Pauline Henriques


Pauline Clothilde Henriques, known to all as Paul, was a Jamaican-born English actress. In 1946, she became the first black female actress for British television. She was also the first black female Justice of the Peace, and was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1969. She worked extensively with unmarried mothers and worked as a counsellor with, and later Secretary to, the Brook Counselling and Advisory Clinic.

Early life

Pauline Henriques was born in Kingston, Jamaica, to Cyril Charles Henriques, a wealthy merchant, and Edith Emily Delfosse. One of six children, she moved with her family to England from Jamaica in 1919, as her father wanted to give his children an English education. Her elder brother, Cyril George Henriques, became a Lord Chief Justice of Jamaica.
Another brother, Fernando, was a President of the Oxford Union in 1944, and a published author.
Paul and her siblings are mentioned in an exhibition about Jamaican families and their roles in the UK during the Second World War in Southwark.
In 1936 Paul married Geoffrey William Heneberry. Their daughter Gail later married Keith Critchlow, artist, author, and professor of architecture in England.
In 1948 Paul Henriques married the actor, Neville Cobbiah Crabbe, with whom she had one son, Biff Crabbe.
In 1969 she married Joe Benjamin, taking on three step-sons Mark, Simon and Adam Pauline died in Brighton in 1998.

Career

Acting and radio

Paul broke more than one glass ceiling in her time, the first of which was as the first Black female actress on British TV in 1946. Cast as Hattie Harris in a 1946 BBC television version of Eugene O'Neill's play All God's Chillun Got Wings, she continued to perform on stage and screen in a variety of roles during the 1950s. She was also cast as Ella in The Heart Within.
She acted in the BBC's A Man from the Sun, a television drama documentary that for the first time portrayed the lives of Caribbean settlers in post-war Britain.

Counselling

During the later part of her career Paul, then known as Pauline Crabbe, worked extensively in counselling unmarried mothers and was involved in championing counselling for pregnant teenagers, especially those under the age of 16, to determine whether abuse had been involved.
From 1957 to 1969 she was first welfare secretary and then Deputy General Secretary of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child. In 1966 she helped form the Havistock Housing Trust, and in the following year was appointed to the Housing Corporation. From 1969 to 1971, Pauline worked as a Conciliation Officer with the Race Relations Board before moving to the London Brook Advisory Centre to work as first Secretary and then, from 1976 as Senior Counsellor until, in 1980m she was appointed as the National Vice-Chairman until her retirement in 1986. In 1977, Pauline featured as a speaker at the Altrusa Convention, as the Secretary to the Brook Advisory Centres. At some time in the She was also interviewed at length for the National Sound Archive.
For Channel 4's Faces of the Family show in 1994, Paul appeared as the matriarch of an extended family.
For her role and responsibility towards women, she was quoted in the First Woman Sheriffs in the United States on the front page:

Works

Featured in:
Bourne, Stephen Black in the British frame: Black people in British film and television, 1896-1996. Cassell
Murray, Jenni The Woman's Hour: 50 years on women in Britain. BBC Books
Nicholson, Mavis What did you do in the war, mummy? Chatto & Windus
Pines, Jim Black and white in colour: Black people in British television since 1936. BFI