NORTH London is rich in choirs. The starriest is the semi-professional Crouch End Festival Chorus, and the oldest – and with 180 members, the biggest – is Highgate Choral Society. This latter Leviathan is kept on the road thanks to a small army of volunteers recruited from its ranks. And leading that army is a chairman, who must be both a persuasive leader and an ace diplomat.

Having recently voted in a barrister named Ashitey Ollennu in this role, HCS may now be breaking the mould, as his background is unique.

Born the son of a High Court judge in what is now called Ghana, Ashitey had a traditional African upbringing with his two elder sisters, until at seven he was abruptly despatched to a prep school called Holmewood House in Kent. Was that a privilege?

He replies with a rueful chuckle: “I wouldn’t put it quite like that.”

He arrived with just two words in English – yes and no – and nobody spoke Ewe, which was the only language he knew.

“It was quite terrifying. I had to communicate by pointing.”

But some other African boys were helpful, including one who is now the president of Ghana. And the school was enlightened, its head Bob Bairamian insisting that everyone should be valued as a person, irrespective of where they came from. He jokingly nicknamed his new Ghanaian pupil “Judge” in honour of his father, and the name stuck.

“He believed that you could do anything you put your mind to do,” says Ashitey. “So I made myself a cricketer.”
Bairamian taught him to bowl leg-spinners. “He would have me in the gym, under instruction to bowl six good leg-spinners before I could be allowed to go to bed.”

He also made his mark as a chorister. His choral singing had started in the family compound in Ghana where his grandmother presided over a church – “holy roller stuff, with guitars and African instruments”, not the Anglo-Catholicism he now embraces.

At 13 he went on to Lancing College, where he was mercilessly persecuted by the head of house to whom he was allotted, for what that school called “under-schooling”, but which most public schools called fagging.

The whole ethos of the school was oppressive. “You were not supposed to talk to anyone who was senior to you – and there I was, behaving in the friendly manner which prevailed at Holmewood. Lancing didn’t like that.”

His isolation was compounded by the fact that while most boys went home for the holidays, he had to go back to Holmewood, having no home to go to.

Going into therapy, decades later, opened his eyes to the extent to which he had suffered emotionally thanks to his savage uprooting, but in conversation he makes light of it, preferring to focus on the good things which happened at Lancing – where he eventually made lifelong friendships – after his cricketing prowess was spotted. Being drafted into the first 11 at 14 gave him status and security, as did being selected to represent MCC Schools in their annual match with Indian Schools at Lord’s. Players from that match went on to become Test cricketers.

Could Ashitey have become a pro? “Possibly. I would have liked to spend half the year being a lawyer and half playing cricket, but that wasn’t possible. At that time there was no money in cricket.” So the law won, and he was called to the bar.

The house in Golders Green which he inhabits with three generations of his family is named after the company he heads, Redemption Chambers. Does that name reflect a religious bias? “No, it’s from Redemption Song, a Bob Marley number which has the line ‘Emancipate yourself from mental slavery / None but ourselves can free our minds’. And that to me is significant – as a black person you must overcome the discrimination which is found in many walks of life. That seemed a good expression of the ethos of our chambers.”

And what do they specialise in? “General common law, criminal law, and a lot of family cases. We used to do a lot of cases for asylum seekers, but that’s fallen away thanks to the government’s reduction of money for legal aid.”

Yet he has never wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a judge.

“I have never felt easy about laying down the law as to whether people on trial are – or are not – telling the truth,” he says. “I never had the necessary confidence. It’s very hard, for example, to make the decision as to whether a child should be taken from one person and given to another, or to be taken from their parents and put into care.

“But I would have liked to have become a Queen’s Counsel. My children say I should have tried several times to achieve that, not just once. That failure troubled me greatly for a very long time.”

The apparently irrecoverable loss of his mother tongue also troubles him. “That part of my brain,” he says, “has shut down.” Yet in another respect, that brain was unusually clever. “Looking at a score, I could always see the notes in my head.”

What made him join Highgate Choral Society? Easy. HCS’s conductor Ronald Corp also had a children’s choir – the New London Children’s Choir – and Ashitey’s two older children joined it. One thing led to another, as they do when parents meet to collect their offspring, and Ashitey – possessor of a low bass and a high falsetto – eventually found himself attending an HCS workshop, and from that joining the main choir.

That was 30 years ago. And when the choir’s long-serving chair stood down this year, a vacancy arose that nobody rushed to fill. “And I looked around at the people who were not coming forward,” says Ashitey. “And I thought to myself, I’ve been here a very long time, and I’ve received a lot of kindness and companionship. But I’ve never really done anything for them. I’m now in my 70s, and would like to make a contribution.”

Moreover, adds this new chairman, over the past 30 years he’s mostly been the only black person in the choir. He laughs: “Maybe we could have a change! And when you look at the audience for the Proms, you see there’s a need for change there too. This is why [the multi-ethnic orchestra] Chineke! is such a welcome idea. As is the West-East Divan orchestra.”

Should the HCS become more ethnically diverse? “Yes, it should! And much more youthful. A large proportion of our membership is over 65. You think, where are the young people?”

He is going to contact local sixth forms and elsewhere, in a trawl for new talent.

• HCS’s next concert will be of Mendelssohn’s Elijah on November 11 at 7pm, at All Hallows Church, Gospel Oak