Remembering Mike Guilfoyle

Many will know of Mike through the regular articles he wrote on probation practice for the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies website. The articles evoke what feels like a lost world: a service motivated by the values of ‘advise, assist and befriend’.

Receiving Mike’s latest article was always one of the highlights of my month. It was totally characteristic of him that he was insistent on submitting his articles, even as he became progressively more ill. Indeed, we still have one more article by Mike, which we will publish in December.

Mike’s insightful, funny and charming articles aside, he was a kind, witty, thoroughly decent man. I will miss him very much.

As part of our tribute to Mike, we asked Deb Borgen, Rob Canton, Chris Hignett, Patricia Johnson and Charron Culnane, and Russell Webster to offer their own personal reflections.

Richard Garside

Deb Borgen

I first remember meeting Mike Guilfoyle at a Middlesex Napo branch meeting at Willesden Probation Office over 30 years ago. Mike was his usual welcoming hospitable self, offering everyone a glass of wine (in those halcyon days when alcohol was provided free at union meetings).

Mike was always a very active union member. He was vice-chair of Middlesex Napo for many years and a regular member of the branch executive. Mike was passionate about justice and injustice, whether it was fighting for the right of his clients, or prisoners, union colleagues or other disadvantaged groups in society.

Mike prided himself on keeping up-to-date with developments in criminal justice and loved nothing better than going to lectures by informed speakers and then asking a pertinent question of his own. I recall being abroad one year and turning on the television, only to spot Mike in a pink shirt asking a question on Question Time.

It was also typical of Mike to be generous in spirit in allowing others to ask a question instead of him, even though he was burning to do so himself. On one occasion, having obtained tickets to be in the audience of Radio 4’s Any Questions, we both had submitted a question regarding whether the government was right to be privatising the Probation Service. It was just prior to the disastrous Transforming Rehabilitation debacle and the whole of Napo was depending on someone to get this issue highlighted on national radio and in the public’s consciousness.

Mike by then had left the Probation Service and withdrew his question in order for mine to be put forward. While Chris Grayling, the infamous Justice Secretary, was answering the question, shouts of ‘liar’ came from the audience, the dulcet tones of one Mike Guilfoyle.

Another thing synonymous with Mike was the legendary Napo Lakes conference. It was an annual social and professional event, which coincided with Mike’s birthday. In his heyday, Mike loved to dance, being a keen exponent of Northern Soul (and a formative member of the Middlesex Area Probation dance team!) The same DJ ran the disco each year and one year Mike asked for his favourite record. As the DJ didn’t have it, he promised to bring it along another year, which he did.

On one occasion at conference Mike spoke about the prison estate. His name and statement made it onto the Teletext, reading as if he single-handedly was going to renationalise prisons, only for the headline to be replaced the following morning by news about General Pinochet!

Mike worked tirelessly on Napo’s National Campaigning Committee, often working closely with Harry Fletcher, Napo’s former Assistant General Secretary and media spokesperson. Mike will also be remembered for his generous campaigning spirit. He was rightly proud of the fact that the branch bestowed on him one of the first Honorary Life Napo memberships, in recognition of his long standing Napo activism.

A truly fitting tribute to Mike Guilfoyle.

Deb Borgen worked as a Probation Officer in London for over 30 years and is a former National Vice-Chair of Napo

Rob Canton

Mike Guilfoyle was a committed and eloquent champion of probation for many years. A former probation officer and active member of Napo, he also worked as a magistrate and these experiences added a compelling authority to his well-judged opinions. Some of his work was ‘behind the scenes’ – for example, in submitting testimony to government consultations – but he is probably best known for his reviews and reflections, published by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies.

Covering a range of (mostly probation-related) topics, Mike often recalled encounters with clients. As Fergus McNeill has commented, beyond those with direct experience, few people have much idea of what it’s like to be under probation supervision – or to practise it.

Mike offered an abundance of insights to enrich our understanding. He told clients’ stories – and his own – movingly, while enabling the reader to draw out the wider significance and implications of these accounts. In his reflections on probation practice, Mike showed a deep emotional literacy and generosity of spirit. He never lost sight of his professional responsibilities, while always evincing compassion and kindness. Many of his accounts were spiced with sharp humour and wit.

Mike showed what it can and should be like to work in probation. Service users are rounded individuals – not carriers of risk or simply burdened by needs. Equally, staff are more than functionaries, but have achievements and satisfactions in their work, as well as doubts and worries of their own, even as they bring their wisdom and professional skills to their tasks.

Service users can feel that their experiences are honoured by Mike’s accounts; practitioners will recognise the predicaments on which he reflected. And a wider public can come away with a much deeper understanding of the nature and worth of probation’s work.

Rob Canton is Professor Emeritus in Community and Criminal Justice, De Montfort University, and Patron of the Probation Institute

Chris Hignett

Travelling back from Cambridge and that year’s McWilliams lecture, Mike Guilfoyle regaled us with another of his great passions: Ladywell Cemetery, its occupants and their histories. So encyclopaedic was his knowledge that, despite the train having to return to Cambridge when two-thirds of the way to King’s Cross and set out again, Mike’s discourse never faltered.

