Anthony Brown: the man who resisted deportation – then fought tirelessly for Windrush survivors

In the summer of 1982, Anthony Brown, then 21, was hoping for an acceptance letter for a place to study law in London. He had worked hard for his A-levels in computing, maths and physics at North Trafford College in Manchester and was full of energy and idealism. After his degree, he planned to join the police, to help counter the violent style of policing he had seen in television coverage of the recent Brixton riots.

Instead, he received a letter from the Home Office telling him he was in the UK illegally and needed to report to Manchester airport for deportation. Brown, who was born in Jamaica but moved to England as a six-year-old in 1967, had been classified as an immigration offender. It was immediately clear that he was not going to be able to start a law degree.

Forty years later, he has a clear memory of the fear that overwhelmed him. “It’s an awful feeling,” he says, still quietly horrified, when we speak in Manchester near the office of the Windrush Defenders, the organisation he co-founded to help victims of Home Office mistakes. “You’re worried about being separated from friends and your family. It’s constant. You compartmentalise the fear and work out how to live with it, but looking back I can see the impact it has had on my life. It doesn’t leave you.”

Many people in Brown’s position were repatriated, but his case was taken up by a group of campaigners who were determined to prevent his removal from the UK, launching what became known as the Anthony Brown Anti-Deportation Campaign. Prof Gus John, then a community activist and now an academic and an equalities campaigner, helped coordinate it. He remembers feeling shocked when he met Brown and heard how his attempt to get into university had triggered a deportation order. “The system was barbaric,” says John.

Lawyers at the South Manchester Law Centre were brought in and petitions were circulated; marches followed and the campaign made the local television news. Brown’s MP, Winston Churchill, the grandson of the wartime prime minister, agreed to write to the home secretary and eventually Brown was granted discretionary leave to remain in Britain.

For the activists, it was a triumph. Brown was grateful for the reprieve, but the experience had shaken him profoundly. “After the letter, and the way the Home Office treated me, I became disillusioned. I was upset for a long time,” he says. He decided not to go to university, abandoned his hopes of legal training, took over a milk delivery business and became Manchester’s first black milkman.

It was a small chapter in the history of immigration activism in the early 80s, which might have been forgotten had the harsh restrictions of the time not echoed explosively in the Windrush scandal that broke in 2018. The hostile immigration environment announced by Theresa May had caused new problems for thousands of people who, like Brown, had arrived in Britain legally in the 50s and 60s.

Brown found it “harrowing” to hear their stories, but quickly realised he was uniquely placed to offer support. “I read about people being arrested and put on planes. I knew what they were going through, because I’d faced it. I knew I was going to have to dedicate my time to taking this on,” he says.

The Guardian had been publishing stories about people from the Caribbean being misclassified as illegal immigrants, with catastrophic consequences, for about six months, before the then home secretary, Amber Rudd, finally apologised, in April 2018. Brown, who had finally managed to take an Open University law degree in his late 50s, stepped up within days to help hundreds of people in Manchester who had been misclassified as illegal immigrants. His experience of facing forced repatriation, and his knowledge of how to launch a campaign, made him an empathic and effective leader.

The Windrush Defenders is made up of a rotating group of 12 volunteers, most of whom have some legal training. So far, they have helped approximately 500 people apply for documentation confirming their immigration status and provided advice to those hoping to secure compensation.

Before the lockdown, Brown and his colleagues were organising weekly meetings at the Windrush Millennium Centre in Moss Side, Manchester, a community resource named in honour of the 50th anniversary of the arrival in 1948 of the Empire Windrush. He was dismayed by the numbers of people in need of help, some of whom were old and frail, arriving on walking frames. The hidden nature of the problem struck him when he recognised an old neighbour for whom he had babysat decades earlier.

“I asked her: ‘What are you doing here?’ She said: ‘I’ve got Windrush problems, too.’ A cold shiver went down my spine. There were so many people who had kept quiet for so long,” he says, angry at the thought of his elderly neighbour being barred from returning to the UK for six months after a holiday in Tobago, because officials refused to believe she was British. “It has been overwhelming, but people stood up for me when I was having difficulties; I felt I didn’t have any choice.”

