Once a fireman, always a fireman. Joanne Fenton half jokes about her husband’s ability to stay calm in a crisis. You can retire from the job, it seems, but only to a point.
‘I’d have been running around like a headless chicken, not knowing what to do, but Ade went the opposite way,’ she says.
Adrian Fenton, 58, nods, and embarks on the sort of forensic analysis a professional first-responder would give, explaining what he did, and the thinking behind it.
What he’s unpicking is the shocking moment they discovered a stowaway hiding in their campervan, on a return trip from France last October.
Adrian’s not on trial here, but he feels he is. And he absolutely, resolutely, believes he did the right thing – the thing any public servant, retired or not, would do.
‘I was very methodical. The first thing I did, when I saw those trainers, and then the legs attached to them, was to shout to Jo to call the police,’ he explains.
‘There were two things going on – thinking of the guy’s welfare, and of our safety. You contain the situation. You try to avoid confrontation. I didn’t know whether he was on drugs, whether he had a weapon. This was our home. We were literally up the driveway, with the garage doors open, offering access to our house.
‘I established he was OK. Jo brought him a bottle of water then some fruit.’
Within about 20 minutes, the police arrived, at which point Adrian stepped back and started videoing proceedings on his phone.
‘It was purely for evidential reasons,’ he says. ‘I knew that if it went forward, and I was asked questions about it, I could bounce back and refer to the video.’
That video went viral this week, and what an extraordinary piece of footage it is: two police officers standing in Adrian and Joanne’s suburban garage in Heybridge, Essex, having just helped a young, Sudanese migrant unfurl himself from the bike rack on the back of their campervan.
The footage would have been troubling anyway, but the reason the story went viral was because of what happened next.
Although the officers at the scene treated Adrian and Joanne, 55, as the victims of crime – right down to establishing a crime incident number should they need to make a claim about damage to property – things took a frankly ludicrous turn.
Instead of being thanked by the authorities for their civic mindedness, the Fentons were contacted by the Home Office, and told they were going to be fined £1,500.
Citing asylum and immigration legislation – legislation introduced in 2023 that the Fentons knew applied to lorry drivers, but had no idea was relevant to them – they were told it had been their responsibility to ‘check that no clandestine entrant was concealed’ in their vehicle.
They immediately drafted an appeal, pointing out that this man wasn’t ‘in’ their vehicle at all, and were furious when the Home Office response was to double down, insisting that penalties were ‘designed to target negligence rather than criminality’.
It beggars belief, says Joanne in this, their first in-depth account of what happened.
They think it happened like this: at some point – and they are utterly baffled as to when, but they believe it must have been when they were queueing in traffic in Calais – the man crept up to the campervan, unzipped the tight plastic cover designed to keep rain off their bicycles, and climbed inside.
He then ‘moulded his body around the bike frame and the bikes themselves’, and clung on for dear life – for more than six hours, and at speeds of 60mph on the rain-swept M25 – all the way to Essex.
‘At any point, he could have fallen off. Or if a lorry had gone into the back of us, he wouldn’t have stood a chance,’ says Adrian.
‘We were negligent? Seriously?! Most other campervanners and caravanners we’ve spoken to have no idea about this law. This migrant wasn’t inside our vehicle, which was alarmed up to the hilt. He was clinging to the bike rack outside it.
‘And the border patrol people – the professionals – had walked round the vehicle doing their own checks before we got on the ferry. No-one has said they were negligent. The whole thing is mad.’
The Fentons’ story has sent shockwaves around campervan and caravan communities, and sparked global comment.
On Tuesday, Adrian was bemused to find himself speaking to the Washington Post. ‘Illegal immigration is a huge global issue,’ he observes.
A huge domestic one, too. On Wednesday, their case was raised by their MP in the Commons. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he was ‘concerned’ about this case, and it was ‘important’ that it was looked into.
Let’s hope some urgency is applied here. Because having listened to the Fentons’ full story, the politest thing we can say here is that the Home Office has picked on entirely the wrong retired couple.
Not only are these two clearly responsible campervanners – the four-day trip to France last year was the first they had made abroad in their new vehicle, and they were meticulous about the planning – but it is the background to what led them to buy it in the first place that makes their treatment nothing short of shameful.
Because it emerges that Adrian Fenton was not just a rank and file firefighter during his 28-year career with the London Fire Brigade. By 2017 he was the Assistant Deputy Chief Commissioner. On the night of the Grenfell fire, which claimed 72 lives, he was the man at the helm in the control room – the most senior officer on duty.
He has not shared this part of their story thus far – ‘because just thinking about Grenfell is triggering’, he says – but in explaining why he retired, and why he bought a campervan, the awful truth emerges.
‘I was diagnosed with PTSD after Grenfell,’ he says. ‘I was retired early, and we bought the campervan for recreation, and for my recovery. I found it very difficult to be at home. I felt caged when I was inside the house. The campervan represented freedom, a new start.’
He won’t go into the detail of what happened in that control room, but the very fact that he has flashbacks and panic attacks to this day tells its own story.
In fact, it was Adrian who took one of those life-and-death decisions that does get scrutinised by public inquiries afterwards.
He was the one who made the decision to reverse the devastating ‘stay-put’ policy which kept victims in their flats and ultimately claimed so many lives.