Mike was a great talker and had so much knowledge because he was also a great enquirer and listener, qualities that made him a fine candidate for his chosen profession of probation officer. Of course the probation service of which he was so proud, serving in Middlesex until amalgamation and many years in all, has been severely distorted since.

At least a part of the motivation for his regular contributions to the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies website was the hope of keeping the original idea of probation as a social work and justice agency alive. Advocacy for his clients and care for their well-being was at the centre of his work, as so many of his vignettes made clear.

But compassion of this kind, built on the injunction to advise, assist and befriend, inevitably led to disagreement with an increasingly unsympathetic management. Fortunately the lay magistracy recognised his humanity and desire to serve, and in more recent years provided a new home for his compassion and energy. His talent for individual support found fresh impetus, working as a mentor for the Longford Trust.

Enthusiasm for keeping abreast of the concerns of Napo and the criminal justice system more generally saw him as a regular speaker at Conference and perhaps, most intriguingly, the poser of apposite questions at any number of meetings, lectures and talks where these topics were to the fore.

As a consequence he had an amazing array of contacts, whom he could and did approach to be speakers at union branch meetings. He loved reading and regularly produced book reviews for the Probation Journal, realising, incidentally, how this enterprise could ensure he received desired texts almost by return of post.

Together with his appreciation of which organisations provided decent refreshments at their annual bashes, these small perks offered some reward for his diligence and the opportunity for this writer to get to the terrace of the House of Commons and meet many impressive people.

Indeed Mike’s generosity as a companion and loyalty to the causes he adopted are what I shall most miss. For others I suspect his love of football, of which in earlier days he was a keen player and always a fierce supporter of Manchester United, will probably be as important, while pride in his family and their extraordinary achievements will trump all of the above.  

He was never a conventional preacher but his faith, to which he remained steadfast throughout his illness, enabled him to be amused at his pre-occupation with the Cemetery.  His example wonderfully demonstrates that the role of the missionary, police court or otherwise, is capable of constant and enlightening reinvention.

Chris Hignett is a former probation officer

Patricia Johnson and Charron Culnane

It was with great sadness we learned the news that Mike Guilfoyle lost his fight with cancer on Sunday 19 November 2023.  He passed peacefully at home surrounded by his loved ones. Our thoughts are with his wife Nana and family at this sad time.

Those who knew Mike will know that he was highly regarded life-long member of Napo. He was a former probation officer and magistrate who never failed to promote probation values and the Service wherever he went.

He was curious about every aspect of the criminal justice system and was a font of knowledge. He was active in many areas writing blogs on various platforms for numerous criminal justice publications, including our Napo Journal. He was a long-standing mentor for the Longford Trust and could often be found at various academic seminars and events featuring criminal justice issues.

He was a Napo stalwart and supported London branch in any way he could, most recently using his vast array of contacts to provide entertaining and relevant speakers for our branch meetings.

Mike was a raconteur, witty and passionate about all things probation and Napo.  Many of you will remember him in the pub after branch meetings, holding court and downing a few pints whilst putting the criminal justice system to rights.

He is simply irreplaceable, his smile and his kindness, lit up the room and he will stay in our hearts forever.

Patricia Johnson and Charron Culnane are co-chairs of the London Napo branch

Russell Webster

I didn’t know Mike well. In fact I only met him once in real life, but we struck up an easy rapport; both being men of a certain age with a passion for probation and an unrequited urge to see it return to its roots of a service which assisted, advised and befriended, rather than one that focused primarily on sentence planning (rather than delivery) and risk management.

I mainly got to know Mike though his regular column, with stories of probation practice, which appeared monthly on the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies website. He’d drop me a quick email with a link to the latest column asking me to plug it to my probation readership. The articles were always worth reading; combining an astonishing range of knowledge of desistance and probation research with a wonderful commitment to doing the best he could for the people he was supervising. The articles always had the ring of authenticity, chronicling disasters as well as the occasional semi-triumph, and were invariably self-deprecating in tone.

Over the last two or three years, Mike included in his email notes very brief (one sentence) updates on his battle against cancer, which he waged unflinchingly with a total absence of self-pity and a wry sense of humour as he exhausted all the usual horrible treatments and worked his way through a range of experimental drugs. In his very last email, he told me that ‘Mr C’ had finally caught up with him. It was somehow the absolute essence of Mike that he used this last message to tell me he had written two more articles to publish posthumously and that I should make sure that Richard Garside didn’t forget to publish them.

If you’d like a glimpse of Mike, I’d encourage you to take three minutes to read the article he sent me that day, which tells the story of how he took on an extra client on a voluntary basis (taking leave to do a prison visit) and that client’s desire to have Mike help him write his biography of a life in conflict with the criminal justice system.

I will miss those monthly three-sentence emails and the links to tales of what I still think it means to be a good probation officer.

Mike Guilfoyle was a special kind of guy. We will miss him.

Russell Webster is a blogger and former probation officer.