Maria Pedro

Her father was a pimp and her mother was a prostitute. Aged 18 months old, she was abandoned and raised in care. Education was her way out and she went on to manage a supermodel, Michelin-starred chefs, Peter Gabriel and become the most influential woman in English rugby. ‘Remarkable’ doesn’t begin to do justice to the story of Maria Pedro.

September the 10th, 2018, Marylebone Registry Office. A humble enough location for a wedding, but with a guest list that includes former England players Jeremy Guscott, Phil Vickery, Lawrence Dallaglio and Andrew Sheridan, Sir Clive Woodward, Peter Gabriel, Michelin-starred chef Michael Caines and living legend of children’s TV, Baroness Floella Benjamin. Taking the pictures, Dave Rogers, a photographer who has spent 40 years capturing some of rugby’s most iconic moments.

Phil Keith-Roach and Maria Pedro had been ‘going steady’ for 21 years - he was 75 and she was 64 – but the wedding had been hastily arranged. 

A few weeks earlier, Maria had surgery to remove a tumour in her a frontal lobe, while Phil was having treatment for cancer having originally been told the previous year that he might have only six months to live. 

As they drove back home following her operation, he saw a couple walking down the steps outside the registry office, turned to Maria and said, ‘we’re getting married in there’. 

“We could have spent years preparing that wedding and would not have bettered it,” says the former Rosslyn Park hooker who became England’s first professional scrum coach.

“I think she wanted to get married quite quickly after we first met,” he admits. “It’s been a bit harrowing sometimes, thinking about how long I left it.

“I’m just thankful we had the chance at the end. When she was ill, I just knew. I was desperate to be married to her, absolutely desperate. It suddenly came to me ‘why haven’t I? Why have I denied her?’

“Peter Gabriel later came to my house and gave me a memory stick. At first, I didn’t know what was on it, but he had filmed the exact moment when we became husband and wife. 

“That film has left a mark on me in my ways. I must not let grief warp the memory that we were in total unison at that moment.”

Just a few days after becoming Mrs Keith-Roach, an MRI scan revealed that Pedro had cancer, which was advanced to a stage where it was beyond treatment. She passed away on November 4, 2018.

Phil and Maria first met in the Mayfair office of former England flanker, turned coach, turned entrepreneur and man about town, Dick Greenwood. The purpose of the meeting was to sort out Keith-Roach’s situation with England Rugby.

After he stopped playing for Rosslyn Park, Keith-Roach taught economics at Dulwich College. But he was also coaching and had a sideline with a new company called Rhino that was developing a scrum machine known as The Powerhouse. 

Ahead of Australia’s 1984 tour of the UK and Ireland, Wallabies coach Alan Jones contacted Keith-Roach to help with the scrum and lineouts, but also to use The Powerhouse. The Wallabies won all four test matches against England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales with an aggregate points margin of 110-33.

Yet it would be another eleven years before Keith-Roach was asked to join the England senior set up. 

“I would do coaching and video sessions about the opposition, which hadn’t been done before,” he explains. “They seemed to quite like it and kept asking me back. I was thrilled, honoured, delighted. But I was also a bit scared to ask the management about getting paid.

“So I spoke to Dick, who had been England’s head coach in 1983. He said ‘well, you’ve got to meet Maria Pedro. She’s the number one rugby agent. She’s the only proper agent. She’s extraordinary!’ 

“I remember every detail of that day. I went downstairs and was greeted by Maria’s radiant smile. We talked for an hour. I found her intriguing.”

They met again later that evening at a gathering arranged by Greenwood at The Sporting Page pub in Chelsea.

“We all went out for dinner that evening,” recalls Phil. “But then people started to drift off. I lived across the road and we were the last two there. That day changed my life.

“I must have been captivated immediately because my youngest daughter tells me I rang her within two days!” 

Buoyed by his new-found romance, Phil went in to see the RFU and they agreed to give him a cheque for a couple of grand. It was only after Sir Clive Woodward became coach in September 1997 that he was handed a formal contract.

“I spent eleven years with England Rugby but I couldn’t have done it without Maria. We would watch a game on Friday evening and on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. 

“Then we would get back home, she would type up my match reports and I would send them to Clive Woodward along with all the other coaches.”

At the point when Woodward started his reign as coach, Pedro was the most influential woman in English rugby. Nowadays, she would probably be described as a ‘super agent’. At one point she was representing most of the England XV including Jeremy Guscott, Austin Healey, Matt Dawson, Kyran Bracken and Gareth Chilcott - players who all went on enjoy successful careers outside of the sport. 

That was a remarkable achievement in itself. Even now, only one woman features on England Rugby’s list of approved agents. But her ascension was all the more improbable given the circumstances by which Maria came into this world.

Born on May 22, 1952, in North-West London, Maria never met her father, who she later discovered was a pimp and died before she was born after being fatally stabbed in a brawl. Her mother was a prostitute and abandoned Maria when she was just eighteen months old. 

Some forty years later, Maria hired a private investigator who tracked down her family to a council house in Slough. It turned out to be a cathartic moment but not in the way that Pedro would have imagined. Her white mother wanted nothing to do with a mixed-race daughter.