Next, Brown intends to use his recently acquired legal knowledge to sue the Home Office: he applied for a judicial review in December, accusing the department of continuing to act unlawfully towards those affected by the scandal. The Home Office’s most senior lawyer, Sir James Eadie, has been assigned to the case. The student this department sought to deport is still refusing to go quietly.

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Brown was born in Jamaica in 1960, the youngest of five siblings. By then, his father, Derrick, had already left the country to return to the UK. He had travelled there initially on a colonial-era Jamaica Railway Corporation scholarship to study civil engineering and later found work on the railways and roads.

Life in Kingston was hard: they lived in a wooden house and his mother, Veronica, grew food for the family in the back garden. “Money was very tight,” Brown says. “My dad sent a bit, but sometimes we didn’t have enough.” His father spent six years saving what he could to bring over his wife and children. With hindsight, Brown appreciates his father’s determination; many of his generation had siblings left behind with grandparents.

His memories of the 14-day boat journey in 1967 are hazy. He has clearer recollections of the bone-deep coldness he felt on arriving in Britain – and he remembers a camera crew filming passengers as they disembarked. He learned later that an uncle rebuked his parents for agreeing to be interviewed for footage that was likely to be used to stoke the simmering debate about immigration.

His childhood in the Stretford area of Manchester was happy. He worked hard to win a place at grammar school, but when he was 13 his father was offered a university teaching post in Kingston and unwittingly made a decision that would cause life-changing immigration difficulties for Brown. He removed his two younger sons from school in Manchester and took them back to Jamaica to study, convinced that the academic aspirations he had for his children were more likely to be realised there. The family was split in two. Brown’s mother travelled reluctantly to Jamaica with her husband and the younger boys; Brown’s elder brother and two elder sisters remained in Manchester.

He had spent more than half his life in England and found the return to Jamaica very dislocating. Having endured playground taunts about his skin colour for years, he was again targeted as an alien, by fellow pupils who were surprised by the flares he wore; they called him “English boy”. He was profoundly homesick. “I pined for England; I couldn’t settle, I missed my friends. Every day, when I came back from school, I was upset,” he says. He ran up huge phone bills calling Steve, the elder brother he had left in Manchester. Eventually, his parents relented and allowed him to return to the family home in Stretford, aged 17, to finish school.

During the time Brown was preparing to leave the UK, the rules relating to Commonwealth migrants tightened, unbeknown to the family; legislation introduced in 1971 and implemented in 1973 cancelled the right to British citizenship for anyone who left the country for more than two years. Brown had been out of England for about four years. Without realising it, he had become an immigration offender. It was only when he applied to university that he discovered that he was going to be treated as an overseas student and that, under rules introduced by Margaret Thatcher in 1981, he was liable for the tuition fees in full. When he wrote to the Home Office, attempting to rectify his situation, officials told him he needed to report for deportation.

Although ultimately he was granted indefinite leave to remain, the shadow lingered. Brown married and had two sons, but he still felt anxious about his immigration status: it could be revoked if he breached certain conditions. “It got worse with time – the stakes get higher when you have children,” he says. “You’re afraid you could lose your home. You’re never sure how safe you are. You wonder what can get you into trouble, particularly with the “sus law” in the 1980s, which let police stop and search and harass black people. I was stopped many, many times. You worry: are you going to run into an officer? Could you still be deported?”

Having worked his way up from milkman to business owner, Brown sold his company in 1991, after five years in charge. “It wasn’t the kind of life I’d envisaged,” he says. John, the equalities campaigner, remembers him as a well-loved milkman, who gave the same degree of service and attention to the people of Moss Side and Hulme as he did later to the Windrush victims he helped. He went into insurance sales, before finding work as a director of the Manchester carnival. In 2008, he applied for a British Gas sales job, but was unable to take it up; his Jamaican passport had expired and he was unable to convince his prospective employers that he was in the UK legally. “I thought: ‘That’s strange. It’s not as if you’re border guards.’ But they were. The border had moved into the workforce.”

