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Tavistock and Portman’s proud black history
Agnes Bryan
Agnes Bryan (born 1954 ) was one of the first black senior clinicians at the Tavistock and Portman and up to our centenary year in 2020, she remains the only black senior manager (Associate Dean) to have been employed by the Trust. She created the black workers’ group and the black trainee and students’ group.
Agnes is of African-Caribbean descent. She was born in Grenada and moved to England in 1967, completing her secondary and university education in the UK.
She took a degree in sociology at North East London Polytechnic (now UEL) and her first masters at Birkbeck, before going to the University of Bath and completing a PhD in the management directorate in 2000, while also training to be a psychotherapist at the Gestalt Centre.
While studying, throughout the 80s and 90s Agnes was also highly involved in activism, helping establish the black women’s centre in Brixton and a large education and skills training establishment in Woolwich. She ran projects for black single mothers in Lambeth with the community relations councils. She also worked with Hackney Community Relations Council and was highly active in challenging inequalities across London.
Agnes Bryan joined the Tavistock and Portman in February 2001 with a specific remit to address issues of access for black and minority ethnic groups and within the Training and education curriculum. Agnes worked with Brit Krause to create the in-roads for black and BAME students and communities, particularly at the level of post-graduate training and courses. She had a mandate to increase the number of BAME students and trainees recruited, and not just to get people through the door, but to make sure that they were well integrated. As part of this she developed support networks for staff, students and trainees.
Agnes also set up a critical enquiry group, which was comprised of senior black professionals from outside the Trust and operated as a think-tank to bring in black professionals, hold lectures, seminars and workshops. Out of that group came three black African psychology conferences, which featured prominent black psychologists from America.
The conferences were a way to expose students to different voices and help validate the students’ own experiences. She successfully increased the number of students and trainees from minority groups. The importance of this work led her apply for and become an Associate Dean and the only black senior manager in the Tavistock and Portman’s 100 year history.
With Frank Lowe she organised a black leadership course for black managers that actively targeted who they wanted to engage. Agnes also created a masters in management and leadership which attracted a number of black senior managers, primarily from education, health and social care sectors.
Across her career at the Tavistock and Portman, Agnes created a visible change in the student and staff bodies, but not nearly at the level that Agnes felt was required and that further work remained to be done.
She retired from the Tavistock and Portman in December 2014.
After retiring from the Trust she maintained her psychotherapy practice for a while, but now specialises in coaching senior executives and consulting to organisations.
Frank Lowe
Frank Lowe was a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and Head of Social Work in the Adolescent and Adult Directorate at the Tavistock and Portman. He was also a teacher and trainer within the Directorate of Education and Training and manager of Thinking Space.
Frank joined the Adolescent Department in 2001 and with the support of Onel Brooks and Maxine Dennis he developed The Tavistock-Caraf Empowerment service, which provided support to Black adolescents at risks of exclusion from Camden schools. He also developed the Young Black People Consultation Service with Onel Brooks, as a way of making psychotherapy more accessible to young black people. Frank’s major contribution to the Tavistock and Portman is Thinking Space, which he started in 2002 as a participatory event where staff and trainees could reflect and discuss about ‘the self ‘and ‘the other’ and learn from this experience. Thinking Space continues to be an important learning forum at the Tavistock for staff and trainees and was commissioned in 2013 by Haringey as a public health response to community mental health in Tottenham following the 2011 riot. Frank was given an award for Psychoanalysis and Diversity by the British Psychoanalytic Council in 2015 for establishing ‘Tottenham Thinking Space’.
Frank retired in 2022 and in 2023 received an honorary doctorate from the Trust in recognition of his life’s work and outstanding contributions to the understanding of race.
Read more about our current staff and their contributions to our proud black history:
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