Britain says "Good Bye" to one 'honorable' old Etonian called Mick May, who left City banking to rehabilitate ex-cons with work and then faced an early death with nobility

Mick, who was born in Aldershot, Hampshire in the Autumn of 1958 and has died at the age of sixty-three, was the son of Liz and Peter, a career soldier and brigadier who had served as an officer in the Durham Light Infantry during the Second World War and won a Military Cross in 1941 for leading his men on a heroic charge to capture a fort at Capuzzo on the Libyan-Egyptian border. After his father retired from the Army, the family of three children grew up in “genteel poverty” in a large house in Northumberland. 

When he was fourteen in 1972, Mick was packed off to the public school for boys, Eton College in Berkshire, where he was both educated and lived in as a boarder. It didn't take him long to have the distinction of being the worst-behaved and most caned boy at the school. Steeped in military discipline his father would punish reports of his misbehavior on the long drives home to the northeast at the start of the holidays, by dropping him off at a reservoir three miles from the family home and ordering him to walk the rest of the way. This seems somewhat ironic, given the fact that his father was nick named "Crackers" in the Army for his daring streak.

It was probably at this point that he came into contact with the police and recalled later : "I was quite a wild youngster. I was arrested twice in my youth, but never charged for what was called : "An excessive exuberance". Things were so bad at school that he was only allowed to stay on, on condition that he attended Aloisiuskolleg School in Germany for one term in order to quell his exuberance. It was based in Bonn Bad-Godesberg and run by the Jesuits and doubtless, was strong on discipline.

He was retrieved by the academic world by the master, Tim Card, who patiently nurtured his academic potential and in 1976 he gained a place to study medieval history at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He probably met Mr Card in his role as a housemaster and his obituary in 'The Independent' in 2001 said : 'Understanding boys well, he knew how to give them their head and call them to order if they went too far. His charges responded by working and playing hard; they respected him greatly'.

He stayed on to successfully study for his Masters degree and after graduation he joined Kleinwort Benson in the City of London, working as a 'derivatives broker' with a view that his being able to say he was a 'merchant banker' would hopefully impress girls. At his interview he confessed to being terrible at maths, but still got the job although, despite the fact that he stayed for twenty years, he admitted his heart was never in it. 

It was in the company office at 20 Fenchurch Street in 1984, when he was twenty-six, that internal work was carried out while staff were still working and asbestos was exposed in a stairwell that he regularly used. It was to here that he later traced the origin of the mesothelioma which would lead to his serious illness and ultimately, death, 38 years later. He said had received compensation in an out-of-court settlement, happy to gain “closure” and open up the chance for other affected former employees to do the same.

He maintained that the best deal he struck in the City in these years was when he married  Jill Langham, another young banker. Set up by a mutual friend in 1987, they went to see a ribald comedy at the theatre where Mick roared with laughter while she hated it. He thought he had blown his chances, but within a year and when he was thirty years old, they were married and in subsequent years raised their family of six children.

With his wife having returned to work in 2001 and Mick feeling not entirely unhappy to have lost his job at Kleinwort Benson, he took a new direction, by becoming the Chief Executive of the community and environmental charity, 'Groundwork'. It was here that he met Steve Finn and after hearing that some two thirds of offenders in Britain end up back in prison and an estimated 45% within a year of their release, he launched his mission to do something about it.

Before they met, after serving four years for armed robbery, Steve was determined to find work and go straight, however, six months on, he found himself fighting the temptation to return to crime. He said : “I was looking for work and couldn’t get it. The door was slamming in my face. You bare your soul and then don’t hear back from anyone. I was almost about to think : ‘Although I have paid my dues, society seems intent on me being a criminal.’” It was when he joined 'Groundwork' the regeneration charity Mick was running in the Thames Valley, that the two men met. Mick recalled : “I pulled Steve Finn’s criminal record and it was a bit like 'War and Peace' and a rattling good read. So I asked Steve to come and have a cup of coffee with me and tell me what it was like to come out of prison”. He had already been struck by the struggles ex-offenders went through to get work and asked Finn to shed some light on the challenge.

When he reflected on his own youth, Mick said : "I thought to myself : 'If I had all the benefits that I had in my life and I managed to get myself into that sort of trouble : People who've never had those kinds of benefits, they're on a hiding to nothing". The result of that meeting was Mick's creation of 'Blue Sky Development & Regeneration', which he launched in 2005 with Steve as its first recruit and within a decade it had employed and supported more than 1,000 ex-offenders which is roughly the population of a large prison and only 15% had re-offended. 

They ran the company from offices at Denham in a Buckinghamshire nature park and it competed with other agencies for contracts from local authorities to pick up litter, cut grass, plant trees and dig graves and private businesses in grounds maintenance, recycling, catering and laundry. Mick was also tireless in presenting counterarguments to sceptical council procurement managers, claiming that it was better to have ex-offenders employed and paying taxes than on the loose in your area breaking into cars and selling drugs to children.

'Blue Sky' took on ex-offenders for full-time, fully paid work for around six months and then helped them move on to other jobs. It also helped with housing problems and with basic training such as forklift and driving licenses. For Steve, who managed the Blue Sky employees, the model worked on the simple principle of keeping ex-offenders busy. He said : “When you have got a job for eight hours, that is eight hours when you are not up to something". He also said it also helped ex-convicts to avoid slipping back into crime through their old contacts and new ones made in prison and : “You are meeting people, workers, not people who will bring you down”. Having said, that he conceded the temptation to re-offend would loom large for most as they faced life after prison but at one point said : “I still struggle with bills and the mortgage but I’d rather do that than wander up and down B‑wing wondering when my next visitor is coming”.

