Leonard Woodley QC

Leonard Gaston Woodley was born on 13 September 1927 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, the son of a bandleader and a businesswoman. Raised largely by his grandmother, he attended the prestigious St Mary's College before working as a clerk and commercial administrator in his twenties, all the while nursing an ambition to study law that his schoolteachers had never encouraged.

In 1960, in his early thirties, Woodley travelled to London, initially studying international affairs before being called to the Bar at Inner Temple in 1963. He built a criminal defence practice that repeatedly placed him at the centre of Britain's most racially and politically charged trials, including the Mangrove Nine case in 1970, prosecutions arising from the 1981 riots, and the Newham Eight trial in 1983.

In 1988, Woodley became the first person of Afro-Caribbean heritage in the United Kingdom to be appointed Queen's Counsel — Britain's first Black silk. That same year, in a mark of solidarity with the anti-apartheid struggle, he invited Nelson Mandela, then still imprisoned, to become an honorary door tenant of his chambers. He went on to serve as a Recorder of the Crown Court from 1989 to 2000 and as a Bencher of Inner Temple, while enduring open racism throughout his career — from being challenged by security for parking in a benchers' reserved space to having a bank teller question whether he was really a QC.

Woodley endowed the Leonard Woodley Scholarship at Inner Temple to support Black and Asian pupil barristers, chaired inquiries into mental health and elderly care, and advised the Scarman Inquiry into the Brixton riots. He died on 19 January 2020, remembered as the barrister who forced open the most senior tier of the English Bar to Black practitioners.