Beryl Gilroy

Beryl Agatha Gilroy (née Answick; 30 August 1924 – 4 April 2001) was a Guyanese educator, novelist, ethno-psychotherapist, and poet.

The Guardian described her as "one of Britain's most significant post-war Caribbean migrants."

Beryl Gilroy was born in Springlands, British Guiana on 30 August 1924 into a very large family.

Her father died when she was young and she grew up in the care of her maternal grandparents as a sickly child.

Both were influential: her grandfather taught her how to read and her grandmother, Sally Louisa James, was affected her deeply.

She was an herbalist who managed the family smallholding.

Gilroy spent a lot of time listening to woman chatting as they worked; her grandmother in particular told her folkloric tales and Guyanese proverbs.

Gilroy began creative writing during her childhood and was homeschooled, as her grandparents did not think a formal education was good enough for her.

At the age of 12, she was sent to Georgetown for schooling, in part to allow her to discover her independence.

Gilroy earned a first-class diploma from a teacher training college in Georgetown in 1945, then taught and lectured for a UNICEF nutrition program.

She was also the school head of the infant section of the local governmental school.

She emigrated to London in 1951 as part of the Windrush generation to attend the University of London, then spend decades teaching, writing, and improving education.

She worked primarily with Black women and children as a psychotherapist and her children's books are lauded as some of the first representations of Black London.

She is perhaps best known as the first Black head teacher in London.

In 1951, she moved to the United Kingdom and earned a diploma in Child Development from the University of London.

She was eventually employed by the Inner London Education Authority in 1953, making her the first Black female teacher in London.

Her first teaching job was at a poor Catholic school in Bethnal Green where her third year pupils had already been taught racist stereotypes by their parents.

She stepped away from teaching between 1956 and 1968 to raise their children, Darla-Jane and Paul, and to earn her master's degree in psychology.

While she was home with her children from 1956 to 1968, she began writing what would become the Nippers series.

These are considered the first children's stories about the Black British presence in London and were meant to replace the outdated Janet and John Books.

She felt that the series was relatable to children of all races because "they have the same problems, only they don't know it or won't accept it."

New People at Twenty-Four, one of the books in the Nippers series, discussed interracial marriage.

The British Parliament passed the Race Relations Act in 1965, making it possible for her to serve on the Race Relations Board.

She returned to teaching in 1968, this time as the deputy head at Beckford Primary School (renamed West Hampstead Primary School in 2021).

Schools had become more racially diverse during her time away; she variably estimated that between 33 and 55 different nationalities now filled the classrooms.

In 1969, she became the first-ever Black head teacher in London.

Despite her rank, she received a lower wage than her oftentimes prejudiced colleagues.

In her 1976 memoir Black Teacher, she recalls the children whimpering and hiding under the table when she first arrived.

During this time, she met and married Patrick Gilroy, a British scientist of German heritage who was an active anti-colonialist.

In 1980, she took an MA in education at the University of Sussex.

In the early 1980s, she co-founded Camden Black Sisters, an information and support group for local Black women.

She left Beckford in 1982 and moved to the Centre for Multi-Cultural Education, which was run by University of London's Institute of Education and the Inner London Education Authority.

She started her PhD in 1984 at Century University in the United States and completed her doctorate in counselling psychology in 1987.

In a 1986 interview, she shared that she had to "relearn English because [she] spoke with Guyana idioms and Guyana expressions."

Being both Black and Caribbean made finding a teaching job difficult for Gilroy.

She and E. R. Braithwaite were two of a handful of Caribbean teachers looking for jobs in London and were met with terrible stereotyping from British employers, namely their beliefs that Caribbeans were cannibals and lacked good hygiene.

In the meantime, she worked in a mail order factory, as a maid, and as a dishwasher in a café to support herself.

She left the centre in 1990.

Gilroy's early work examines the impact of life in Britain on West Indian families and her later work explores issues of African and Caribbean diaspora and slavery.

Many of her stories, both fiction and non-fiction, came from her time as a teacher or the stories her grandmother told when she was a child.