My friend Pip Salvador-Jones, who has died aged 61 of gall-bladder cancer, was director of Citizens Advice in the London borough of Barking and Dagenham, one of the UK’s most disadvantaged areas.
Having started out at North Lewisham law centre in south-east London as an articled clerk, Pip moved on to Hackney Community law centre, where she worked as a solicitor helping, among others, Travellers, tenants’ associations and disabled people’s organisations.
Later, as chief executive of the Mary Ward legal centre in central London (2005-08), she doubled that organisation’s size and set up a new programme, Young, Free and Legal, to increase access to legal advice for young people.
Her final working spell, from 2010 until her death, was spent at Barking and Dagenham Citizens Advice, where over 15 years she headed initiatives to provide legal aid and advice to people facing evictions, domestic abuse and debt. She also made space in the office car park for a converted bus that served as an LGBTIQ+ homeless shelter.
Pip was born in London to Heidi-Jean Salvador, a single mother from the Philippines, who gave her up for adoption. Although her mother had named her Luzviminda, a melding of the Philippines’ three main island groups, once she was adopted by an English couple, Vic and Tova Jones, she was renamed Philippa. Raised in Birmingham alongside three 6ft blond brothers, she was teased by children at her primary school as “Philippa from the Philippines”, which she subverted to Pip to match her 5ft frame.
After leaving Lordswood secondary school, in 1988 she gained a law degree at North London Polytechnic (now London Metropolitan University), where she emerged as a proud black lesbian and socialist, becoming treasurer of the Black Lesbian and Gay Centre and later of Southwark law centre, both in Peckham.
Her working life began at North Lewisham law centre in 1989 via the Black Articled Clerks Scheme, a pioneering initiative to increase diversity in the legal profession. Wherever she worked she used her experience of living as an outsider, and she could walk into a room, find the awkward figure in the corner and make them feel that they belonged.
Away from work Pip co-owned a small yacht named Legs & Co, after the Top of the Pops dance troupe, which she sailed on London’s docks with Sailability, which brings disabled and non-disabled sailors together as equals.
In her 30s, after much detective work, she found that in Toronto was her birth mother, who told her: “I have thought about you every day of your life.” She also discovered she had a half-brother, Allan.
She is survived by her partner, Noelle Britton, a psychotherapist, whom she met in 2019, and two brothers, Damian and Allan.
