Florence Tina "Gloria" Cameron (27 June 1932 – 15 March 2020) was a Jamaican-born British community worker, activist and promoter of West Indian culture. Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, she emigrated to England as part of the "Windrush generation". In 1958, she joined the St John's Inter-Racial Club in the Brixton district of London and became involved in activism directed at widespread discrimination against the West Indian community. Her concerns included accommodation problems, educational disparity, racial discrimination in employment, transport, and pubs, as well as Sus laws, which allowed police to detain people upon suspicion that they might have committed an offence.
Believing that celebrating culture could both help West Indians adapt and bridge misunderstandings, Cameron helped to develop London's first indoor Caribbean-style carnival in 1959. In 1963, she founded the Caribbean Folk Group, which performed throughout Britain reciting West Indian folklore and playing music accompanied with dance. In the 1970s, intent on creating a day nursery for working mothers that would better prepare Caribbean children for school, along with Gerlin Bean and Mabel Carter, she formed the West Indian Parents Action Group (WIPAG). Cameron became a community relations officer for the London Borough of Lambeth in 1973 and was one of the first Black women to be appointed a justice of the peace in the UK, serving from 1975. Cameron worked with the Inner London Juvenile Courts, became a magistrate, and volunteered to visit prisoners. As the day nursery expanded exponentially, in 1983 a new facility was officially launched by Diana, Princess of Wales.
Cameron's community work was recognised with honours as a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1980 and with the Jamaican Prime Minister's Medal of Appreciation in 1987. She was featured in several documentaries throughout the 1980s and was the first native Jamaican to appear on the British television programme This Is Your Life. In 1988, she was arrested and falsely charged with fraud and theft. Her defence blamed the charges on an organised group wishing to take over the nursery she had worked to build and ruin her reputation. After a five-day trial, the judge Valerie Pearlman of the Southwark Crown Court ruled that Cameron and the other three people charged were innocent, based on the inability of an accounting audit to substantiate the prosecution's charges. The judge noted that the case had been an injustice, causing anxiety for the defendants, and encouraged an investigation into how the charges had made it to court. In 2016, Cameron wrote an autobiography Case Dismissed!: An Ordinary Jamaican Woman, an Extraordinary Life giving her side of the ordeal.
Early life and education
Florence Tina was born on 27 June 1932 in Kingston, Jamaica. When she was fourteen months old, a tropical storm caused the family home to be flooded. She and her mother, the only ones home at the time, were rescued, but Florence developed typhoid fever and subsequently pneumonia and was hospitalised at Kingston Public Hospital for several months. When she finally began to recover, their rescuer suggested Florence be called "Gloria" thereafter, and the name was quickly adopted. From 1934, she lived with her step-mother Eugenie (née Johnson) and father, Clifford George Hylton. Her father worked as a manager for the textile firm Seaga's. He was active in the Universal Negro Improvement Association and her step-mother served as one of the Black Cross Nurses. Gloria attended Brown's Private Infant School and then middle school at the Methodist-run Ebenezer School. She began high school at St Martin but at fifteen, when her parents separated, she went to live with her birth mother. Attending the West India Commercial College, she trained as a secretary, and simultaneously studied domestic science at the Kingston Technical School.