Brian Anderson: Boxing, prison, the community

Brian Anderson is an ex-pro boxer, and not a bad one at that; British middleweight champion back in the Eighties and afterwards a referee. Now at 45 he is Britain’s first black prison boss. Small wonder he commands respect from old and young cons alike as he patrols the prison corridors.

He readily admits that if it was not for boxing he might be serving time himself. “I was a bit of a tearaway, got into a few scrapes – nothing serious, but it landed me in juvenile court. I could easily have been here in a cell rather than in this office if it wasn’t for finding something that gave me a bit of self-esteem and respect.”

Andersond iscovered that something in the Croft House youth club in his hometown Sheffield, England after being taken there at 13 by a social worker appointed by the court to supervise him. “Almost immediately I found boxing was something I could do and was good at.”

Within four years he had made the England amateur team and it was on a trip to Germany that he met up with Brendan Ingle who persuaded him to join his famous St Thomas’s ‘academy’ in the Sheffield suburb of Wincobank. “That was a different world for me. At Croft House I was number one but with Brendan I found I was sparring with people like Herol Graham and later on Naz (Naseem Hamed) and Johnny Nelson, a real education.”

Nelson, the now retired former world cruiserweight champion, told Alan Hubbard of the London Independent on Sunday: “Brian was a straight, no-nonsense type of fellah who always talked about being a social reformer. He’d always help you. I was a bit of a coward when it come to fighting but Brian taught me how to turn that fear into anger, and that made him the fighter he was. When he punched it hurt, like a hot poker in your ribs.”

Says Anderson: “When I turned pro, I suppose my record wasn’t bad (39 fights, 27 wins with 14 Kos, nine defeats and three draws) and I only lost against good fighters. To be honest I wasn’t the sort of fighter you normally see coming out of the Ingle camp, the flash, hands-down type, even though I trained with Herol (Graham) and Naz (Hamed). But we had a good time and I think we visited the odd nightclub or two.”

Little could Anderson have known that some 20 years later old sparmate Hamed would briefly be under his supervision at Doncaster prison. He had only been in the job a month when the former world featherweight champion was sent there after being sentenced to 15 months for a serious motoring offence. Anderson quickly moved him on. He is not allowed to discuss individual prisoners and will only say, “It was obvious that because of our past association he could not stay here.”

Andersonquit boxing in September 1987 after losing his title at the Royal Albert Hall in London. “I was up for it but like a lot of boxers I’d been having problems with my weight. I was 6ft 1in, weighed 15st (210lbs) and I had to get down to middleweight, a real struggle. But in a way that defeat was the making of me as a person. I’d lost a bit of heart for boxing by then – not for the sport, which I have always loved but for fighting itself.

“Boxing had made me what I am. It has been the foundation stone. Even to this day, some of the things Brendan (Ingle) taught me I use as core values in my life. I turned to refereeing and I did quite well though I never made A-class. I was having to jump through too many hoops as an ex-champion to make the transition to refereeing; it’s a bit like football (soccer) I suppose.

“After I finished boxing I felt I wanted to give something back to the community. So I decided to try to train to be a probation officer and within six months of joining the service I had got place at university.”

Son of Jamaican immigrants – his father was a plasterer and his mother a nurse – he is one of a family of six who have all gained degrees.

A trained electrician, Anderson qualified as a probation officer in 1988, worked in youth courts and also at Doncaster, run by Serco as one of the first private prisons. “The prisoners knew how to run prisons and they were running riot. The company asked me to take on the role of the country’s first anti-bullying officer in a prison. The then chief inspector of prisons, Sir David Ramsbottom, seemed to like what we were doing. I told him I had always wanted to be some kind of social reformer and it was he who suggested I should aim to be a prison governor. I found there was a graduate scheme and managed to get on it-the first black candidate to do so, in September 1997.”

After spells as a officer at various prisons he was given the residential governorship of Everthorpe, Hull and now director of Doncaster, a medium category jail  built to accommodate 770 but currently housing over 1,100. “A tight squeeze,” Anderson admits.

Andersonconcludes that he made better decisions than the people who are inside. “I could quite easily not have done. God knows what I would have done if I hadn’t found boxing.”