In many respects, the fact that Simon Woolley is the first black male head of an Oxbridge college is the least remarkable thing about him.
How many other deans are former car mechanics? How many have been ticket touts? Or left school without any O-levels? Woolley did all of them, and plenty more besides, on his colourful and unlikely path to the doors of Homerton College, Cambridge.
Baron Woolley of Woodford, Kt, to give him his full title, is the former foster child from a Leicester council estate who rose to the House of Lords through his relentless campaigning for racial equality, and who now aims to level up education in his role as principal of Cambridge University’s biggest college.
Having spent much of his career trying to turn out the black vote at elections, he now finds himself grappling with the transgender debate, culture wars and religion, as well as the day-to-day running of a 250-year-old institution.
“It’s a new, exciting, scary journey for me,” he says. “One of the opportunities this role gives me is to break away from that narrow prism of just being a race equality champion. I’m also a champion for equality in general, for great education, for creativity.”
Woolley is bursting with ideas for how he can attract more working-class students of every colour to Homerton and other top-rank institutions, but his presence in this cloistered world is already making a dramatic difference.
Five years ago it emerged that six Cambridge colleges admitted fewer than 10 black students each over a five-year period (one of them admitted none at all). Since the announcement a year ago that Woolley was to lead Homerton, a job he began last October, applications for undergraduate places at the college have soared from 600 to 1,100, many of them from black youngsters.
“I don’t wear it heavily but I’ve been a beacon for working class kids and black kids in general,” he says. “The other week when I was walking through the college a woman came up and said, ‘I’m doing an MA because you’re here.’ I could have cried.”
For the lucky ones who make it, Woolley’s job is to “give every student that walks through Homerton a sense of true belonging”, “because someone from Bradford or Birmingham or Doncaster, who’s working class, you’re bringing them to an arena where you have formal dinners with the gown and an array of cutlery, I’ve got to give them that wraparound support.
“Some of it might be intellectual and cultural, others might be financial, through bursary schemes.”
Sitting in his sumptuous office, with an oil portrait of himself, a polished hardwood dining table and leather armchairs, Woolley freely admits to his own imposter syndrome. “Yeah. I’m almost a little bit embarrassed. Because for 25 years, I worked out of a shoebox. But I’m embracing it in a way to say to council house kids, through hard work and endeavour these spaces belong to you too.”
“These spaces” include the House of Lords, of which he has been a member since 2019.
“When you go into the House of Lords, there are a few black and brown people. You’re an outsider, but on the inside you’re uniquely placed to articulate the lived experiences of people not in these spaces. And I do feel a huge responsibility that I must be that voice.”
This is why Woolley, who turned down an OBE in 2005 because of the word Empire in its name, accepted a peerage in 2019, which Theresa May believed would “empower him to do more”.
He mentions three occasions when fellow peers have mistaken him for staff, asking him to photocopy papers or fetch things, but handles the word racism like an unexploded bomb.
“Racism is too crude a word,” he says. “It’s loaded, a blunt instrument to describe a myriad of occurrences. There are misunderstandings, cultural baggage, and in the worst instances, extreme racism. Most institutions will have some institutional baggage that is going to take some unpicking.
“These institutions that I now belong to, I see very little of the teeming diversity that is outside. Do I think that people are consciously doing that? No. Do I think that it must change? Yes, I do. My modus operandi has been to lay bare uncomfortable truths. It’s not always Mr Nice Guy. But in the main, if you take people along with you, you’ve got a better chance of making a difference.”
Woolley is best known for setting up Operation Black Vote in 1996. At the time there were just four non-white MPs – Bernie Grant, Keith Vaz, Diane Abbott and Paul Boateng – and the organisation used census data to work out that more than 70 seats could change hands if black people turned out to vote in greater numbers at a general election. Today there are 65 MPs from ethnic minorities.
It is impossible to discuss Woolley’s achievements without discussing his life story to date, which he has chronicled in an autobiography, Soar, published this week. It’s a self-deprecating, often hilarious, and brutally honest story of a fascinating life, told by a man whose activism is built on conversation rather than confrontation.
