‘We were made to feel like outcasts’: the psychiatrist who blew the whistle on racism in British medicine

Aggrey Burke was the NHS's first Black consultant psychiatrist. Rather than becoming a pillar of the establishment, he was forced to challenge it when he saw how other people of colour were treated

In 1980 a man called Steven Thompson was just one week from completing a six-year prison sentence at Gartree prison in Leicestershire. Then the prison guards cut his hair off. Thompson was a Rastafarian and his dreadlocks were an important spiritual connection to his beliefs. So he resisted. It was taken as a sign of a violent psychiatric disorder - and, instead of going home, Thompson found himself committed to a secure hospital. His detention caused outrage in the Black community and, soon, Dr Aggrey Burke was asked to help getting him released.

Burke - the first Black consultant psychiatrist in the NHS - remembers travelling through the snow to Rampton Secure Hospital in Nottinghamshire. In a more than 40-year-long career he would fight tirelessly against discrimination in healthcare, sacrificing his own advancement to do so. He would take on racism in medical schools and offer psychological support to those traumatised by the infamous New Cross fire in 1981 that killed 14 young people. Yet Thompson's case stuck in his mind as one that encapsulated many of the prejudices he had to battle. At the time, however, he just knew he would need to muster all his expertise and experience to convince the authorities Thompson was safe to release.