Mick reiterated the importance of work when he said : “A job is not just a pay packet to an ex-offender. I once gave someone a million dollar bonus and he told me to "fuck off" because that was the protocol in the City. I had a guy here with lumbago, who asked to come and see me and had tears in his eyes because he thought I was going to sack him because he had lumbago. That’s what a job means to people”.

In 2013 he was diagnosed with mesothelioma, the incurable lung cancer caused by his exposure to asbestos nearly 40 years before. About his diagnosis he said : "One day you're normal and the next day you're not normal. You're a rarity and you're gonna die and I don't really know why that last sentence should be so shattering, because we all know we're gonna die. But you come away with the clear impression that you're gonna die in a relatively small number of months. So it's earth shattering. Completely earth shattering".

There followed a grueling programme of surgery, chemotherapy, immunotherapy and innovative drugs trials with a range of unpleasant side effects. It was now fishing which provided much-needed respite, days by the river transporting him as he said to : “Another world, mentally further from the Cromwell Hospital than I was geographically”. 

Back in the 1980s, working for a time in the USA, he had taken up fishing as a pastime which became a passion and took him to such far-flung spots as Patagonia and Iceland, as well as closer to home. Fishing, he told the Telegraph in 2020 : “Has one great thing that marks it out from other blood sports. You can triumph over the animal, but you don’t have to kill it. That’s important to me, because the older I get, the more I don’t like killing”. It was that year that he published an acclaimed memoir, 'Cancer and Pisces', (link) which told his story and communicated the joy of his continued existence through the prism of fishing trips around the world. (link)

On the day his cancer was diagnosed he recalled : "As if in a form of recompense, came June 2, a day of almost indescribable peace and beauty on the River Dun, just about where it flows into the larger River Test”. Mick had no “bucket list” except for being with his family and pursuing trout and salmon streams the world over. Each expedition would be mapped out on Excel spreadsheets and he spent happy hours, as he said : “Noodling about with piscatorial data”. He calculated that the number of fish he caught rose by a factor of eight after his diagnosis. One of his riverbank companions was his surgeon Professor Loic Lang-Lazdunski, who became an enthusiast after catching three trout on his first outing with Mick.

He had a successful operation to remove as much of the lining of his lungs as possible in 2013 and called the experience : “My own personal Capuzzo”. Seven years later he said : "One of the silver linings that I think you have had is that having prepared yourself for say, and 18 month life expectancy, if you than get a multiple of that, it's all time that you're not supposed to have had and that's really great. And you've got to get on and enjoy it."

Before he retired from 'Blue Sky' in 2015 he had secured the organisation’s future by brokering a merger with the 'Rehabilitation for Addicted Prisoners Trust' to form the 'Forward Trust'. RAPt, which had an annual income of £14.3m and employed 338 people assumed company membership and thereby control of 'Blue Sky', which had an income of £1.7m and 17 employees. Mick said that the joining of the two organisations was : "Driven by strategic thinking, not financial need. It will produce a unique offering: no other organisation offers this continuum of support, from in-prison care for addicts to resettlement support through the prison gate and into a proper paid job with a proper company on the outside."

After his retirement, Mick served on the boards of a number of charities, including as Chairman of Governors of the 'Kensington Aldridge Academy', a secondary school which he said was : "A privilege to help, particularly in an area which, surprisingly, where given the school is located, is an area of very great deprivation".

The school was just yards from Grenfell Tower, in which 60 students lived and five current or former pupils died in the terrible fire of 2017. He proved an exceptional Chairman, helping to guide the school and local community in the difficult period following the disaster. When the school was forced to close, Mick oversaw it's temporary move to hastily erected portable buildings at Wormwood Scrubs in time for the new school year. Aldridge was found to be 'outstanding in all areas' in an Ofsted report soon afterwards. The 800 pupils moved back to its original site underneath Grenfell Tower in July 2018.

In 2016 he was appointed OBE for his work with 'Blue Sky'. He said : " 'Other bugger's efforts', as my father used to call it. It usually is because, if you're a realist and not self-obsessed, you know you can only do these things through team work". When he was diagnosed with mesothelioma he was given less than a year to live, but he went on to make medical history by surviving for nearly nine years, during which he never lost his zest for life.

One of Mick's greatest challenges was Leroy Skeete, who had visited him after his release from Belmarsh Prison. In 2009, Leroy was released from prison; he had been inside for 11 years and served a string of shorter sentences before that. He said : "I had no parents who stood by me; I spent most of my early life in care and graduated, if you like, with a crack cocaine habit. I felt quite bitter and twisted about society by then”.

Leroy began looking for work by following up a connection with an old
friend of Mick, ex-cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken, who he met by chance in Belmarsh. Aitken recommended him to 'Blue Sky Development and Regeneration'. Leroy was impressed by Blue Sky’s commitment to helping him progress and said : “Blue Sky funded my Network Rail qualification and helped put me in touch with Vital. Vital pay well! Normally people like me with no education and a criminal record get palmed off permanently with dead-end minimum wage jobs. Those kinds of jobs are not going to stop people committing crimes”.

Mick said about his time with 'Blue Sky' : 

"It was just a wonderful career and I loved it and it was the best job I ever had. I had so much fun. Ex-offenders are just like everyone else, They're just a bit more chaotic, but a lot of them are very good human beings. But that's what I learned, but it was a great thing to have done and I was very lucky. It certainly put my own misfortune into context, that's for sure".

Mick interviewed in 2020 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNvMFv2W2Jo&t=0m48s