Wilfred Wood is a Bajan who became the first Black Anglican Bishop of Croydon in the UK in 1985. He was an activist priest in Britain for forty years, from 1962 to 2002.
Bishop Wilfred retired to Barbados in 2003 and continues to live there. On 15th June 2026 he celebrated his 90th birthday, a milestone we are delighted to mark with him. His wife Lady Ira died in January 2025.
The current Bishop of Croydon who was appointed in 2022 is also a Bajan: Dr Rosemarie Mallett.
Bishop Wilfred’s friend Professor Gus (Augustine) John a prominent Grenadian-born British scholar-activist, author, and human rights campaigner penned the following birthday tribute.
Professor John in his tribute to Bishop Wilfred Wood says:
“You remain a monumental figure in British post-war social history and the current and future generations of young creatives and young activists, of any ethnicity, need to know of you, study you and understand themselves better on account of you.”
A very happy and blessed Earth Day to you, dearly beloved Brother Wilfred.
We give thanks that the Creator has blessed you with longevity, peace and contentment of spirit. We give thanks for the number of years you sojourned amongst us here in Ole Blighty, a nation that gets increasingly gnarled, warped and ill at ease with itself with the passing of every decade.
I give thanks that my life and yours were intertwined in so many ways on our journey in Babylon in the struggle for racial equity and social justice.
I arrived in the UK in 1964 to join the Dominican Order and study theology in preparation for the priesthood, a mere 9 years your junior. You arrived in 1962, already a priest. I joined my parents in Acton. You were a curate at St Stephen’s Shepherd Bush, just a stone’s throw from that wonderful market where my mother would take me every Saturday. I soon came to dread that weekly outing, as it took most of the day, with my mother doing more talking with every Grenadian and Trinidadian relative or national we met, while I stood, sometimes patiently and respectfully, but more often irritated because I wanted to pee, or was just bored sick.
The cloisters at Blackfriars, Oxford, could not contain and control me for very long. I developed more of an interest in politics and liberation struggles than in Theology, and soon identified the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England as giving divine absolution to tyrannical regimes, especially in Latin America and southern Africa.
In South Africa, the Dominicans had two theological colleges, in Johannesburg and in Witwatersrand. I was not welcomed in either. As a 19-year-old black man from the African diaspora in the Caribbean, I found Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and W.E. DuBois, Huey Newton and Angela Davis much more exciting than Thomas Aquinas, Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Rahner and Hans Kung.
So, to find you as an Anglican priest from the Caribbean diaspora so grounded in the life of ordinary folk, with a passion for social and racial justice and for the teachings and praxis of Martin Luther King, was for me deeply inspirational. Although I left the cloisters in Oxford in favour of Marxism, I nevertheless continued to work closely with the Roman Catholic and Church of England churches.
It was a pleasure working with you in the British Council of Churches, especially when I chaired the working group on The New Black Presence in Britain and produced the pamphlet of the same name (exactly 50 years ago). Similarly, with the World Council of Churches Programme to Combat Racism, of which you were Moderator for a number of years. You well recall, I am sure, when a number of churches took the decision to withhold their funding for the WCC because they objected to the WCC funding terrorist organisations, like the ANC, on account of its armed wing: uMkhonto We Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). Margaret Thatcher actually dubbed Nelson Mandela a terrorist. With characteristic British hubris, we witnessed those same churches and the British state falling over backwards to embrace and valorise Mandela upon his release after 27 years of brutal incarceration.
Our activism intersected again in the area of criminal justice. When Derek Humphry and I wrote Police Power and Black People in 1972, we decried not only the way police across the nation were wantonly criminalising black youth, and increasingly their hard-working parents, but the way they were framing people and making up their own evidence to put before magistrates and judges. You railed against that and were instrumental in getting the government to establish the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedures, a commission on which you served, which gave rise to the creation of the Crown Prosecution Service, thus taking away from the police themselves decisions as to whom there was evidence to prosecute and who it would be in the public interest to prosecute. That was a big deal and, some 45 years later, it remains one of the most significant legal reforms of the 20th century. We give thanks for the inspiration you had to initiate that process.
Your work in the area of housing and the establishment of housing associations was similarly trailblazing. I well recall the number of Federation of Black Housing Organisations (FBHO) meetings we attended and of AGMs I addressed, and the number of housing workers I mentored. I remember your hands-on support you gave to FBHO executive members such as Louis Julienne.
I was happy to feed into that groundbreaking work which you carried out with David Sheppard, Bishop of Liverpool, on Faith in the City, which shook the Church to its foundations and led to the establishment of the Church Urban Fund. I have no doubt that if you were still here, you would be an equally prophetic voice in the Church and in its leadership on the issue of reparations and reparatory justice.
Thankfully, dear brother, you are not the only one in history by any means, but when it comes to the history of post-war Black settlement in Britain, there is no question that the Creator planted you as a prophet of our time and fortified you with Grace, Guidance and Divine Inspiration, not only to work among men that His will might be “done on earth”, but that God’s people might experience heaven on earth.
In this sense, your ministry has never been otherworldly, about pointing people towards a heaven in the sky as a reward for good works and enlightened being on earth. Your mission was/is to create the conditions whereby ALL God’s children could experience justice, joy, the plenty that the Creator has provided for all but which is appropriated by the few, and can walk in Grace. Thomas Aquinas saw “Grace” as a sharing in the divine essence of God, a transformative gift by which God enables and elevates our higher selves to participate in His own essence.
You see, I did not altogether abandon Thomas Aquinas for Karl Marx. The gift of the Spirit just won’t let me.
We give thanks for you and with you. You remain a monumental figure in British post-war social history and the current and future generations of young creatives and young activists, of any ethnicity, need to know of you, study you and understand themselves better on account of you.
So, my good brother, after all that reminiscing, enjoy today to the max.
We remember and salute Sister Ina at this time and welcome her as she joins you in sharing this blessed day.
You remain in my prayers with Love and Joy.
Augustine (of Hippo) John
Professor Augustine John
[Editors note: As this tribute is written for an esteemed Anglican Bishop, Professor John’s use of the moniker “Hippo” serves as an affectionate, historically fitting theological inside joke between two of Britain’s most prominent Black Christian trailblazers.]
Our thanks to Audrey Dewjee for sending us this link to Bishop Wilfred Wood.
