Hope. This is the word that Richard Taylor — the father of child knife crime victim Damilola Taylor — said he wanted to be remembered by in the final interview before his death at 75 on Saturday.
“Young people need hope,” the OBE-awarded knife crime campaigner told me in his last-ever newspaper sit-down back in November, before his secret cancer battle was made public this weekend. “It may not be rosy for them but hope is there for them to work towards and they will get it. They don’t need to despair. There is so much ahead for them.”
Taylor’s 10-year-old son Damilola was on his way home from the library when he was stabbed in the leg with a broken beer bottle and left to die in a stairwell in Peckham in 2000. It shocked the nation and become one of London’s most high-profile killings, prompting Taylor and his late wife Gloria to establish the Damilola Taylor Trust in his memory, steering young people away from knife crime and funding places for inner city school students to study medicine.
Gloria tragically passed away after a heart attack in 2008 at the age of 57, a loss that Taylor, a former Nigerian civil servant, said had been “unbearable” over recent years. “I’m not a spiritual person and believe when we die, we die. But if that isn’t the case, I know there’s lots to tell her and Damilola when I see them,” he’d told me. “I hope there is a place for us to reunite. I want to see if a heaven does really exist so I can be reunited with Gloria and Damilola and we can stay together forever.”
Taylor had known that his own prostate cancer diagnosis was a terminal one by the time of our interview, but agreed it could only be revealed once he’d passed away, wanting instead to focus on his legacy.
“There’s nothing to hide for me any more. My health has come to a level where the doctors have told me the chemotherapy is not working. They have stopped the chemo.
“All that is remaining for me is to just continue to live until the day my heart stops.
“The spirit of Damilola will always remain with us. It’s been over 23 years and the memory is still with people, and that encouraged me to campaign,” he’d told me on a visit to the House of Lords from his home in Blackheath, south-east London.
“What will people say about me? Probably that I dealt with an incredibly difficult situation and always looked for solutions. I want results and change. If people see me as a go-getter, they will always follow my ideology and principles of bringing hope.”
A go-getter he certainly was. Taylor and his family had moved to the UK just months before his son’s brutal killing, settling in Peckham in south-east London as they aimed to get medical treatment for Damilola’s sister Gbemi, who had a severe form of epilepsy.
Damilola — the youngest of the siblings and a childhood friend of the now Star Wars actor John Boyega — had wanted to join the medical profession one day, to carry out research to help his sister, but he was tragically killed before he ever had that chance. Boyega and his sister Grace were among the last people to see the 10-year-old alive. He was stabbed by thugs as he made his way home from school on November 27, 2000, and bled to death on a filthy stairwell on the North Peckham estate.
Brothers Danny and Ricky Preddie, 12 and 13, were eventually convicted of Damilola’s manslaughter in 2006, after six years of police and forensic blunders and three Old Bailey trials costing a total of £20 million. Taylor said he “could never forgive the Preddie brothers” after the conviction, but sought to fight what he called the “national crisis” of knife crime through his work, speaking in schools and meeting with everyone from royals and prime ministers to police leaders in a bid to keep Damilola’s name at the forefront of policy-making.
He continued campaigning after his wife’s death and dedicated his OBE in 2012 to the memory of his son before eventually stepping back from campaigning in 2020. “Twenty years has taken a toll on me,” he said at the time, adding that the grief of losing a child never goes away.
Footballer Rio Ferdinand, who grew up in Peckham, was among the famous faces to support Taylor in his charity work over the years, and former prime minister Boris Johnson went on to designate December 7 — Damilola’s birthday — as a national Day of Hope in 2020 as a result of the Taylors’ efforts.
Johnson has not yet spoken since Taylor’s death, but Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer is among those to pay tribute so far, commending him for breaking down barriers to opportunity through the Damilola Taylor Trust. “He will be remembered for his courage, determination and message of hope. My condolences to Richard’s family and friends,” he wrote on X over the weekend.
Taylor was a founding member of the Hope Collective, a cross-sector alliance working towards ending poverty and discrimination.
The legacy campaign continues this week with a Hope Hack in Newcastle on Tuesday and Milton Keynes on Wednesday.
In May, another event in Coventry with the College of Policing aims to break down the mistrust between police officers and young people.
Ndidi Okezie OBE, chief executive officer of UK Youth, said: “Richard was an incredible man who made a real difference to so many young people’s lives.
“We were thrilled to work alongside Richard with the Hope Collective, working to establish real change and reduce poverty, violence and discrimination among the UK’s most vulnerable communities and celebrating young people’s hopes for the future on the Day of Hope, on Damilola’s birthday, December 7, each year.”
Taylor’s remaining children Tunde, Gbemi and Florence, meanwhile, mourn the loss of a beloved father, grandfather and uncle. “It is with a heavy heart that the family announce the death of our beloved father, grandfather and uncle, Mr Richard Adeyemi Taylor OBE, who sadly passed away in the early hours of Saturday March 23 at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Woolwich, after a prolonged battle with prostate cancer,” the family said in a statement over the weekend.
Taylor might not have been a spiritual person, but he was certainly a hopeful one. Perhaps now — finally — he can be reunited with Gloria and Damilola once more.
