Sir William Roger Brown (1831 – 14 May 1902), known as Roger Brown, was an English mill-owner and philanthropist, lord of the manor of Beckington in Somerset.
Early life He was born in 1831, the son of James Brown, a tea merchant, of Highfield, Hilperton (near Trowbridge, Wiltshire), and Bath. On leaving school Brown was taken into the business of his uncle, Samuel Elms Brown, at the Pole Barn cloth mills, Trowbridge. In 1857 he married his uncle’s daughter Sarah."SIR WILLIAM ROGER BROWN, Knight Bachelor, Justice of the Peace for the county of Wiltshire, Lord of the Manor of Beckington" in Arthur Charles Fox-Davies, Armorial Families: A Complete Peerage, Baronetage, and a Directory of Some Gentlemen of Coat-armour (1895), p. xxxiv
In 1859, Brown began to build for himself and his wife a new country house called Highfield at Hilperton. This continued to grow for many years.Brief History, Fieldways.co.uk, accessed 7 August 2022
Career
Brown made a large fortune as a clothier. In 1867 he was appointed as a Justice of the Peace for Wiltshire and later chaired the Trowbridge bench of magistrates. He bought land at Beckington which made him its lord of the manor. He was a leading figure in Wiltshire's textile industry and at one time employed a thousand people in the cloth mills of the Brown & Palmer company (reconstituted as Palmer & Mackay in 1877). One of the original members of Wiltshire County Council, he was commissioned as a deputy lieutenant for the county in 1898, and was appointed High Sheriff for 1898–99.
Brown provided the site for a new school in Newtown, Trowbridge, which opened in 1901; he is named on its foundation stone. Between 1887 and 1889 he also paid for the building of the Trowbridge Town Hall, at a cost of some £20,000 () to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria. During his lifetime, a marble bust of Brown by Edward Sheppard, inscribed to commemorate his donation, was placed on the staircase of the town hall.
In 1893, Victoria made Brown a knight bachelor, and in 1895 he received a grant of arms.
In politics Brown was a Liberal, and in religion he was a Congregationalist.
Legacy
Brown's wife died on 6 December 1899,"Dame Sarah Brown" in The Genealogical Magazine, Vol. 2 (1899), p. 422 and soon after he built and endowed two blocks of almshouse cottages in her memory, to house six widows. Known as Lady Brown's Cottage Homes, they still stand on Polebarn Road, Trowbridge, altered to make five dwellings. Pevsner describes their style as "deliberately rustic, many-chimneyed and many-gabled".
Brown died on 14 May 1902. He and his wife were buried in a grand mausoleum in Trowbridge cemetery. His estate was valued for probate at £425,137,"BROWN sir William of "Highfield" Trowbridge Wiltshire knight died 14 May 1902" in Wills and Administrations 1902, p. AU2 , and in his will he left money to buy fuel for the deserving poor.
The mausoleum is a pink granite structure on a square base, with a round-headed doorway. In 2012, its bronze gates were stolen, and in 2021 the same fate befell its valuable bronze doors which had been locked in the cemetery chapel for safekeeping.
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