Beryl Gilroy
| Beryl Gilroy | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Beryl Agatha Gilroy 30 August 1924 Skeldon, Berbice, British Guiana |
| Died | 4 April 2001 (aged 76) United Kingdom |
| Occupation | Writer, teacher |
| Children |
Paul Gilroy Darla Gilroy |
| Relatives | Sally Louisa James (maternal grandmother) |
Beryl Agatha Gilroy (née Answick) (30 August 1924 – 4 April 2001) was a novelist and teacher, and "one of Britain's most significant post-war Caribbean migrants". Born in what was then British Guiana she moved in the 1950s to the United Kingdom, where she became the first black headteacher in London. She was the mother of academic Paul Gilroy.
Beryl Gilroy was born in Skeldon, Berbice, Guyana. She grew up in a large, extended family, largely under the influence of her maternal grandmother, Sally Louisa James (1868–1967), a herbalist, who managed the family small-holding, was a keen reader and imparted to the young Beryl stories of "Long Bubbies", Cabresses and Long Lady and a treasury of colloquial Guyanese proverbs.
Gilroy did not enter full-time schooling until she was 12. From 1943 to 1945, she attended teacher training college in Georgetown, gaining a first-class diploma. She subsequently taught and lectured on a UNICEF nutrition programme. In 1951, at the age of 27, she was selected to attend university in the United Kingdom. Between 1951 and 1953 she attended the University of London pursuing a Diploma in Child Development.
Although Gilroy was a qualified teacher, racism prevented her getting a post for some time, and she had to work as a washer, a factory clerk and maid. Eventually employed by the Inner London Education Authority, she taught for a couple of years, married and spent the next 12 years at home bringing up and educating her children Darla and Paul, furthering her own higher education, reviewing and reading for a publisher. In 1968 she returned to teaching and eventually became the first Black headteacher in London, at Beckford School in West Hampstead. Her experiences of those years are told in Black Teacher (1976).
Later she worked as a multi-cultural researcher at the Institute of Education, University of London, and developed a pioneering practice in psychotherapy, working mainly with Black women and children. She was a co-founder in the early 1980s of the Camden Black Sisters group. She gained a PhD in counselling psychology from an American university in 1987 while working at the Institute of Education.
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