William Roger Brown

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.^[1] He bought land at Beckington which made him its lord of the manor.^[2] 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^[4] (reconstituted as Palmer & Mackay in 1877).^[5] One of the original members of Wiltshire County Council, he was commissioned as a deputy lieutenant for the county in 1898,^[6] and was appointed High Sheriff for 1898–99.^[1][7]

Brown provided the site for a new school in Newtown, Trowbridge, which opened in 1901;^[4][8] he is named on its foundation stone.^[9] Between 1887 and 1889 he also paid for the building of the Trowbridge Town Hall, at a cost of some £20,000 (equivalent to £2,126,541 in 2023) to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria.^[4] 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.^[10][1]

In 1893, Victoria made Brown a knight bachelor, and in 1895 he received a grant of arms.^[2]

In politics Brown was a Liberal, and in religion he was a Congregationalist.^[1]

Brown's wife died on 6 December 1899,^[11] and soon after he built and endowed two blocks of almshouse cottages in her memory, to house six widows.^[1] Known as Lady Brown's Cottage Homes,^[4] they still stand on Polebarn Road, Trowbridge, altered to make five dwellings.^[12] Pevsner describes their style as "deliberately rustic, many-chimneyed and many-gabled".^[13]

Brown died on 14 May 1902. He and his wife were buried in a grand mausoleum in Trowbridge cemetery.^[14] His estate was valued for probate at £425,137,^[15] equivalent to £43,238,190 in 2023, and in his will he left money to buy fuel for the deserving poor.^[16]

The mausoleum is a pink granite structure on a square base, with a round-headed doorway.^[14] 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.^[16]