Patrick Philip Vernon (born 1961) is a British social commentator and political activist of Jamaican heritage, who works in the voluntary and public sector. He is a former Labour councillor in the London Borough of Hackney. His career has been involved with developing and managing health and social care services, including mental health, public health, regeneration and employment projects. Also a film maker and amateur cultural historian, he runs his own social enterprise promoting the history of diverse communities, as founder of Every Generation and the "100 Great Black Britons" campaign. He is also an expert on African and Caribbean genealogy in the UK. He was appointed a Clore Fellow in 2007, an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2012 Birthday Honours for "services to the Reduction of Health Inequalities for Ethnic Minorities", and in 2018 was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Wolverhampton.
Vernon led a successful campaign for 22 June to be recognized annually as Windrush Day, a national day acknowledging the migrant contribution to UK society, which was officially backed by the British government in 2018.
In 2019, he was appointed Associate Director of Communities at the Centre for Ageing Better, a National Lottery Community funded charity looking to improve the lives of those approaching later life.
Biography
Education and early years
Patrick Vernon was born in Wolverhampton, Staffordshire (now in the West Midlands), England, to Norris and Avis Vernon, who had migrated to the UK from Jamaica in the 1950s. Vernon traced his lineage as far back as the 1800s, to a village in Senegal called Kédougou.
He grew up in the All Saints and Penn Fields areas of Wolverhampton, attending Grove Junior School, Colton Hills, and Wulfrun College, before going on to study law at Manchester Metropolitan University.
He later undertook postgraduate studies at Warwick University. He moved to London in 1989.
Health and social care work
Vernon initially worked in health and social care, where he was a manager for Citizens Advice Bureau and a civil servant at the Department of Health and Local Government Association. He later served as director of the Brent Health Action Zone (Brent Primary Care Trust), and Regional Director for charity MIND. He later worked in the third sector for a number of organisations focussing on the mental health of refugees, immigrants and prisoners.
He was associate member for the Department of History of Medicine at Warwick University, an advisory board member for the mental health campaign Time To Change, and a former ministerial adviser for mental health. He was a member of the independent Metropolitan Police inquiry on Mental Health and Policing.
Every Generation Media and family history work
In 2002, Vernon founded Every Generation Media to develop education programmes, publications and films on cultural heritage and family history, with the Every Generation website becoming one of the main sites on family history for African and Caribbean communities in Britain. In 2003, he launched the successful "100 Great Black Britons" campaign, in response to a television series broadcast by the BBC called 100 Greatest Britons (a list topped by Winston Churchill through public nomination), in order "to raise the profile of the Black contribution to Britain and to challenge the notion of Britishness."
The campaign received wide coverage in the national print and television media, with Mary Seacole eventually announced as having been voted the greatest Black Briton. In 2019, the decision was taken to relaunch and update the poll, and the results of the updated poll were revealed in a new book entitled 100 Great Black Britons, written by Vernon with Angelina Osborne, that was published on 24 September 2020.
Windrush Day and community activism
Vernon was among the first to call for the national celebration of "Windrush Day" on 22 June, to recognise the migrant contribution to UK society, marking the day in 1948 when the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, bringing the first big group of post-war migrants from the West Indies to Britain. He was appointed an OBE in 2012, in recognition of his work to promote health equality for Black and minority ethnic communities.
In 2017, Vernon was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Historical Society (RHS) and he is a member of the RHS's Race, Ethnicity and Equality Working Group, which in 2018 published Race, Ethnicity & Equality in UK History: A Report and Resource for Change.
