Henry Brown obituary

The Guardian

17-04-2025

My friend Henry Brown, who has died aged 85, was a South African and later British solicitor whose human rights work across nearly four decades reads like a South African anti-apartheid struggle 'Who's Who'. In the UK he also became a leader in the field of mediation.
As a young attorney with Cape Town's leading civil rights firm, Frank, Bernadt and Joffe, he was involved in the trial of leaders of a dramatic march of 30,000 protesters from Langa township into the centre of the city in 1960. Henry, barely into his 20s, was on his way. In 1967 he consulted with the imprisoned Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, on one occasion when the then ANC leader and future president was charged with slacking in the notorious salt mine. The charge was withdrawn after it was reported in the local newspaper.
Henry, born in Muizenberg, on the Western Cape coast, was head boy at the local school. His father, Sam Brown, ran a photographic business, while his mother, Leah (nee Harris), a Polish Jew who had been brought to South Africa as a child to escape persecution, was a secretary.
Henry qualified as an attorney in Cape Town, before obtaining a part-time degree in history and political science at the University of South Africa (1964). In 1971 he and his wife, Elsa (nee Solomon), a social worker whom he had married in 1962, moved to north London.
Henry set up practice with an old friend, Arnold Simanowitz, in a dingy office opposite the Old Vic theatre in Waterloo. They were involved in a secret network transferring payments to lawyers in political trials in South African courts, originating from Canon John Collins of St Paul's cathedral.
In 1980 Henry moved to Birkbeck Montagu's, a long-established Anglo-South African City firm. His clients included radical southern African groups mixed with the solicitor's standard daily fare. Henry recalled in his memoir, A Lawyer's Odyssey (2020), the time Birkbeck were discussing a merger with the old-school firm Penningtons, and he was asked by a partner if he minded that it acted for the Conservative party. Replied Henry: 'As long as you're OK with me acting for [Namibian freedom fighters] Swapo.'
Mediation, the movement away from the at-times brutal and often costly adversarial system of the English courts, now became the focus of his professional life. A colleague, Lisa Parkinson, described his contribution to the development of this field, both here and internationally, as immense. In 2013 he was awarded a lifetime achievement award by the International Academy of Mediators for his 'dedicated service as a civil rights lawyer, mediator, teacher, writer and leader in dispute resolution reform throughout the world'. And yet, said colleagues, 'he was always … modest and good fun'.
He co-authored (with Arthur Marriott) the standard work on civil and commercial alternative dispute resolution, ADR Principles and Practice (1993). After he retired from legal practice in 2005 (though he continued as a mediator for several years), he and Elsa moved to Whitstable, Kent.
Elsa survives him, as do his children, Gavin, Jeremy and Lauren, and three grandchildren, Jacob, Joshua and Rifka.