Joyce Gibbon Davies was born on 19 November 1915 in London, and was educated at the North London Collegiate School. She won a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge and went on to the Royal Free Hospital in London from which she graduated MB BChir in 1940. After various house jobs she obtained her D(Obst) RCOG while at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. In 1941 she married Desmond Neill with whom she had four children, three girls and a boy, and moved to Belfast in 1946 when Desmond was appointed Head of the new Department of Social Studies at Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland.

After various part-time locums while the children were young, she was instrumental in setting up the Northern Ireland Family Planning Association in 1965, opening clinics throughout the Province, training doctors and nurses, and finally seeing Family Planning safely into the National Health Service. She practised at the Royal Maternity Hospital and in the Community Medical Service and led seminars on psychosexual problems.

In pressing for a …