Alex Wheatle died yesterday from prostate cancer, aged 62. But he leaves behind an incredible legacy, having survived horrifying abuse to help victims win a landmark payout in the Shirley Oaks children’s home scandal
From Monday, a whole new generation of kids will know the inhabitants of Crongton via a new BBC series. The fictional inner-city estate was the creation of award-winning best-selling writer Alex Wheatle MBE who died yesterday from prostate cancer at the age of 62.
Known as the Brixton Bard, the father-of-three was a lover of life and literature, and a founding member of the Crucial Rocker sound system. He wrote from his own experience as a young boy growing up in South London, mainly in care. In 2014, he helped blow open the Shirley Oaks children’s home scandal on the front page of the Daily Mirror.
His bravery helped win compensation for thousands who had been abused in the home a few miles from Croydon, South London – and a public inquiry into the abuse of children looked after by Lambeth Council. In a moving first-person account, Wheatle, then 51, wrote of how he was sexually assaulted by a doctor as a child at Shirley Oaks, and of years of physical and psychological abuse.
“I arrived in Shirley Oaks in 1966,” he wrote. “My first memories were filling in coal buckets and getting beaten up with wooden hairbrushes, belts and hard-soled shoes. Suffering violence was as part of my day as eating toast.” He wrote about the “strange, nameless men” within the grounds of Shirley Oaks, one of whom would sleep in the children’s cottages. He remembered a friend who took her own life, and another who later did so because she couldn’t cope with the memories.
Wheatle discovered literature during a short stint in prison for his involvement in the 1981 Brixton Uprising, introduced to books by an older cellmate, Simeon, a self-educated Rastafarian who remained his mentor. He would go on to a phenomenally successful career as writer – the Crongton series of books sold millions of copies, and in 2020 he was the subject of one of Steve McQueen’s ‘Small Axe’ series with a film under his own name.
The Oscar-winning director had completely recreated his bedsit in a social services hostel in Brixton, down to the reggae posters and flyers on the walls. Wheatle walked in to find actor Sheyi Cole was dressed as him, lying on the narrow bed. “I had to leave the room because I didn’t want to burst into tears in front of the crew,” Wheatle told me. “It was like an out of body experience, like going back in time to 1981. It reminded me of a time when I was completely lost.”
He spoke about the emotional trauma not just of the abuse but of never having been hugged in his childhood and being called an “animal”. He was awarded an MBE for services to literature by the Queen in 2008. “There are still people in children’s homes, kids who don’t know where they belong, they need inspiration,” he once told the Bookseller. “If they can see me and see I made it they might feel they can do the same. That means so much to me.”
Wheatle was the author of several novels which were shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Carnegie Medal and the YA Book Prize. His debut novel Brixton Rock earned him the London Arts Board New Writers Award in 1999, and his 2016 book Crongton Knights won the 50th Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize.
A former youth worker, he never stopped working to promote literacy or to unleash young people’s creativity through visits to schools, prisons, and community groups. And after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, he began trying to raise awareness of that especially among black men, saying he was “alarmed to learn that Black men are twice as likely to get this form of cancer than white people”.
Yesterday his family said: “Alex has 26 years of legacy for you all to continue and enjoy by reading his novels, watch again the self-titled episode Alex Wheatle from the Small Axe TV series and also watch the new upcoming Crongton TV series as he looks over us in spirit.”
Wheatle told me that he would always carry the pain of his childhood. “Just because I’m a successful writer, that doesn’t mean I’m more able to carry emotional traumas,” he said. “Sometimes it overwhelms me. But if I live up to my creative potential it means those people who abused me when I was very young didn’t win.”
