As the owner of a professional rugby club, Tony Brown was accustomed to being invited into the directors’ box at away matches. Yet in March 2002, when his Newport team were playing Ebbw Vale, he was turned away at the turnstiles and had to watch the game on television in the pub 20 yards away. “We refused him entry for the same reason that Winston Churchill would not have allowed Adolf Hitler to come to dinner in London,” Paul Russell, a Vale director, said.
Brown called the ban “very, very petty”. He said: “They were happy enough to have 2,500 Newport supporters in the ground and to take their money, but they were not happy to have me there. It’s a great shame.”
Newport were one of a group of clubs demanding a six-team Welsh Premiership; the nearby Ebbw Vale, excluded, threatened legal action.
By that stage Brown had poured £5 million into Newport — from the profits he had made building Bisley, one of Europe’s leading office furniture makers. “I don’t have racehorses, yachts or exotic foreign properties,” he said. “But I have always had one indulgence — and that is Newport Rugby Club.”
He became vice-president (and later chief executive) of the club in 1997 and the following year turned it into a limited liability company. He improved performance on the field: lifting Newport from near the bottom of the First Division, he recruited a string of overseas players. The club started winning against the likes of Bath and Toulouse, and won the Principality Cup.
In 2003 he took on the Welsh Rugby Football Union, which had proposed creating six combined regional teams that it would legally own. Newport were to be joined with Ebbw Vale under the name Gwent Dragons. Brown baulked at the absence of his club’s name, holding out until they were renamed Newport Gwent Dragons. Last year, much to his chagrin, they were rebranded again to Dragons RFC.
He stepped down from his responsibilities at the club in 2005, frustrated with the infighting. “It has been a strange few years,” he said. “In one way, it has taken over my life. Up until the end of last season I was spending most of my time marching up and down the M4 and living out of a suitcase in local hotels. And for what? Well, the answer to that is simple. I got an immense satisfaction out of serving the community through the club and by putting something back into the town that gave me so much in terms of my business.”
With the help of money from his wife’s family and ICFC, a forerunner of the investment group 3i, he turned Bisley from a minor office furniture manufacturer into one with 500 employees and operations in 50 countries. When the pandemic dented sales, Brown responded by marketing a new range designed for working from home. “Many years ago we were told about the paperless office and that filing cabinets would be a thing of the past,” he said, “but we have maintained our output, quality and market share.”
Anthony Charles Brown was born in 1937 in Woking, Surrey, the eldest of five children of Freddy Brown and his wife Agnes (known as Nancy), née Urwin. They separated when the children were young, leaving Nancy to raise Tony and the others, on her own. At one stage they had to move into a workhouse. He attended a Catholic seminary, which he hated, welcoming National Service as an army sergeant in Korea and Malaysia, despite confronting spiders “as big as dinner plates”. He loved the military life, even becoming a special constable for several years. He had hoped to go into the army full-time but wanted a commission, which did not materialise. Instead, he trained as an accountant and played rugby for Guildford in Surrey. In 1960 he joined the family firm.
His father had been a panel-beater, starting a garage business in Woking in 1931; he moved to a factory four miles west at Bisley ten years later and made wartime jerry cans and steel containers for parachute supply drops. After the war Freddy reverted to car repair — but then, in 1946, came a turning point for his business: he won a contract to make 24 steel wastepaper baskets for a London office-supply firm. Five years later he invented the multi-drawer layered cabinet, inspired by letter trays, which let users keep documents flat and separate. It became a classic and millions were sold. When his son arrived, the firm nevertheless employed only 28 people. In 1963 it stopped repairing vehicles to concentrate solely on office furniture.
At a dance Brown met Rosamund Vestey, daughter of Sir Derek Vestey and great-granddaughter of Edmund Vestey. They married in 1961 and had a son, Mark, and a daughter, Julia, a journalist and novelist. Both survive their father. Tony and Rosamund divorced in 1980. In 2009 he married his former secretary, Marilyn Stevens, who died in 2013.
When Freddy retired, Brown bought out the rest of the family and moved the focus of the business to lockers and filing cabinets. Within ten years, annual sales multiplied six times to £24.4 million. He opened the Newport factory in 1988 to take advantage of lower wages and property prices, and invested in the rugby club nine years later.
“My only thought was to put a bit of self-belief back into the town, which was going through an economically difficult time,” he said. By 2019 Bisley sales reached a record £93 million. Last year he formed an employee ownership trust that gave 51 per cent of Bisley’s shares to the workforce.
Date: 15 May