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Joan Newiss was a senior member of staff at the Beckett Park Library which served the City of Leeds Training College and later Leeds Polytechnic..

Ayrton was a City of Leeds Training College student between 1941 and 1943. In 1941, the college was evacuated to hotels in Scarborough for the duration of the war. Ayrton was based at Southlands and Red Lea Hotel. She was educated at Park School and Colne Grammar School. Her first teaching posts were at Park Junior School in 1945 and later at Trawden Primary School through the 1950s. She married Benjamin Waite, a Civil Servant, in Colne in 1948. The couple moved to Slough, where they brought up their family. She taught at Montem Middle and William Penn Schools but moved back to her native Colne after the death of her husband in 1979. She retired from teaching in 1981. She threw herself into organising festivals, including the Colne Luther Greenwood Festival. She also organised reunions for her college and Grammar School in Colne.
In the early 1990s, she contacted Judith Chalmers' regular spot on Radio 2 to promote reunions. As a direct result, she organised Scarborough students' reunions until around 2017. At the height of their popularity, the reunions attracted over 140 students.
Ayrton was born on 5 July 1923 at Colne in Lancashire, the daughter of Walter Ayrton, a Cotton Worker, and Beatrice Greenwood. She married Benjamin Waite on 19 June 1948 at Colne Congregational Church. She died on 20 July 2019 at the Sycamore Rise Nursing Home in Colne.