At the height of his boxing career, Vernon Vanriel fought several times at London’s Royal Albert Hall. From his dressing room, he could hear the crowds singing his name: “‘Vernon Vanriel, Vernon Vanriel. We’ll support you ever more.’ They were singing, and I wasn’t even in the ring yet. The atmosphere was electrifying.”

Vanriel, 63, now lives in an abandoned roadside grocery shack in western Jamaica, ill, penniless and desperate to return to his family in the UK. After visiting Jamaica in 2005, he was refused a visa when he tried to go back home to the country where he had lived for 43 years, since the age of six. He has spent the past 13 years stuck, destitute and homesick.

Vernon Vanriel in 1982.

“It has been hell,” he said, in an interview conducted at the counter of the derelict stall, which has no furniture apart from a camp bed behind a plywood partition. “If I ever end up accidentally going to hell, I’ll be well prepared for it from the experience I have had here. I have deteriorated to something unrecognisable. No amount of money can ever compensate me for what has happened, the loss of contact with my friends and family.”

Since the Windrush scandal erupted in April, Vanriel has been trying to gather the information requested in an online questionnaire published by the government’s Windrush taskforce in order to apply for assistance to return to the UK. The shack, however, has no electricity and he rarely has credit on his phone, so has had to rely on help from the owner of a nearby internet cafe.

Vernon Vanriel in the roadside shack where he has been living. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

When we visited him on Saturday, he was feeling uncertain about his chances of getting back to London to see his sisters and re-establish contact with his three children. But at midday on Monday a car pulled up outside the stall and a parcel was delivered, couriered directly to him 119 miles from the British high commission in Kingston, containing documents that will allow him to return to the UK.

“It was absolutely miraculous,” he said in a phone call, amazed and delighted at the sudden appearance of papers.

Vanriel is one of 83 people who the British government now admits it either deported or wrongly refused the right to return home, during a protracted period of mistreating Caribbean-born long-term UK residents, stretching over several decades. The decision to issue him a visa comes as Home Office staff work their way through thousands of case files of historical detention and removal decisions, attempting to reverse mishandled cases of Windrush generation people.

Jamaica was still a British colony when he left in April 1962 with his mother, Myrtle, and his older brother and three older sisters, to join their father who had already travelled to work in London. No visas were required to travel from Jamaica to the UK; they went on his mother’s passport, the same British passport which would have been issued to people in England. It stated that they were British subjects.

He had a happy childhood in London. Sitting on a wooden stool in the empty grocery stall, observed by six stray dogs at the doorway, he listed his addresses in London: 124 St Ann’s Road in Tottenham, their first home, where the family of seven lived in two rooms, (sharing the house with another family, the Hutchinsons), 23 Lemsford Close, 71 Chestnut Road, 86 Shelbourne Road. His parents both got jobs with the vast Gestetner factory, working on early duplication machines.

He left school and trained as an electrician and set up his own business, VJ Electrics, when he was in his early 20s. At the same time, his boxing career was flourishing and he turned professional in 1976, trained by Terry Lawless, the same coach who worked with Frank Bruno.

Newspaper cuttings recall Vanriel’s boxing heyday. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

After 13 years, moving around Jamaica, living at times on the streets, Vanriel has very few possessions, but he has held on to his boxing gloves in a Lonsdale training bag and a file of newspaper cuttings from his boxing heyday. He was known as Vernon “The Entertainer” Vanriel. The headlines from 1983 read “Vanriel beats the Brighton Rock”; “Speedy Vernon”; “No charity as Vanriel hammers him in six”.

“I was number two in Britain in 1983-4; number nine in Commonwealth and 14 in Europe. Looking back in hindsight, I did tremendously well. At the time, I didn’t think much about it, but now I know I did well,” he said.

His boxing career ended when he began to suffer from depression and he travelled in 2005 to Jamaica to spend some time with his son who lived there. He went on a Jamaican passport, because it was quicker and cheaper to apply for than a British one.

“I never thought of myself as Jamaican, but getting a British passport was problematic and expensive and I didn’t have the money. To be honest I was a bit negligent,” he said. When he wanted to return to his family in the UK, the British high commission refused him a visa. “I was in such a state of confusion. I don’t think I’ve ever recovered,” he said.

Vanriel (right) fighting Gary Gibson at the Royal Albert Hall in 1983. Photograph: S&G/Empics

He tried to rebuild his life as a boxing trainer in Jamaica and successfully coached one athlete to the finals of the Jamaican championships, but recurrent ill health made it impossible to continue. Since he has stopped working, he has found it hard to survive.

“I left here when I was six. I don’t know the country; I don’t know anyone here. I came to spend some time with my son but it didn’t work out. I was on the streets after a short while,” he said. “When I first came here I had a few bob in my pocket, looking the part, if I say so myself. When I got a kid to the boxing finals, I was almost like a king. But, as I have faded, it has become harder. Nobody wants to know you when you’re down and out. If you’re not doing well they treat you with scorn. Now people walk past me purposefully turning their heads.”

For much of the past 13 years, Vanriel has felt very lonely and has been particularly miserable recently. The old shop has no glass in the windows, tiny ants crawl across the surfaces and torrential rain comes in through the doors as we talk. “There’s nothing good about it; I’ve got no toilet, no bathroom, no kitchen, no electricity, no furniture. It gets excruciatingly hot.”

Vernon Vanriel is still unsure of how he will afford the ticket home, or even get to Kingston. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

While he is hugely relieved to finally have the papers to return to the UK, he is uncertain about how he will afford to fly home. An official from the high commission suggested by telephone that a ticket might be provided, he said, but nothing has been sent to him. Vanriel points out that he currently has no money even to get himself to the Jamaican capital.

His older sister Lynette, who recently retired as a nurse, has been supporting her brother with money from her pension and remains very concerned about him. “I’m extremely disappointed at the way the government has handled the situation,” she said by telephone from London. “His health has deteriorated. It’s just so unfair. When he travelled to Britain he was a British subject. Why is it so complicated for the government to understand that these people are British people?”

Despite the enormous difficulties he has faced, Vanriel is incredibly upbeat about Britain and grateful that his father brought the family to join him in north London in April 1962. He says he feels no anger with the British government and is just desperate to get home.

“I’m not bitter or angry in any way. I don’t want to say anything derogatory. I love London and the people there with all of my heart. Obviously it has some shortcomings – they could have treated immigrants better. They have done wrong but they have also done a lot of good. Moving us there was the best thing my father ever did in his life. I learned the boxing, the electrical work and how to be a human being.”