My husband, Mike Guilfoyle, who has died aged 68 from prostate cancer, worked for the probation service for more than 20 years. As a probation officer in London, Mike was an active member of the probation union Napo.
He was a regular contributor to debates and motions at the union’s annual conferences, moving campaigning motions aligned to its core commitment to retaining a public probation service. On one occasion, he was chided by a former home secretary on national television for criticising the then government’s obsession with punitive prison policies. It was a reprimand he cheerily accepted.
In 1983, Mike was employed by the Inner London Education Authority as an educational welfare officer, and, on completing a postgraduate social work certificate at South Bank University in 1990, worked for the Middlesex Probation Service, before joining the Inner London Probation Service, now the London Probation Service, where he remained until he retired in 2010.
Mike retired in 2010. Keen to use his retirement to help others and serve the local community, he became a magistrate in south-east London in 2014 and also worked for many years as a volunteer with the Jesuit Refugee Service in Wapping, east London.
A much-valued colleague of Napo, he was awarded a honorary life membership by the union in 2022. He continued his active interest in criminal justice policy and practice by writing a lively online monthly column for the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, which was based on his varied experiences as a probation officer in London. And, over several years, Mike also supported the restorative justice work of the Longford Trust.
One of his other interests was cemetery history, and he served as chair of the Friends of Brockley and Ladywell cemeteries, in south-east London, leading guided history walks, narrating podcasts, and compiling four guidebooks on some of the illustrious deceased buried in the cemetery.
Born in Oldham, then Lancashire, now Greater Manchester, Mike was the eldest of seven children of Veronica (nee Kileen), a housewife, and Denis Guilfoyle, a printer at the Manchester Guardian. He went to Oldham comprehensive secondary modern school, before gaining A-levels at night school at Oldham College to go on to religious studies at Lancaster University in 1977. After completing a postgraduate certificate in education, he was an RE teacher for a brief time at Sudbury comprehensive school in Suffolk, and then a nursing assistant in a mental health hospital in Colchester, Essex.
In 2002 Mike and I met at a lecture by a human rights barrister at the Royal Festival Hall , London; we were married six years later.
Mike is survived by me, our son, Matthew, and by his six siblings.
