Despite a disadvantaged childhood, Joan Hunt became a company director of a multinational. After retiring to Spain and being widowed, she dedicated the rest of her life to creating a hospice on the Costa del Sol: to date, the only one in Spain
Imagine a little white-haired old lady with a lovely smile, living in retirement on the Costa del Sol, speaking only a little Spanish, often leaning on a stick to get about. An unremarkable British granny, you might think, quietly enjoying her old age in the sun. Joan Hunt, though, was far from unremarkable.
She was born Joan Philomena Sloan in Bootle (Liverpool) in 1929, the eighth of a family of nine children, in an Irish Catholic family. Joan had an attack of septic arthritis when she was two, which led to several operations, years in Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, and hip problems which lasted all her life. Her mother died when Joan was 16. Her father was a dock worker in Liverpool.
As a child, Joan was evacuated to the countryside during World War 2, so her education was always sketchy. However, her mother had seen her potential, and scraped up enough money to send her to classes to learn bookkeeping and secretarial skills.
Her career marked her out as special. By the time she retired, she was one of the very few women of her time to hold a top management post, as Head of Personnel Administration in a multinational with 1,400 employees.
Retirement
Along the way, Joan had met and married Fred Hunt, and like so many they decided to retire to the Costa del Sol. After only a short time, though, Fred was diagnosed with a brain tumour. To add to their distress, Fred couldn’t understand what was happening to him in the hospital. Joan finally found an English-speaking doctor in a newly created palliative care unit in Malaga, and Fred was able to end his days there, dying in 1991, in the care of Dr Marisa Martín.
Spain’s first and only hospice
Joan had forged a close friendship with Fred’s doctor, and took her the money collected at his funeral to donate to the hospital where he had died. The palliative care unit, though, was not like the sort of hospice Joan had come across in the UK – and which Marisa had also seen for herself. So Joan decided to create one. She wanted everyone facing the end of life to have the care she had wanted for Fred, and for their families to be supported too.
Marisa agreed and loved the idea, but was dubious. Where, she asked Joan, was the money going to come from? Joan’s faith in the goodness of her fellow humans produced the answer: “People will help us”. “But how will they know about it?” was the next question. Joan’s business background provided the answer to that, too. “Through the media. We’ll send out a press release.”
It was around this time that I first met Joan. I was the editor of an English-language newspaper on the coast, whose ethos was to inform and support the international community, so it was natural that we supported her from the start.
A meeting was called, and at this stage it was nearly all foreign residents who went along to hear about Joan’s project. One of them was Susan Hannam, a State Registered Nurse, originally from Skipton, Yorkshire, who immediately signed up to help raise funds for the new Cudeca Foundation, which was duly registered as a charity (Cudeca is an acronym for ‘Cuidados del Cáncer’ – Cancer Care). The volunteers mobilised by Joan set about organising fund-raising events and Susan later became the Cudeca Foundation’s first paid employee.
An army of volunteers
Her next move was to open a charity shop in Fuengirola, in 1992, despite the misgivings of people who knew that this was a new concept in Spain and thought it wouldn’t work. It worked so well that Cudeca’s shops now account for by far the biggest proportion of the charity’s income. Manned by hundreds of volunteers, there are currently 24 Cudeca shops in the Costa del Sol area, as well as an online version, Joan by Cudeca.
Beloved by the Spanish
It was not only the foreign residents who were bowled over by Joan. Cudeca personnel started visiting patients at home, offering what Joan called a “special kind of caring”, and grateful Spanish families joined the ranks of volunteers and donors. The Mayor of Benalmádena offered a plot of land for the planned hospice, and Joan laid the first stone in 1998. The in-patient hospice opened in 2005.
Andalusians are known for being friendly, but the warmth of their feelings for Joan was on another scale. As the founder of Cudeca she was called on to accept accolades and awards from all parts of society. At one ceremony, she commented to Marisa that everyone seemed to want to be near her, and the reply came: “It’s because they love you, Joan”. Rafael Olalla, Cudeca’s Financial Director, recalls similar events, at which Joan would always insist on speaking in Spanish out of respect for the Spaniards. He says it gave him goosebumps “to see the admiration these Malagueños, the businesspeople, politicians and professionals, all felt for a little 80-year-old Englishwoman.”
Joan was modest. She never sought the limelight and always credited the volunteers and other supporters with the success of Cudeca. At one awards ceremony, though, she ended her acceptance speech on a personal note, quoting the Robert Frost poem which ends:
‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.’
The ovation which greeted her words went on for more than five minutes.
Joan Hunt once laughingly said that she was no saint, but through conviction, unwavering principles and a profound belief in human nature, she performed a miracle in her lifetime. She died in 2021, leaving her home to Cudeca to house a dedicated paediatric palliative care unit: Spain’s first. Her spirit is still the beating heart of the hospice she created.
