Women’ in Immi Tallgren (ed), Portraits of Women in International Law: New Names and Forgotten Faces (OUP 2021). Read the full article here.