Tea with Baroness Kingsmill

Charity knows no geographical boundary.  Meet Baroness Denise Kingsmill CBE, life peer of the House of Lords, who has reached across the Atlantic to connect with students of the Spring Garden Primary School in Trelawny.

The Baroness has never met these children, but she understood their need as articulated by her Jamaican friend, and it spurred an act of benevolence. By placing tablets in the hands of ten students she is ensuring they can continue learning at a time when all the norms associated with education have shifted, due to covid-19.

Why do you even care? She shot back, “because education was the making of me.” This from a Cambridge economics graduate who has had a successful career as a solicitor concentrating on trade union, personal injury and employment, and who continues to support education and training projects as well as mentorship initiatives.

All too often women who succeed in male-dominated professions, tend to shy away from women’s issues because they fear being labelled soft or predictable. As Baroness Kingsmill explained it, she did not get into law by accident. She was inspired by one of the champions of justice and advocate of gender equality, the late celebrated American, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

For a woman packaged as almost six feet of elegance, a career in fashion seemed like a perfect fit for the young university graduate, who was born in New Zealand and grew up in South Wales. Back in those days, Paris and New York were her stomping ground. She happened to be in New York when Ginsburg started to make waves and the young jurist touched a nerve.

And just like that the young Denise gave up the fashion industry and enrolled in law school. Graduating at age 31, with concepts like equal pay, social change and better conditions of work, percolating in her head, she joined a big trade union firm.

Those were heady days when unions were under attack. Asked about butting heads with Britain’s Iron Lady, the late Margaret Thatcher, who did everything to emasculate unions, the Baroness replied, “she was my nemesis.” She recalls street protests and heading fearlessly to the frontlines of barricades during the 1980’s.

Disappointed with her treatment by the firm, she decided to put up shingles and with mostly like-minded females and some men, continued her practice for seven years. After she sold the firm, her counsel was sought by a slew of high net-worth private sector firms and public entities.

Then in 1997 she was appointed deputy chairman of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission she was kept busy enquiring into sectors such as banking, cruise ship, and energy at the same time filling speaker’s role on a range of topics including business, finance technology, diversity and sustainability. She was a commanding figure in many boardrooms of international companies across Europe. 

With her practicing days behind her, the Labour peer continues the quest for justice for the most vulnerable in society. Her advocacy on behalf of different categories of workers is well documented. The review which she undertook into the care sector led to a vigorous debate. After studying their condition of employment she brought before the Lords the case of the “most invisible members of the UK workforce.”

In her motion, she argued that care-workers were undervalued, underpaid, under-trained and under-regulated, laying bare before her colleagues the anatomy of a crisis. She recognized that many of these care-workers were immigrants from the Caribbean. She is particularly sad about the treatment of the Windrush generation and their off-springs who have been denied citizenship by a mother country that invited them to come over from the colonies in the 1950’s and 1960’s. 

Any conversation these days must come around to the pandemic which has disrupted all our lives. Aside from the absence of face-to-face interactions with friends, Baroness Kingsmill misses debates in the House. One understands this, because her oratory skills are great and she presents her case with such clarity and forcefulness. These very unsettling times are when you know who your friends really are, she mused.

Music has been a huge part of the Baroness’s life. Her late husband Richard, was a jazz musician and they travelled the world attending concerts. She is left with beautiful memories like seeing the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald at Carnegie Hall. “I was simply mesmerized by her ability to hold her audience in her hands.”

She was there when Gregory Porter, vocalist and songwriter demonstrated at the Syracuse Jazz Fest in 2012, how to mix melody with power. “He gave all to his audience,” she declared. Other memorable encounters included Nina Simone, disagreeable though she was, demanding to be paid in cash literally on stage, but hey, she “sang like an angel.”

When asked to name her best decade, the Baroness selected the 40’s. She, like many other women, was coming into her own. Her children were grown and her career was thriving and she was on the cusp of success. She confirmed that those were indeed exciting times.

Her current joys are her grandchildren Torin and Caden. It’s not hard to imagine all three of them cuddled up in bed reading or watching a video. The doting grandma says Torin “has an innate sense of self.” The seven-year-old decided to grow his hair, really long. When his mates teased him about it he gives a perfunctory shrug and says, “they will get used to it.”

And no she’s not done yet, Baroness Denise Kingsmill says the best is yet to come.