A colleague in the control room had ordered television screens to be turned off because they didn’t want emergency operators – who were facing unprecedented calls from those trapped inside – to be distracted. But Adrian had gone down to a lower floor and seen the TV footage there, showing the fire spreading up the building at an alarming rate.
His actions doubtless saved further loss of life, but he is candid about how the stress changed him.
‘I wasn’t the same person afterwards. I didn’t deal with stress – any stress – in the same way,’ he says.
And, of course, it affected Joanne, too. ‘We had to work out what came next,’ she says. ‘It was a hard time. He has struggled to refind himself.’
What came next was a life that was carefully designed to be as stress-free as possible. The Fentons have three children and three grandchildren (with a fourth on the way) but their daughter lives in .
Shortly after Adrian retired, three years ago, they went to visit. ‘And we hired a campervan,’ he explains, breaking into a smile at the memory.
‘It was the best experience ever. It represented escape for me. It represented flip-flops, freedom… the phone doesn’t ring. There are no reminders. You can disappear.’
They bought their own campervan just over a year ago, and threw themselves into being responsible owners.
‘There is so much to learn,’ says Joanne. ‘A lot of it is computerised so you need to know so much.’
They talk me through the logistics: Adrian stresses that ‘because of my background’, his focus was always on safety.
‘Securing the vehicle is a big thing so we had this state of the art alarm system, linked to an app on our phones. It means that if someone tries to get in the campervan when we aren’t there, we get an alert. In fact, if it moves at all, we know about it. Even if you rattle the bike rack, the sensor will detect it.
‘That’s why we think he must have climbed in when we were in traffic because if it had been, say, when we were in the supermarket loading up, that alarm would have been triggered.’
After 13 trial runs in the UK, last October they felt confident enough to head abroad, arranging a four-day trip to the Champagne region of France with some neighbours who are also campervanners.
All went swimmingly – until that fateful return journey, when they hit Calais. The pair were shocked to see gangs of youths as they approached the ferry dock.
‘As you drive up to the Shuttle on every street corner there are groups of young lads, loitering. I’ve discovered since that there are some campervanners who say they won’t even stop at a traffic light because of this, but I don’t even know how that’s possible.’
They sailed through the obligatory border checks, with immigration officials walking around their van. No drama. Nothing untoward, and arrived home at around 9.20pm.
‘It was cold and dark and wet and we just wanted to get into the house and get to bed,’ remembers Joanne.
When Adrian went to unzip the bike cover, however, he got the shock of his life.
‘I unzipped the bottom and saw these two white trainers. I thought immediately “Why are my trainers in here?”‘ He unzipped some more – and was confronted by two legs, then a torso.
He still struggles to explain the position the young man was in – ‘completely contorted around the bike. I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing.’
As Joanne was on the phone to the police, telling them to hurry, Adrian was asking the young man questions.
‘The first thing he said was that he was 16 and that he had no ID and no passport. He said he was from Sudan. He was speaking in broken English.’
Adrian is ‘100 per cent sure’ he was older than 16. ‘He looked early 20s, maybe late teens, but the police explained to us that if they are under 18, they are classed as missing persons and it won’t go to court.’
The stowaway had a mobile phone – a brand new iPhone. ‘Better than mine,’ quips Adrian.
Shortly afterwards, their neighbours who’d been travelling with them drove past, and Joanne yelled for them to come and help.
‘Our friend was running around her van with a torch, trying to check that they didn’t have any migrants too, and checking if there were any others in ours.’
Shortly afterwards, the police arrived.
Both Joanne and Adrian insist they did the morally correct thing. They are horrified that anyone in their shoes would let a stowaway simply walk away.
‘What if we’d just let him go and he’d gone down the road into a little old lady’s house? He had nothing, save for his phone. He was desperate and desperate people do desperate things. And we were also concerned for his wellbeing. It’s heartbreaking to think what he had endured.’
As for the Fentons, they were left deeply shocked by what had happened.
‘I was searching all over the house in case someone had got in,’ says Joanne. ‘It does make you paranoid. We realised from upstairs that we could see the roof of the van – which we couldn’t search from the ground without ladders. What if there had been someone there? Would that have been our fault, too?’
Adrian asks another question. ‘Maybe the Home Office expects us to take ladders with us?’
They believe the man was taken to hospital to be checked out but were given no updates – not even a call to let them know he was OK.
‘We heard nothing,’ says Joanne. ‘Not a single thing – until we got that email saying we were going to be fined.’
To add insult to injury, the Home Office notice of the fine – brought under the Carriers Regulation Liability legislation of 2023 – contained inaccuracies.
‘First, they got the date of when it happened wrong. Then they said “a clandestine” had been found when “an authorised officer” searched our vehicle. That is simply wrong. We called them. But even when I wrote back to them saying we don’t think we were negligent, and detailing all the checks we made, it’s still apparently our fault. Madness.’
The worrying thing is that millions now will have read of the Fentons and their predicament – and may well be swayed to take very different action in the event of finding their own stowaway.
‘The Home Office has just given people licence to park up at a services on the M25 and turn a blind eye, letting the person abscond,’ says Adrian. ‘How is that right? It is not right.’
Who’d head abroad in a campervan now? After our interview the Fentons are off on their travels again, to Poland for a short break.
This time, purely by chance, they are flying. It suddenly seems very sensible.