Beryl Gilroy

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Beryl Agatha Gilroy (nee Answick), a novelist, was born on 30 August 1924 in Skeldon village (now Corriverton), in Berbice, British Guyana. She grew up in a large, extended family, largely under the influence of her maternal grandmother, Sally Louisa James (1868-1967), a herbalist, manager of the family small-holding, keen reader, imparter to the young Beryl of the stories of ‘Long Bubbies’, Cabresses and Long Lady and a treasury of colloquial proverbs.

She did not enter full time schooling until she was twelve. More formal education followed and Beryl Gilroy, awarded a British Guiana Teacher’s Certificate with first class honours, worked as a school teacher in Guyana until 1951 when at the age of 27 she was selected to attend university in the United Kingdom. Between 1951-53 she attended the University of London pursuing a Diploma in Child Development.

Although 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. She taught for a couple of years, married (one of the earliest inter-racial marriages in the postwar period) and spent the next twelve years at home bringing up and educating her children, furthering her own higher education, reviewing and reading for a publisher. In 1968 she returned to teaching and eventually became one of the first Black headteachers in the UK. Her experiences of those years are told in Black Teacher (1976). Later she worked as a researcher at the University of London and developed a pioneering practice in psychotherapy, working mainly with Black women and children.

Her own creative writing began in childhood, as a teacher for children and then in the 1960s when she began writing what was later published by Peepal Tree Press as In Praise of Love and Children. Between 1970-75 she wrote the pioneering children’s series Nippers which contain probably the first reflection of the Black British presence in UK writing for children.

it was not until 1986 that her first novel, the award winning Frangipani House was published (Heinemann). It won a GLC Creative Writing Prize in 1982. Set in an old person’s home in Guyana, it reflects one of her professional concerns: the position of ethnic minority elders and her persistent emphasis on the drive for human freedom. Boy Sandwich (Heinemann) was published in 1989, followed by Steadman and Joanna: A Love in Bondage (Vantage, 1991), and a collection of poems, Echoes and Voices (Vantage, 1991). Then came Sunlight and Sweet Water (Peepal Tree, 1994), Gather the Faces, In Praise of Love and Children and Inkle and Yarico (all Peepal Tree, 1994). Her last novel, The Green Grass Tango (Peepal Tree) was published in 2001, sadly after Beryl Gilroy’s death in April of that year.

She was the mother of Paul Gilroy.