My first boss, Mike Hall, who has died aged 69, helped to found Simon House in Oxford in the 1960s. Everyone was welcome at this night shelter for the homeless, whatever their condition. Then, in the 1970s, he successfully campaigned for a new £1m hostel to be built in Paradise Street.
Mike was brought up in Salford. His father, Jack, a docker and Labour councillor, died when Mike was 10, and his mother, Elizabeth, worked as a dinner lady and playground supervisor to support her two sons, before running an off-licence.
On leaving De La Salle college, Mike worked in hostels in the UK and Ireland. He soon became an activist, angry at the establishment and ready to do something for people at the bottom. He found plenty of those in Oxford when he went to study first at Plater College, an adult education establishment, and then, in 1967, at Campion Hall, part of Oxford University, where he read philosophy, politics and economics, later training as a social worker.
The Simon House that he helped to start during his undergraduate years, under the auspices of the charity Oxford Cyrenians, consisted of some old Nissen huts wedged between a railway and a graveyard. The conditions were sordid but the ethos strong – rooted in Mike’s conviction that everybody deserves a roof over their heads. He also opened a second house, Cyrox, for long-term residents. At this time he met Dilly de-Ville, a nurse at Radcliffe Infirmary, when they volunteered at Slade Park travellers’ site. They married in 1972 and had two children, later adopting a third.
Mike gathered a strong, diverse team around him. Among them was a Danish colleague, Margit Veje, who was paraplegic. Before her arrival, Mike had found out the dimensions of her wheelchair and measured up the hostel, an act that was typical of his thoughtfulness and imagination.
Mike could be a cheerful or a moody presence, but was always full of action. For years, on Christmas Day he made a point of cooking lunch for about 100 residents, and his family joined in.
The new Simon House opened in 1981, achieving Mike’s dream of providing homeless people with “somewhere decent”. However, it also became a magnet for people across Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, in which homelessness was rising, forcing the original open-door policy to give way to selective admission.
In 1993, a hostel worker was stabbed to death by a resident, and the subsequent inquiry concluded that the Cyrenians’ project had grown so quickly that it had failed to develop proper systems to supervise and train staff. The murder and report were damning blows for Mike. He left Oxford, moved to Brighton and became the popular landlord of the New Kensington pub.
His idealism never died. Every year he went to Glastonbury to run the tent for disabled festival-goers. His great achievement, Simon House hostel, still serves Oxford’s homeless people.
He is survived by Dilly, their children, Kara, Katherine and Jonjo, and a granddaughter, Jemima.
