The female bricklayer Tracie Simpson knew she was going to be in trouble from the start. The first day she arrived at the depot to begin work, 150 male workmates downed tools and stood watching her. Immediately someone commented on her bottom. ‘Is it a lesbian, ain’t it a lesbian?’ asked someone else from this territorial and testosterone-pumping group.

Simpson, now 28, joined Greenwich council as a trainee bricklayer in 1986. She was intimidated with violence and all talk was abusive. ‘I felt so threatened. I used to think the men might rape me.’ Male colleagues asked her whether she shaved her pubic hair and whether her spirit level fitted her vagina. Another time, she was in a hut with eight men and one lay on the bench thrusting, fornicating style, and talking explicitly.

‘I used to just sit there and read my book.’ She sounds upset when she talks, sometimes holding back tears.

Simpson endured this cruel sexual and racial harassment for an astonishing four and a half years. She became ill from the stress and in May 1991 was unfairly dismissed while she was off sick, allegedly having been made redundant.

Last week she won £15,000 compensation from Greenwich council, one of the highest recorded payments for sexual and racial harassment at work. This ‘breakthrough’ out-of-court settlement followed an industrial tribunal in which she was represented by the builders’ union Ucatt.

Simpson wears a thick sweater, biker’s boots, Afro dreadlocks, cat scratches all over her hand and she has a muscular body. ‘I could haul mortar or bricks up 60 foot and build a chimney stack on my own. I can pick up what men can pick up,’ she says defiantly in a cockney accent. ‘I was good at my job and I worked harder than the men.’ She doesn’t think she has female physical limitations.

She was paid equally and was only once unable to do something the men could when her back gave out as she worked on a brick wall. She received a credit for her practical work in her City and Guilds exam and believes she should have the right to do a traditionally male job at which she is competent.

Simpson felt humiliated by the catalogue of abuse she endured at work and went often to the women’s unit at Greenwich council for support. She complained frequently to her managers but, she says, they did nothing to help and some contributed to the abuse. Without success, she repeatedly begged the supposedly right-on council with its two female directors to sort out the problem.

She felt isolated and spent most of her weekends crying until she became ill with anxiety in October 1990. Eventually she was off work on full sick pay for seven months.

‘I couldn’t leave the house. I couldn’t socialise. I’d had enough. My insides felt drained.’ Her doctor recommended she quit her job and prescribed tranquillisers, which she took initially. Then she started having counselling. ‘I feel as if someone’s stolen something from me they have no right to.’

During her illness, her rare forays outside proved daunting. ‘A council guy kept coming to my house, harassing me and slagging me off,’ she says, smoking. ‘If I went out and bumped into someone from the council, I started to shake all over. I went to Safeway’s one day and this council bloke came up behind me and pinched my arse.’

Simpson (whose mother works as a DSS supervisor) is illegitimate and of mixed race. She thinks she’s part Afro-Caribbean and has a black grandmother. She was the only one in her family who wasn’t white. ‘I don’t know my real father,’ she says. ‘I thought the father I had was my father until my mother divorced him when I was 13. Then a neighbour told me he wasn’t my proper dad.’

Her surrogate father had a nasty temper. ‘He thumped and beat me with his fists. He used to hit me for being a minute late from school, to stop me chewing my nails or because I walked with my feet turned out a bit.’ She left home at the age of 16.

Simpson was educated at Mottingham girls’ school – where she was ‘a little rebel’ – and left with no qualifications. She wanted to be a nursery nurse, but was unqualified, so went to work in a meat factory for three years. ‘I got sacked because I didn’t bother to go in.’ She was unemployed for a year, then got into community programme gardening, started doing some bricklaying and proved a natural. Next she applied to become a trainee bricklayer with Greenwich council.

‘I got into it by accident, but it was really important for me to do this job. For the first time in my life, I’d found something I was good at and wanted to do.’

What of her relationships? For seven years, until she was 24, Simpson went out with a white, male biker. But does she like men? (‘The builders,’ she had said earlier, ‘were gutless.’) ‘Yeah, I’m fine around them … I actually believe everyone is bisexual.’ She now lives alone in a flat in Deptford with two cats and a dog.

She received £1,000 redundancy pay and is going to live off her £15,000 compensation money. ‘I just see it as an acknowledgement that the council was abusive. Because of it I’m not eligible for unemployment benefit.’ She is unemployed but does voluntary youth work, looking after an 18-year-old. ‘I’m there to support him. If he needs, for example, to go to a job interview and feels nervous, I accompany him.’ She doesn’t plan to look for a more traditionally female job. ‘I think people should be able to mix.’

She hopes her experience will encourage other women to fight harassment. The supposedly politically correct Greenwich council took on six other women in Simpson’s intake as trainee carpenters, bricklayers and plumbers. But they all left within two years because of harassment.

Of its 523 building section employees, only 45 are women. ‘The council said it was going to employ more women, but never did,’ says Simpson. ‘That’s what really finished me off.’

The council says it has introduced a new complaints procedure for harassment, victimisation and discrimination. No one has been disciplined over Simpson’s complaints.

Simpson talks assertively. She doesn’t see herself as a victim and calls herself a feminist. ‘I was bought up on the streets, so I’m quite hard-wearing.’

She admits she was a threat to the men she worked with. Was she in any way responsible for what happened? Surely there was something in her attitude that upset the male brickies?

‘No way, no, no, no!’ she says. She feels ‘entirely blameless’. That’s why she carried on working. ‘I liked my job and wasn’t going to have any idiot take it away from me.’ She has no plans to return to bricklaying. ‘Not unless they gave me a job to sack all those beasts.’