My friend Victor Brown, who has died aged 95, was a singer with an attractive tenor voice who achieved fame in the last days of British variety as half of the urbane musical duo Harriott and Evans (Victor’s stage name).
One of 10 children, he was born in Banes, Cuba, to Jamaican parents, John, an engineer, and his wife, Miriam (whose maiden name was also Brown). Victor left Jamaica in 1939 as an engine-room seaman; once in Britain he signed up for the war effort as a steward on tankers. In 1944 he made newspaper headlines when his ship was torpedoed, leaving him to cut the lifeboat away from the sinking vessel – “Burly West Indian Saved Crew”.
Back in Britain, he sang and played the guitar with Ensa (Entertainments National Service Association) and for dances organised by the League of Coloured Peoples. He formed a duo with his younger brother, Noel, as the Brown Brothers, and played in nightclubs with the guitarist Lauderic Caton. He joined the dance-and-drum troupe of veteran West African Prince Zulamkah, then formed a short-lived act with the pianist Winifred Atwell.
In 1943 Victor married Kameedea Packwood, the daughter of an English civil servant and Ghanaian mother; in 1947 went to work as a nurse in West Africa, where Vic joined her, in a move reflecting the pan-African spirit of the times. In Ghana he sang with musicians including the trumpeter ET Mensah, and went into partnership in a timber enterprise. He managed a hotel in Kumasi, where he sang with a band that included drummer Guy Warren (Kofi Ghanaba). When his business ventures failed, the couple were made homeless, and were helped by Warren, who doubled as a campaigning journalist.
The couple returned to Britain, where Kameedea turned to teaching and Victor re-entered show business. Their West African connections took him and Noel to the Gateways Club in Chelsea, where a fellow Jamaican, Chester Harriott, played the piano for an enthusiastic audience before forming a harmony duo with Victor, now known as Vic Evans.
The pair wore white tie and tails for cabaret and in Paris they socialised with jazz musicians, getting Quincy Jones to write for their act and carousing with trumpeters Clifford Brown and Art Farmer. For eight years Harriott and Evans toured and played on radio and television, and if the charismatic, moustachioed pianist attracted greater attention, it was universally agreed that Victor was the better singer.
In the 1990s, Victor and Kameedea moved to Lancashire, eventually settling in Morecambe.
Kameedea predeceased him. He is survived by three daughters.