Remembering Sir Stephen Brown

Sir Stephen Brown, who has died aged 100, was a Lord Justice of Appeal from 1983 to 1988 and President of the Family Division from 1988 to 1999.

He was widely admired as a robust, fair and humane judge whose qualities were on display in a series of harrowing cases. None was more difficult than the much-publicised hearing in 1992, at the end of which Brown authorised doctors to stop feeding Anthony Bland, the 21-year-old victim of the Hillsborough football stadium disaster who was deemed to have no hope of recovery from his persistent vegetative state.

“His spirit has left him and all that remains is the shell of his body,” said Brown. “It is a desperately tragic situation. May his soul rest in peace.”

The landmark decision, unanimously upheld in the Court of Appeal, was welcomed by most commentators as both correct and compassionate. Some pro-lifers, however, described it as “legalised euthanasia”, and pointed out the similarity between Brown’s final words and those used by judges passing death sentences on criminals.

The same year, Brown ruled that surgeons should be allowed to carry out an emergency caesarean operation against the wishes of the mother, a member of a born-again Christian sect.

Four years previously, Brown had acquired a degree of notoriety as one of the appeal judges who, alongside the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Lane, turned down the first Birmingham Six appeal in 1988.

In 1975 the six had been convicted of carrying out the worst atrocity of the IRA’s mainland bombing campaign, killing 21 people and injuring 160 others in the Mulberry Bush and Tavern in the Town pubs in Birmingham. Their case was reopened by Douglas Hurd, then Home Secretary, in 1987, following an intensive campaign led by the Labour MP Chris Mullin, whose two World in Action programmes and book Error of Judgement called into question the reliability of the forensic tests and alleged that the men had been beaten up in custody.

Towards the end of the 27-day hearing, the feeling among many of those present in the Court of Appeal had been that the six would “walk”. Their lawyers were smiling and their families had begun to celebrate.

But the three judges unanimously reaffirmed the men’s convictions. During the lengthy judgment, which they took in turns to read out, Brown branded the former policemen and women who said they had seen the investigating officers use violence as unconvincing liars, motivated by malice and revenge. Ending the judgment, Lord Lane said: “The longer this case has gone on, the more convinced this court has become that the verdict of the jury was the correct one.”

The decision provoked much criticism. The Dublin government expressed “regret and disappointment”, while Chris Mullin spoke of “a black day for British justice”. On the second appeal, in 1991, the convictions were overturned.

Most of the attacks, however, were directed at Lord Lane, whose failure to acknowledge the role of the courts in keeping the six in prison for more than 16 years undermined public confidence in the criminal justice system and led to calls for his dismissal and for the Government to set up a Royal Commission.

While judgment was being given in the second Birmingham Six appeal in 1991, Brown was sitting with Lord Lane in another court, putting an end to the law dating back to 1736 that said a man could not be guilty of raping his wife. Lane said in his judgment: “It is the removal of a common law fiction that has become anachronistic and offensive.”

Stephen Brown was born in Staffordshire on October 3 1924. He was educated at Malvern College, which was moved to Blenheim Palace during the Second World War, and at Queens’ College, Cambridge. During the Second World War he served as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Relief, resigning his commission in 1946.

He was called to the Bar by Inner Temple in 1949 and began practising on the Midland and Oxford circuit, handling a mixture of criminal, licensing and personal injury work. He took Silk in 1966, and prosecuted many of the most knavish villains in the Midlands. He was a member of the Parole Board from 1967 to 1971.

One of Brown’s cases in 1974 involved a blue-movie gang whose “studio” had been traced to the classrooms of a secondary school. The shocked headmaster had picked out two of the “stars” as an 18-year-old ex-head boy and the school caretaker. “Scenes were obviously shot in laboratories, classrooms, the girls’ changing rooms and even the deputy headmaster’s study,” Brown told the Birmingham jury – adding that they depicted sex “in the nastiest, rawest fashion”.

