John Lewis chairwoman Sharon White says the ‘only people who looked like her’ while working in the Treasury in the 1990s were cleaning the loos’.
The 54-year-old businesswoman, who grew up in Layton, east London, joined the Civil Service in 1989 and took on a number of senior roles throughout her lengthy career.
The former Ofcom chief said there were very few female or ethnic minority members of staff and that being educated at Cambridge helped her fit in to the Westminster elite.
In 2013, Sharon became the first black person and the second woman to become a Permanent Secretary at the Treasury.
Speaking to Amol Rajan for his BBC2 interview series, Sharon said: ‘I think if I hadn’t been to Oxbridge I would have found the Treasury much tougher.’
The former Ofcom chief said there were very few female or ethnic minority members of staff and that being educated at Cambridge helped her fit in to the Westminster elite. Sharon is pictured front row, middle, at her Cambridge graduation ceremony
‘There were so few women, let alone from an ethnic minority background. So the only people who really looked like me were cleaning the loos or were on the reception.
‘But there were also very few women, the one woman on the Treasury board at the time who said to me, “You are permitted one eccentricity if you’re at the Treasury and if you’re a woman, basically that’s it”. She was very supportive and helped navigate [her way through the Treasury.’
When asked whether she ever felt the need to change her behaviour in order to fit in with work colleagues during her career, Sharon said: ‘I’ve never felt that very explicit way.
‘One role I had, I suddenly looked around the table and thought “Goodness everybody looks and dresses in a different way”.
John Lewis chairwoman Sharon White says the ‘only people who looked like her were cleaning the loos’ when she worked at the Treasury in the 1990s
‘I bought a completely different style of clothes. Colours and a style that wasn’t naturally me. I thought maybe I have to adjust my style to fit in.
‘I remember at the end of the year thinking “What have I done?”. There was just something that felt a bit uncomfortable.
‘I remember the day I piled up all these clothes and took them to Oxfam and re-started wearing training shoes to the office and I was quite far into my career at that stage.’
Sharon grew up in Layton as the daughter of a Windrush generation family and says that being able to buy a house was a ‘huge thing’ for her parents.
‘It was really difficult to rent as a black family’, she said. All those signs of “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs”. So it was a really big thing trying to buy your own house, hats off to my dad.’
Her parents came over to the UK from Jamaica in the late 50s and early 60s and had only planned to stay five years before meeting one another and starting a family in London.
‘My dad always wanted to improve himself’, said Sharon. Even though he didn’t do very much schooling. He left school at 15 or 16. My mother left school when she was 11 and hardly did any primary school because she was the eldest of nine.
‘So every time my grandmother had a baby my mum had to leave school to look after them, neither of them had huge amounts of formal schooling.’
Sharon admitted she felt ‘conscious’ that her parents were not born in Britain, saying: ‘Having a brown skin in a community that was majority white working class…I felt very British, but I felt very British with a brown skin.’
Sharon, who attended a local state school, says she had an extremely high level of education and always knew she wanted to go to Cambridge as a child.
‘I think if you have a non-traditional background it’s very easy to be given a label of underprivileged. I had lots of privileges. I had to my mind one of the best educations, she said.
‘The issue looking back is how much of that is down to luck, if my parents house was 20 meters further away I would have been [attending a] much less academic, much less successful school’.
John Lewis axed around a third of its stores in less than a year after suffering a hefty annual loss following the pandemic.
‘We’ve had to take some very difficult decisions, she said. ‘Closure of stores and partners made redundant.
‘I think it’s difficult for any business, but for a partnership I think it’s been really painful, because as a partner you feel yourself part of a community, part of a family.’
The high-end brand confirmed in August 2020 that their flagship £35million store in Birmingham would never reopen after closing during lockdown.
The retailer said at the time that the affected stores were ‘already financially challenged prior to the pandemic and a number of contributing factors, including the shift towards online shopping which Covid-19 has accelerated, meant these shops would not be commercially viable in the future’.
Sharon says that while it was ‘painful’ closing their flagship store, the company had to prioritise profit amid the pandemic.
‘Wherever we close a store it’s really hard for the community and there was a lot of debate around Birmingham, she said. ‘But the painful fact is that we weren’t making profit on the store and that’s really hard.
Speaking to Amol Rajan for his BBC2 interview series, Sharon said: ‘I think if I hadn’t been to Oxbridge I would have found the Treasury much tougher’
Dame Sharon White and her husband Sir Robert Chote with the awards they received at an investiture ceremony at Windsor Castle last year
‘I’d love to say we’re able to keep all our stores open, but then I don’t want to find ourselves five years down the track saying the partnership itself is at risk, as chairman your job is to take the really hard decisions’.
Sharon defended John Lewis’ decision not to pay back £190 million in furlough support and business rates relief to the government, insisting the company did what was necessary to maintain jobs.
‘The last two years have been an economic shock that we haven’t seen in our lifetime and probably haven’t seen since the depression or Spanish flu, she said.
‘So we only claimed business rates relief as it was intended and used it as intended and without that money sadly even more of our partners would have been at risk and the scale of restructuring would have been even greater’.
Amol Rajan Interviews airs on Thursdays at 9pm
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