Simon Woolley: A voice for change

Simon Woolley grew up in foster care on a council estate before climbing the social ladder to receive a peerage and become the first black man to head an Oxbridge college.

Image credit: David Johnson

By Kathryn Knight | Published - 1 Jun 2024

Since taking his seat in the House of Lords in 2019, Simon Woolley has been mistaken for a member of staff three times.

"The first time, a Lord asked me to help with his photocopying – and I got up and did it," the 62-year-old recalls. "I don’t know whether I was just embarrassed for him or reverted to type. The second time, I showed my badge and said I wasn’t staff. And the third time, I said, 'I’ve had enough of this. I’m one of you'."

Certainly one imagines few other Lords having to clarify their status. And, one would think, even fewer have faced the same obstacles or navigated quite such an extraordinary path as that of Lord Woolley of Woodford – to give him his full title – on his way to the upper chamber.

Council estate to Oxford University

A foster child raised on a council estate, he can count car mechanic and ticket tout as entries on his CV, before he went on to set up Operation Black Vote, which was credited with encouraging thousands of black men and women to exercise their right at the ballot box.

Today, he is the first black man to head an Oxbridge College, inaugurated last October as principal of Homerton College, Cambridge. He follows in the footsteps of two women, Sonita Alleyne, who was elected head of Jesus College, Cambridge, in 2019, and Baroness Amos, who took on the role at University College, Oxford, in 2020. Meanwhile, his CV is garlanded with gongs, and he counts Prince Charles and the Rev Jesse Jackson among his friends.

So Woolley is undoubtedly a fully paid-up member of the British Establishment – and he certainly looks the part. A dapper figure, his desk nestles amid a book-lined office with views of the quadrangle outside.

Today he can add his own book to that library, having written his autobiography, Soar, a moving but often very funny account of his life’s journey so far.

Soar - Simon Woolley RRP: £10.99

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And what an extraordinary journey it is: the biological son of Lolita, a Windrush generation nurse from Barbados, he was the result of a fling with a man who never knew he had fathered a child. Aged two, Woolley was sent to a Catholic orphanage when Lolita got back together with the white father of his half-brothers, as he would only return to the family home if the young boy was gone. "She faced a terrible choice," he says now. "Poverty with three kids, or a chance of something better for two of them."

He met his mother again aged 17, when he heard that she wanted to make contact, and the two have been in close touch ever since. "I sense that sometimes she wants redemption from me, and I always say, 'Look, you don’t have to apologise for anything, you were not given a good deal.' And it worked out for me," he says.

Growing up in Leicester

Woolley was first fostered then adopted by Dan and Phyllis ‘Pippi’ Fox, a white couple who resided on one of Leicester’s poorest estates. Money was desperately short – he recalls Pippi shoplifting food and scouring corners for coppers – while as one of the few black children in the area he and his older adopted brother Mick were the subject of countless racial taunts.

"There was name-calling, but it was mixed in with other stuff," he recalls. "I remember the vicar’s son, who was a horrible kid, saying, 'You were abandoned. You were put in a dustbin'."

Yet for all the challenges, Woolley’s childhood was a happy one and, while alert to the challenges of mixed-race adoption, he takes a measured view today. "I’m not against white families adopting black and brown children but I do think they need to be helped to understand the child’s cultural heritage," he says. "It’s ensuring that the child is in a house of love, but their heritage is not dismissed or forgotten."

Either way he is resolute that Pippi – who along with Dan died several years ago – made him who he is today, and, as he writes in the book: "Most people are lucky if they have one mother who loves them – I’ve had two."

In common with his peers, Woolley left school at 16 with a handful of CSEs. He worked as a car mechanic, before finding he could supplement his income as a ticket tout outside the local football stadium. "I was always a bit of a hustler," he grins.

Life changed when in his late teens he met a bunch of ‘wide boys’ from London who persuaded him to come to the capital to be a sales rep for a shower firm. He was good at it: by 22, Woolley was earning enough to purchase two flats in South Woodford – the east London borough he still calls home – and a car.

By anyone’s measure he was a success story, yet Woolley was acutely aware of his lack of education, a sense that was solidified on a visit to Oxford for work.

"I was looking at these people around me at the university and thinking, 'I need that to be me'," he recalls.

Igniting his campaigning zeal

He bought himself a university access degree and registered as a mature student at Middlesex University, studying Spanish and politics, a course that gave him the chance to spend time in Costa Rica and then Colombia, where his campaigning zeal was first ignited.

"Going there, I thought I’d experienced and seen racism in the UK, but here you were seeing people getting shot and kidnapped. I thought I have no excuse not to try to change my world."

That conviction led to Operation Black Vote, which Woolley helped establish in the mid-1990s to tackle the disenfranchised among the black community. "Many working class and particularly black working class people bitterly complain at the hairdressers, but often we disengage because we feel powerless, and I wanted to change that dynamic," he explains. "Elections are won and lost in the margins. I was able to tell them that far from being powerless, we can decide who has the keys to Downing Street."

It worked: back then, in 1996, there were just six non-white MPs, among them Diane Abbott and Paul Boateng. Today there are 65 with ethnic minority backgrounds.

Meticulously non-partisan when it comes to equality campaigning, Woolley emphasises that he will work with anyone he believes to be sincere about effecting change. His success has opened new doors, including a friendship with Prince Charles. "He believes I can be an agent for social and racial change with him," he says. "I can go to places he can’t."

Why he turned down an OBE

Yet Woolley is no establishment lackey, turning down an OBE awarded by Tony Blair’s Labour government, as he felt unable to accept an award that contained the word ‘empire’.

"The Empire wasn’t a benevolent endeavour, it was an endeavour of exploitation," he says. "Really and truthfully my ego wanted it, and I knew I could justify it – the empire strikes back and all that. But I needed to say no, I could say no, and it was liberating to do so."

He thought he had "lost his chance" of the rubber stamp of establishment approval only to be offered a knighthood by Theresa May in 2019 and elevation to the House of Lords.

"So in the end I got the highest honour, but my integrity was intact, and that to me was really important," he says. Not just for him either: Woolley has a teenage son, Luca, from a long-term partnership that ended 17 years ago only for Woolley to later find out his ex was pregnant. Luca now lives with his mother in London but has a room at Woolley’s grace-and-favour house at Homerton. "I can’t love a human being more than this kid," he says.

His mission is promoting equality

Today, Woolley sees his mission both in the Lords and at Homerton to promote equality on all fronts and wants to use his role at the latter to encourage more black and working-class children to go to university.

"I’m in the perfect position to do that," he says. "A lot of the students have what I had, which is imposter syndrome: do I belong? Do I have the right? And I’m saying you do have the right, you are brilliant; you’re going to do great things in the world."

Homerton is working hard to provide equality of access: around 40% of its 2021 intake identify as BAME (Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic), while 75% came from state schools.

This is a huge shift given that five years ago one Cambridge college had no black students at all, although inevitably it has led to grumbles that the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction. It’s an argument for which Woolley has short shrift. "A lot of people say, 'Well, you’re just for the working class now.' And nothing could be further from the truth: I want the privileged kids, the middle-class kids and the working class here, but I want them all to have the same values," he says.

He recounts a poignant incident that unfolded early on after his arrival in Homerton. "I had another formal dinner, the fourth in a long week, and I just wanted to get home and go to bed," he recalls. "But then a young Asian woman approached me and said, 'You have no idea what your presence means to me here.'

"And she started to cry. She said that as a young Asian woman she looked around the walls of places such as Homerton and saw predominantly old white men, and nobody like me in a position like this. It was a bit of a “wow” moment. You realise what your presence means to a lot of people."

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