In 2012, Brown had a heart attack, which prompted him to re-evaluate his life. As soon as he had recovered, he enrolled at the Open University, aged 52, to start a law degree. “I loved it. I thought: ‘Why didn’t I do this years ago?’” He graduated the month the Windrush scandal broke in 2018.

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In the immediate aftermath, Brown agreed to speak at a public meeting in Manchester to discuss the problems unleashed by hostile environment policies, but also those caused by the tightening of nationality legislation going back decades. At the start, he asked members of the audience to put their hands up if they had been affected by the scandal; no one did. After he had spent some time explaining his difficulties with the Home Office, he asked again. This time, half a dozen people raised a hand.

“I told people I’d been very scared and said that I knew people would be frightened. I think that gave people confidence to speak out,” he says. They made a call for legally trained volunteers and the Windrush Defenders was set up. People began to come forward from all over the city.

Week after week, Brown and his colleagues occupied three interview rooms in the Windrush Millennium Centre, advising people on how to approach the government’s newly formed Windrush Scheme, created to help people get documentation confirming their legal status in the UK. Over the past year, sessions have slowed down and moved online, but the work continues. Many worry that by applying to the scheme they risk being reported to immigration enforcement. “People remain in a fugitive state and don’t want to come forward,” Brown says.

His experiences with an earlier version of the hostile environment were minor compared with what had happened to some of those caught up in the scandal: people who had been mistakenly arrested, detained and removed from the country; sacked from their jobs and evicted from their homes; or denied the healthcare or pensions they needed, despite decades spent paying UK taxes. But he was able to appreciate the suspicion of the department responsible.

The interviews with Windrush victims can be very distressing. Brown has become experienced at anticipating when the conversation is becoming too difficult. “Sometimes we have to stop, let them have a moment and get it out. People are talking about losing their jobs, their family homes; about family breakups, seeing their lives completely broken. It’s emotional. It can often be simple things you might dismiss that have crucified people: the holidays people couldn’t take with their families because they didn’t have a passport; hearing their children ask: ‘Daddy, why aren’t you coming with us?’ We try to comfort them and have a laugh with them. It’s cathartic, to express that emotion rather than bottling it in.”

On several occasions, Brown has invited officials from the Home Office team to address victims. The meetings have been angry and noisy, but also constructive, forcing officials to understand some of the difficulties people have experienced. “I think they are genuine people,” Brown says. “They want to do their best, to right the wrongs. At least, they say so all the time.”

Brown is sceptical about whether the Windrush compensation scheme is delivering justice. More than two years since it launched, only 1,196 people have received payments totalling just more than £6m – far short of the £200m initial estimates indicated could be paid out to 15,000 people. At least nine people have died before getting a payment; 500 have been waiting for more than a year for a decision.

Reforms announced by the home secretary, Priti Patel, in December have increased the minimum payouts to make the scheme more generous, while a quick payment of £10,000 has been promised to anyone who can prove that they have been affected. Brown says many people are still waiting. Most feel a sense of humiliation at having to apply to the Home Office for compensation – the same department that caused the problems, he says. “It’s a gruelling, re-traumatising process; it crushes people.”

The Home Office insists the schemes set up to deal with the scandal are working well, pointing out that more than 12,500 people have been granted documentation. “We have also overhauled the Windrush compensation scheme so people are receiving significantly more money, more quickly, enabling more victims to have the confidence to come forward with their claim,” a spokesperson says.

The judicial review application lodged last year by Brown aims to compel the Home Office to offer faster payments in reparation and to reverse some of the discriminatory changes to immigration legislation that had such negative effects on the Windrush generation. The action is at an early stage, but it is a bold attempt to force the department to consider the lasting legacy of its immigration reform on people who lost their legal status.

Sometimes, Brown finds it overwhelming to have the weight of dozens of people’s difficult experiences in his head and to field daily calls from people seeking advice about lives upturned by Home Office decisions. When things get too much, he is supported and encouraged by his sons, George, 25, a design graduate of Goldsmiths, University of London, and Louis, 21, who is studying maths at Oxford. “What’s upsetting is seeing people whose lives could have been so different,” Brown says. “I don’t shout and rage about it, but I want to get the Home Office into court.”