Educated at Magdalen School, Oxford and St. Peter Hall, Oxford. His early contributions to entomology were primarily concerned with the taxonomy, distribution and ecology of aquatic insects, especially Corixidae and other aquatic Hemiptera in many parts of the British Isles and in the Faroe Islands. Later he became interested in insect migration too, and it is these subjects which dominate his extensive list of publications. Perhaps his best known work on the Coleoptera was The Aquatic Coleoptera of North Wales, published by the Society for British Entomology in 1948.
In 1946 he worked briefly with the Middle East Anti Locust Unit in Tripolitania on locust control, and in 1951 he became a member of the Commonwealth Institute of Entomology's pool of entomologists. In this latter capacity he worked in the Seychelles, the Soloman Islands, the Middle East and Africa, the study of armyworms occupying a great deal of his time.
Brown bequeathed the greater part of his collections to the HDO. These include his named collections of British beetles, mainly aquatic, and his unnamed foreign insects which also include aquatic Coleoptera. Foreign collections from the Soloman Islands, New Guinea, Australia, the Seychelles, Madagascar and East Africa are in the NHM where is also an extensive collection of reports and manuscripts acquired from the Natural Resources Institute in 1988 (listed in Harvey et. al., (1996), 28-29). His collections of Hertfordshire beetles are mentioned in C.T. Gimingham 'Notes on the List of Hertfordshire Coleoptera...' in Transactions Hertfordshire Natural History Society, 24,(4), 1955.
Smith (1986) records ‘Notebooks on Hemiptera (mainly aquatic); manuscript notes on East African Army Worm project and work in the Middle East; twelve diaries written in Madagascar, Seychelles, and Kenya’ in the HDO, and Pedersen (2002), 84, letters to D.J.Jackson in the RES .
There is an obituary by E. Betts, including a photograph and complete list of publications, in Ent.mon.Mag., 109, 1973, 65-71. (MD 12/01, 11/09)