Valda James was also Islington’s first black councillor

ISLINGTON’S first black mayor says she would do it all over again if she could.

Valda James, 96, was born in Saint Thomas in Jamaica before coming to London as part of the Windrush Generation in 1961.

Ten years later, she moved into the Margery Street Estate in Clerkenwell, where she still lives today.

“I was part of the residents’ association [on the estate] at the time, and we were at a meeting in a community centre with some of the local councillors,” she said.

“One of them turned to me and said ‘Valda, you ought to be a councillor.’ And I said, ‘no because I’m black.’ She told me not to be silly, she put my name forward and I was accepted. “I didn’t think anybody would vote for me. Not that I couldn’t do it, but that they wouldn’t vote for me.”

She added: “I didn’t know that much about English policy, so, I booked myself into CityLit and I took a course, and I bought a book about how to give speeches in public. I did all that, but I was still scared.”

Valda James with her granddaughter Aminah

Ms James had recently divorced and ran her campaign all while holding down a busy job as a district nurse and managing life as a single parent to three children. She won a hard-earned victory in 1986 as the borough’s first black woman councillor.

“If I could stand up for myself to get a divorce, I could do anything,” she said. “The [campaign] kept me going. I could never walk into a pub on my own, so therefore, I couldn’t say ‘I’ll go down the pub and get over that stress.’

“Getting into that council job … It was something that kept me going, kept me alive. I didn’t have to think about where the next meal would come from to feed the kids. And the kids, although they were small, they were all for it.”

Two years into her career as a councillor, Ms James became the mayor, with her daughter Corinne as her mayoress.

“God, I’d do that [be mayor] all over again,” she said.  “What wouldn’t be nice about sitting in the back of the car with a chauffeur in the front?”

Ms James took her mayoral role seriously. She took early retirement from her district nurse job, which affected her pension. She wasn’t able to claim councillors’ attendance wages as the mayoral post took up too much of her time.

So, she began work as a cleaner at 5.30am to keep her and her family financially stable. She also experienced racism in the role, with some in the mayoral office unhappy to be working with a black person.

“They were frightened of working with a black person,” Ms James said. “They didn’t know me, they didn’t think they could work with me.”

The borough’s council is a much more diverse organisation now, with Cllr Kaya Comer-Schwartz as its first black woman leader.

Ms James’s family have followed in her footsteps as trailblazers: her granddaughter Aminah is one of the few black figure skaters in the UK, and another, Phoebe Collings-James, is an acclaimed artist. “I love it. After I left, more black women and black people became councillors,”she said.

“But, they need to become the mayor – you go all over the place and you meet everybody.”