Pedro later said, “In retrospect it was a really liberating experience. I could imagine how I would be and what I would be doing if I’d stayed with her — a miserable existence.”

She spent most her of childhood within the state care system but education provided a pathway to a better life. 

After passing the 11-plus, she got into a grammar school, but it was in Ashford, Kent, which involved a four-hour round trip every weekday. Eventually, Brent Council’s social services secured Pedro a place at St Catherine’s – a boarding school near Guildford. She became best friends with Jill Moore, whose father was Peter Moore aka Baron Moore of Wolvercote. His sole England cap came against Wales in the 1951 Five Nations, but he was far better known as the Private Secretary to the Queen. 

The Moores would become the closest thing Pedro ever had to a surrogate family and she would become a frequent guest at Kensington Palace, mixing with high society; a world away from the life that she had known just a few years earlier.

After graduating from the London School of Economics, she trained as a social worker before moving into finance as a merchant banker. 

Meanwhile, Jill Moore would go on to marry Peter Gabriel. In 1987, he became a global star through the success of So, an album that sold over ten million copies. Gabriel wanted somebody he could trust to handle his financial affairs and didn’t want to sign to a big agency. At first, Pedro resisted the idea but eventually relented.

Talk about going in at the deep end. She had to steer a path through managing her best friend’s husband at the point when their marriage was breaking down. 

But Pedro made an effortless transition from the financial world to the world of celebrity. Soon her roster of clients would include supermodel Marie Helvin and chef Raymond Blanc. She was ahead of the game when it came to understanding a star’s marketability. In an interview with Business Age magazine, she said, “I see them as brands and I won’t take people on unless I think I can either develop them as a brand or if there’s still some mileage in that brand.”

“She was a networker long before the word was popularised,” adds Phil. “She was approached by Blanc and did a lot of his deals for TV and supermarkets.” 

At the time, Maria’s offices were just outside of Bath and Phil recalls that “she was invited to a lawyers and accountants luncheon where she met former Bath fly-half, Brendan Perry. He said, ‘I know Jerry (Guscott) is wondering if there is any scope for him in the commercial world’. This was still five or six years before the game turned professional.” 

As unlikely as it sounds now, Guscott could sometimes be found on a building site working as a bricklayer or driving a bus when he wasn’t playing for Bath.

The men looking to represent England stars like Guscott tended to fit the classic mould of the wide-boy, 90s sports agent – all flash motors and mobile phones the size of a brick. 

By contrast, he described Maria as “a different act altogether…my contract with her consisted of a handshake.” 

In an interview with The Guardian from 1996, Maria warned that as the game entered the professional era so the profile of players would rise and their lives would come under increased scrutiny like never before.

She added, “I can’t do anything for them if they don’t perform well on the field. Some people rushed off into promoting themselves as celebrities and forgot the playing side. To their cost. Whoever said it’s not about winning but taking part was talking nonsense.”

Guscott soon became an ubiquitous figure, starring in TV shows, writing newspaper columns, and modelling for catalogues. He was the rugby celebrity who was adored by your sister, your mother and your grandmother. But he also had a stellar career on the pitch.

“As I recall it, she went to the Hong Kong Sevens and saw Jerry play,” says Phil. “She once said to me, ‘if he was running across snow he wouldn’t leave a footprint.’ He also sent me texts after Maria died saying she had a profound effect on his life and he knew she had a profound effect on mine. 

“When we started going out together he said to Maria, ‘isn’t he a bit old for you?’, which is the cue for a roar of laughter.

“A lot of the other guys at Bath wanted her to be their manager. She saw Gareth Chilcott play and thought ‘he would be ideal for panto’. He then worked every Christmas for fifteen years.”

It requires a certain force of personality to be a successful agent. But as a woman of colour in the male-dominated world of rugby, it also required an awful lot of resolve and resilience. But Maria was better equipped than most to deal with it given the challenges she had overcome to get this far. “She worked with Richmond just at the point when big money came into the club,” explains Phil. “She also got on very well with Nigel Melville at Wasps and Dean Richards at Leicester. But I can’t say that was the case with every Director of Rugby. Some had delusions of grandeur, were full of themselves, looked down on a woman, but also looked down on a black woman.

“I remember her coming out of one meeting with a few tears. It was the worst of the class system, the pomposity and self-regard. The sort of people you and I would think were complete prats. And rather than having a charming way with a woman, they would be thinking ‘what are you doing here?’

“To give you another example of what she came up against, I’d only just met her in early 1997 and she was off to see Guscott play for the Lions in South Africa.

“She made appointments with some of the rugby hierarchy over there and they had arranged for her to be picked up at the airport. She went to the agreed meeting spot and she was the only person there for 45 minutes. She called the chap who was due to pick her up, who said ‘no, I’ve driven past there three times and you weren’t there.’

“The reason he thought she wasn’t there was because of the colour of her skin. That’s the world she had lived in then and people still have to live in now” 

When it came to managing rugby players, Maria said that being a woman meant you stood out from the crowd, “You come up against barriers but you do in any walk of life. But it can work to your advantage. You get attention because you are not just another man in a suit. It works both ways.”