Born in Leicester, Woolley, 60, was briefly raised by his biological mother Lolita (a Windrush generation nurse originally from Barbados) after she had a fling with a man who was never told he had fathered her child.
When he was two, his mother sent him to a Catholic orphanage after getting back together with the white father of his younger half-brother, who would only move back in if Simon was gone. As he writes in his new book, she “had to choose between being a single mother with three kids or life with her husband and two of her children”.
He was taken in by white foster parents, Phillis and Daniel Fox, at the St Matthew’s council estate in Leicester. He was showered with love but lived in such poverty that he would see his mother stealing food.
Inevitably, he also experienced racism, and the odious name-calling of 1970s Britain.
A talented footballer, he had trials for Leicester City, but it was outside the stadium on match days where he first discovered, aged 12, a talent as a salesman, earning money as a ticket tout. He would buy the club’s junior players’ complimentary tickets for £1 before selling them on for a fiver.
“They would sell them to me, except Gary Lineker. He was already a high flyer, marked out for greatness – a bit of a goody two shoes!”
He and his friends would also sneak into cinemas by using a wire to open fire doors from the outside – a skill that he would put to use in adult life by gatecrashing an event with Nelson Mandela and unfurling an Operation Black Vote banner.
Having shown academic promise at primary school, he left secondary school at 16 with six CSEs but no O-levels, an experience that is a spur in his flanks even today.
“We need more black and brown teachers,” he says, suggesting that too many black children fall through the cracks in part because of the “cultural gap” between them and their teachers.
Woolley took up an apprenticeship as a car mechanic when he left school, earning £15 a week. Then he landed a sales job in London and moved to South Woodford, where he has lived ever since. At weekends he boosted his income as a ticket tout outside West End theatres, where he could rake in up to £500 a day.
Would he describe himself as a geezer? “Ha! I was an imposter geezer! I’m not ashamed of it. It allowed me to learn about people.”
His ticket touting also paid for his adult education on an access course at Epping College, which led to a modular degree in English, history and Spanish as a mature student at Middlesex University in his 20s.
Crossbencher Woolley is no Conservative (his first thought on being ennobled by Theresa May was “Oh gosh, they’ll think I’m a Tory!”) but he willingly accepts his debt to Margaret Thatcher, who introduced the access courses.
“Margaret Thatcher and that government was the real nasty party,” he says. “But my life changed dramatically because she had a vision for mature students. Life isn’t always black and white.”
It is Woolley’s take-them-as-you-find-them attitude that sets him apart from many activists. He refuses to be party political and will work with anyone who is prepared to effect change.
“For a long time the left has tried to own the equality agenda,” he says, “They would often say, ‘We’ve got this covered. Go to the back of the queue’. And nothing would change.
“We had a vivid illustration when we did our Colour of Power survey and looked at 50 trade unions. You think of trade unions, you think of equality, yeah? But not one of them had a black general secretary. So the idea that the Left owns equality, and particularly race equality, is fanciful.
“With the Tories, the One Nation Tories, they would say, ‘Look Simon, we’re doing things wrong. Can you help us?’ And it was often there you could get great things done.”
He is particularly proud of the Race Disparity Audit launched by Mrs May in October 2017 with his help, which identified inequality in public services and is still being used to guide change and “unleash talent”.
He is less enamoured with Boris Johnson, having confronted him in public about what he regards as racist comments in the past. He believes the Prime Minister could have been “persuaded by good people to go down a particular path”, citing Ray Lewis, the Guyana-born youth worker who was one of Johnson’s deputy mayors.
Fascinating man. Particularly what he says about the left thinking they own the equality agenda. Reddit threads are testament to that.
Trade unions had no black leaders. But a subset of Tories used me to represent all black people by asking me what they were doing wrong. So the left don’t have the credibility to talk about race.
From a man old enough to remember the Apartheid era and their support for it ffs
Edit: pretty interesting quote to lead on too.
