Methodist Minister. Vice President of the Commonwealth Youth Council. First black woman to receive an MBE in Britain. Founder of the first purpose-built black youth community centre in the UK and twice the winner of woman of the year. These are just a few of Sybil Phoenix’s incredible achievements.
Sybil Phoenix (née Marshall) now 95 and “still very much alive and kicking”, nurtured her generous and charitable spirit from a young age even though life wasn’t always easy for her.
“She had a fairly unhappy childhood,” her son Woodrow Phoenix, tells Eastlondonlines. “Her mother died before she was even 10. That was obviously really hard for her.”
In 1956, she moved to London from Guyana, with her soon-to-be husband, Joe Phoenix. When she arrived, she experienced shocking racial discrimination.
“As I walked the streets of London my illusions were brutally challenged,” Phoenix said in an interview in 2004, referring to how hard it was to find a room to rent. “Most noticeboards proclaimed: no Irish, no coloureds, no children, no dogs.”
Nonetheless, Woodrow explains that his mother’s hard life experiences only ever added to her passion to reach out to the “unspoken pleas” for kindness from people – especially youth in her community.
In 1961, Phoenix started her long legacy of foster caring. Her home in Brockley became a safe haven for young people.
Although the specific number of children she has helped is not certain (some estimates say over 400), it is certain that within the first ten years she had fostered over 100 girls and young women.
Woodrow shares with ELL that as children, him and his sisters found it hard sometimes to wrap their minds around what their mother was doing.
“Of course it was mostly fun to have all these temporary brothers and sisters. But it was very stressful too – because we were sharing our rooms and sometimes even sharing our beds.”
“Sometimes we felt like we didn’t really have our parents to ourselves, we had to share them. So that was difficult.
“But now as a grown man I can say, she really did the things that needed to be done and that’s an inspiration.”
Ten years into fostering, Sybil raised £64,000 to build the UK’s first purpose-built youth centre for black children, Moonshot in New Cross.
“Everything that she did – they are all kind of about a fellowship, common humanity, creating bonds between people and creating relationships and making families where they don’t exist,” Woodrow says.
In 1973, Pheonix went on to become the first black woman to be awarded an MBE in the UK, followed by an OBE in 2008.
From her renowned Yellow Paper, which fundamentally altered the Methodist Church’s understanding and approach to race relations within the church, to the construction of the Marsha Phoenix Memorial Trust, which supports young homeless women, Phoenix’s legacy was cemented by her unwavering care for young people and her fight against all forms of discrimination.
“If I could end with something it would be this – as she always says, don’t wait for someone to do something. If you know what needs doing and you have the ability, then you should just do it. You don’t need permission for someone to do things – especially if it’s about helping someone,” Woodrow says.