However, what persuaded her to walk away from the sport had nothing to do with prejudice but came down to a simple matter of principle. 

“I was also coaching at Wasps at the time and I was approached by several players for her to represent them. She got Rob Henderson a great new deal (thought to be around £150,000 a year). He said ‘yes’ but then went two weeks without returning her calls. He was away with Ireland in Rome, so she called him and said, ‘I need to know whether you’re definitely going to sign this’. Henderson replied, ‘Yes, and I’ll be back on Monday. I’ll speak to you then.’ 

“By Monday the newspapers reported that he had signed for Munster. She came home and said, ‘that’s it, honey, it’s time to look elsewhere. There are too many people whispering in these guys’ ears’.

“It was a terrible blow. The shake of a hand, the honour of one’s word was broken. I thought Rob was a friend but he never spoke to her again.”

Instead, she was able to use her connections to campaign against child abuse through her next role as celebrity manager for the NSPCC, which became the official charity of the England Rugby team.

She was instrumental in bringing on board a string of famous ‘ambassadors’, and by the end of her seven years at the NSPCC its annual income had increased from £20m to £120m.

The last entries on her CV were Deputy Lieutenant to the Lord Lieutenant of Greater London, before subsequently becoming Representative Deputy Lieutenant for Hounslow - a role which she described as a ‘bridge builder’. 

Along with hosting members of the Royal family, dignitaries and other VIPs at public events across the borough, Maria could draw on her life experiences to provide advice and help to publicise community programmes, youth organisations, charities and local businesses to a wider audience. Freed from having to negotiate contracts, it turned out to be the most enjoyable period of her career.

It was through this work that she met Alan Fraser, assistant headteacher at Cranford College and Chair of Heston West Big Local - a lottery-funded group where residents are given £1 million and the power to invest that money however those choose to create opportunities and improve their communities.

“I had no idea of her background and it says something about her that I didn’t know,” says Fraser. 

“In fact, nobody in Hounslow knew much about Maria, and I think that was because she didn’t want to become the story. She wanted to focus on other people’s achievements and perhaps felt that she would detract from what she was trying to achieve.”

Fraser had the idea to make a documentary about Maria’s life, titled Maria’s Story, after he attended her funeral.

“Floella Benjamin was reading Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech, Michael Caines was there, Lawrence Dallaglio was there, Sir Clive Woodward was there... I started to think ‘this was an incredible life, an inspirational story and needs to be heard’.”

Fraser brought together a team of young local filmmakers to “expose them to opportunities they might not otherwise get.

“We wanted to hold a launch event and we were hoping to use the Sipsmith’s Gin Distillery in Hounslow, because she helped them to win a Queen’s Award. But then, of course, lockdown happened.

“So we decided to hold the premiere on a private YouTube channel. We did three screenings on Friday, May 21, the date of Maria’s birthday. It was a mixture of the local community, Maria and Phil’s friends, which included Jill Gabriel, Danny Grewcock, Wayne Barnes and Martin Bashir, and other connections from around the world. Bashir was incredibly complimentary about the film and that was a huge boost for everyone involved.” 

Bashir conducted a string of famous TV interviews including one with Princess Diana in 1995 followed by Michael Jackson in 2003. He was also a decent rugby player in his youth and represented London Welsh Juniors. 

A few years ago, Bashir was on a tube train heading back to central London from Twickenham. The only other chap sitting near him in his carriage was Keith-Roach, who didn’t recognise him but spotted that Bashir was holding a matchday programme.

“So, he’s thumbing through the programme and we get chatting,” recalls Phil. “I ask if he used to play? He says, ‘yeah, when I was younger I played at hooker. 

“My sports master was keen for us to see rugby played at a first-class level. So he would take us to Rosslyn Park and they were one the best teams in the country. 

“They had this amazing hooker called Philip Keith-Roach. He used to win nearly every ball in the scrum. He would also find Andy Ripley at the back of the line-out with pinpoint accuracy.

“At first I’m thinking, ‘he must be taking the micky’. But I don’t want to spoil the story, so I let him carry on. I was getting near to my stop, so I take my hat off and say, ‘you probably won’t remember me.”

He says, ‘No’.

‘Well, I’m Phil Keith-Roach.

“From that moment we’ve been friends and Martin helped me out with getting food during lockdown.”

Shortly after Pedro’s funeral, Phil received an email from Floella Benjamin. “She asked me ‘what are you going to do about Maria’s legacy?’ Well, I didn’t have a clue.” 

Maria’s Story is a fitting tribute in itself, particularly as she would have championed a project that gives young adults a platform to showcase their skills.

But Fraser and Keith-Roach are also currently setting up a scholarship scheme for children in care when they leave school or go to University.

“After she died I was full of remorse, but also pride in what she achieved,” says Phil. “She was a gift from God.”

Story by Ryan Herman

Pictures by Getty Images and Phil Keith-Roach

This extract was taken from issue 11 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.