This is a fairly standard working class political arc in this country
3 comments
In many respects, the fact that Simon Woolley is the first black male head of an Oxbridge college is the least remarkable thing about him.
How many other deans are former car mechanics? How many have been ticket touts? Or left school without any O-levels? Woolley did all of them, and plenty more besides, on his colourful and unlikely path to the doors of Homerton College, Cambridge.
Baron Woolley of Woodford, Kt, to give him his full title, is the former foster child from a Leicester council estate who rose to the House of Lords through his relentless campaigning for racial equality, and who now aims to level up education in his role as principal of Cambridge University’s biggest college.
Having spent much of his career trying to turn out the black vote at elections, he now finds himself grappling with the transgender debate, culture wars and religion, as well as the day-to-day running of a 250-year-old institution.
“It’s a new, exciting, scary journey for me,” he says. “One of the opportunities this role gives me is to break away from that narrow prism of just being a race equality champion. I’m also a champion for equality in general, for great education, for creativity.”
Woolley is bursting with ideas for how he can attract more working-class students of every colour to Homerton and other top-rank institutions, but his presence in this cloistered world is already making a dramatic difference.
Five years ago it emerged that six Cambridge colleges admitted fewer than 10 black students each over a five-year period (one of them admitted none at all). Since the announcement a year ago that Woolley was to lead Homerton, a job he began last October, applications for undergraduate places at the college have soared from 600 to 1,100, many of them from black youngsters.
“I don’t wear it heavily but I’ve been a beacon for working class kids and black kids in general,” he says. “The other week when I was walking through the college a woman came up and said, ‘I’m doing an MA because you’re here.’ I could have cried.”
For the lucky ones who make it, Woolley’s job is to “give every student that walks through Homerton a sense of true belonging”, “because someone from Bradford or Birmingham or Doncaster, who’s working class, you’re bringing them to an arena where you have formal dinners with the gown and an array of cutlery, I’ve got to give them that wraparound support.
“Some of it might be intellectual and cultural, others might be financial, through bursary schemes.”
Sitting in his sumptuous office, with an oil portrait of himself, a polished hardwood dining table and leather armchairs, Woolley freely admits to his own imposter syndrome. “Yeah. I’m almost a little bit embarrassed. Because for 25 years, I worked out of a shoebox. But I’m embracing it in a way to say to council house kids, through hard work and endeavour these spaces belong to you too.”
“These spaces” include the House of Lords, of which he has been a member since 2019.
“When you go into the House of Lords, there are a few black and brown people. You’re an outsider, but on the inside you’re uniquely placed to articulate the lived experiences of people not in these spaces. And I do feel a huge responsibility that I must be that voice.”
This is why Woolley, who turned down an OBE in 2005 because of the word Empire in its name, accepted a peerage in 2019, which Theresa May believed would “empower him to do more”.
He mentions three occasions when fellow peers have mistaken him for staff, asking him to photocopy papers or fetch things, but handles the word racism like an unexploded bomb.
“Racism is too crude a word,” he says. “It’s loaded, a blunt instrument to describe a myriad of occurrences. There are misunderstandings, cultural baggage, and in the worst instances, extreme racism. Most institutions will have some institutional baggage that is going to take some unpicking.
“These institutions that I now belong to, I see very little of the teeming diversity that is outside. Do I think that people are consciously doing that? No. Do I think that it must change? Yes, I do. My modus operandi has been to lay bare uncomfortable truths. It’s not always Mr Nice Guy. But in the main, if you take people along with you, you’ve got a better chance of making a difference.”
Woolley is best known for setting up Operation Black Vote in 1996. At the time there were just four non-white MPs – Bernie Grant, Keith Vaz, Diane Abbott and Paul Boateng – and the organisation used census data to work out that more than 70 seats could change hands if black people turned out to vote in greater numbers at a general election. Today there are 65 MPs from ethnic minorities.
It is impossible to discuss Woolley’s achievements without discussing his life story to date, which he has chronicled in an autobiography, Soar, published this week. It’s a self-deprecating, often hilarious, and brutally honest story of a fascinating life, told by a man whose activism is built on conversation rather than confrontation.