Brown served as deputy chairman of Stafford Quarter Sessions (1963-71), Recorder of West Bromwich (1965-71) and Honorary Recorder of West Bromwich (1972-75) – all part-time judicial experience that was put to full-time use when he was appointed a High Court judge in 1975.

He was assigned initially to the Family Division, and one of Brown’s first decisions was to order an American woman, Princess Jeanne of Romania, to return her 14-year-old son to the care of his father, Prince Carol, so that the boy could return to his public school. He also granted divorces to Sir Billy Butlin (from his second wife) and to a “worthy plodder” of a husband whose domineering wife had constantly denigrated him.

In 1977, Brown was transferred to the Queen’s Bench Division and, a loyal Midlander, opted for appointment as presiding judge for the Midland and Oxford circuit.

His sentences in criminal cases erred, if anything, on the side of compassion. In 1979 he freed a devoted son who had aided his mother’s suicide by giving her a bottle of weedkiller to drink. The next year, he told a 15-year-old mother who pleaded guilty to grievous bodily harm of her baby: “You have to put all this behind you and look to the future. You are not the first mother to succumb in this way.”

From 1972 to 1975 Brown sat on the Butler Committee of inquiry into the treatment of criminal psychiatric patients and the subsequent protection of the public when they are released. This followed the conviction of a 24-year-old man of murdering two of his workmates in a photographic laboratory. The man’s employers were not told that he was a former Broadmoor patient who, had poisoned his father, his sister and a schoolfriend 10 years earlier.

After advancement to the Court of Appeal in 1983, Brown returned to family cases, many of them involving difficult disputes over custody. He criticised the way in which these were often turned into “gladiatorial contests” and appealed to judges, barristers and solicitors to show conciliation and restraint.

As a Court of Appeal judge, Brown also presided at several cases involving allegations of so-called “Satanic” child abuse during the 1980s. And in an unprecedented case in 1987 he ruled that an Oxford University student had no right to prevent his girlfriend from having an abortion.

He became President of the Family Division in 1988. In one case that year, he appealed to press and public to help search for a gypsy boy who, as the seventh son of a seventh son, whose father had died before he was born, was endowed with mystic and healing powers by gypsy folklore.

He later sat on the first so called “child divorce” cases, which arose out of the Children Act (1989), giving children the right to instruct solicitors and make independent applications to the court.

In 1990, Brown presided at the Lord Aldington libel appeal case, at which Count Nikolai Tolstoy claimed that the judge at first instance had “displayed bias and animosity” with his “sarcasm, interruptions and insults”. Finding that Count Tolstoy had no reasonable prospect of succeeding, Brown ordered him to pay £125,000 into court as a condition of proceeding, at which point the impecunious litigant was forced to throw in the towel.

Following several well-publicised rape acquittals, Brown was among those who called for a change in the law that would entitle defendants in rape cases to remain anonymous unless convicted. But the calls were rejected by the then Home Secretary Michael Howard.

Brown was also one of the four senior judges who agreed with Lord Mackay that solicitors in private practice should be given rights of audience in the higher courts.

He was chairman of the Advisory Committee for Conscientious Objectors from 1971 to 1975, and was elected a Bencher of Inner Temple in 1974. He was knighted in 1975, and sworn of the Privy Council in 1983.

His favourite recreation was sailing. He was a member of the Garrick and Birmingham clubs.

He married, in 1951, Patricia Ann Good, who died in 2020. He is survived by their two twin sons and three daughters.

Sir Stephen Brown, born October 3 1924, died October 1 2025

Obituary taken from The Telegraph

A Memorial Service will take place on Monday 10th November at 3:30pm at St Augustine’s Church, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B16 9JN.

Sir Stephen’s family warmly invites members of the Malvernian community to attend. St Augustine’s holds personal significance to the family – it is where Sir Stephen was married and where he attended services throughout his married life.

If you plan to attend, please get in touch so we can inform the family. Similarly, if you would like to send a message of condolence to the family, we would be honoured to pass this on. The family is extremely grateful for all the kind messages received so far. Please email us at malsoc@malvernc​ollege.org.uk.