Born in Leicester, Woolley, 60, was briefly raised by his biological mother Lolita (a Windrush generation nurse originally from Barbados) after she had a fling with a man who was never told he had fathered her child.
When he was two, his mother sent him to a Catholic orphanage after getting back together with the white father of his younger half-brother, who would only move back in if Simon was gone. As he writes in his new book, she “had to choose between being a single mother with three kids or life with her husband and two of her children”.
He was taken in by white foster parents, Phillis and Daniel Fox, at the St Matthew’s council estate in Leicester. He was showered with love but lived in such poverty that he would see his mother stealing food.
Inevitably, he also experienced racism, and the odious name-calling of 1970s Britain.
A talented footballer, he had trials for Leicester City, but it was outside the stadium on match days where he first discovered, aged 12, a talent as a salesman, earning money as a ticket tout. He would buy the club’s junior players’ complimentary tickets for £1 before selling them on for a fiver.
“They would sell them to me, except Gary Lineker. He was already a high flyer, marked out for greatness – a bit of a goody two shoes!”
He and his friends would also sneak into cinemas by using a wire to open fire doors from the outside – a skill that he would put to use in adult life by gatecrashing an event with Nelson Mandela and unfurling an Operation Black Vote banner.
Having shown academic promise at primary school, he left secondary school at 16 with six CSEs but no O-levels, an experience that is a spur in his flanks even today.
“We need more black and brown teachers,” he says, suggesting that too many black children fall through the cracks in part because of the “cultural gap” between them and their teachers.
Woolley took up an apprenticeship as a car mechanic when he left school, earning £15 a week. Then he landed a sales job in London and moved to South Woodford, where he has lived ever since. At weekends he boosted his income as a ticket tout outside West End theatres, where he could rake in up to £500 a day.
Would he describe himself as a geezer? “Ha! I was an imposter geezer! I’m not ashamed of it. It allowed me to learn about people.”
His ticket touting also paid for his adult education on an access course at Epping College, which led to a modular degree in English, history and Spanish as a mature student at Middlesex University in his 20s.
Crossbencher Woolley is no Conservative (his first thought on being ennobled by Theresa May was “Oh gosh, they’ll think I’m a Tory!”) but he willingly accepts his debt to Margaret Thatcher, who introduced the access courses.
“Margaret Thatcher and that government was the real nasty party,” he says. “But my life changed dramatically because she had a vision for mature students. Life isn’t always black and white.”
It is Woolley’s take-them-as-you-find-them attitude that sets him apart from many activists. He refuses to be party political and will work with anyone who is prepared to effect change.
“For a long time the left has tried to own the equality agenda,” he says, “They would often say, ‘We’ve got this covered. Go to the back of the queue’. And nothing would change.
“We had a vivid illustration when we did our Colour of Power survey and looked at 50 trade unions. You think of trade unions, you think of equality, yeah? But not one of them had a black general secretary. So the idea that the Left owns equality, and particularly race equality, is fanciful.
“With the Tories, the One Nation Tories, they would say, ‘Look Simon, we’re doing things wrong. Can you help us?’ And it was often there you could get great things done.”
He is particularly proud of the Race Disparity Audit launched by Mrs May in October 2017 with his help, which identified inequality in public services and is still being used to guide change and “unleash talent”.
He is less enamoured with Boris Johnson, having confronted him in public about what he regards as racist comments in the past. He believes the Prime Minister could have been “persuaded by good people to go down a particular path”, citing Ray Lewis, the Guyana-born youth worker who was one of Johnson’s deputy mayors.
Fascinating man. Particularly what he says about the left thinking they own the equality agenda. Reddit threads are testament to that.
Trade unions had no black leaders. But a subset of Tories used me to represent all black people by asking me what they were doing wrong. So the left don’t have the credibility to talk about race.
From a man old enough to remember the Apartheid era and their support for it ffs
Edit: pretty interesting quote to lead on too.
This is a fairly standard working class political arc in this country