He was Melrose to the core: he was born there and attended Melrose Grammar School before going on to Galashiels Academy. With a father who had played and served for many years on the club committee, he was always meant for a rugby-playing career with the Greenyards club.
He was a back-row forward for most of his career, was good enough to play for The South and appeared in Scotland trials and played for the famous invitation club, the Barbarians. Worse players have won Scottish caps, but this ultimate honour eluded him, although he was a non-playing travelling reserve for the Scotland XV on several occasions.
His national service, between 1954 and 1956, was spent with the Royal Scots at Glencorse Barracks, where he shared a barrack-room with the future Scotland football manager Ally MacLeod, and rose to the dizzy heights of corporal. He was immensely proud of his association with the Royal Scots and proud to wear the regimental tie.
One of the benefits of his service with the Royal Scots was that he was able to continue playing for the Melrose club. His aggressive play about the park from the moment he made his debut as a teenager and his line-out leaping marked him down as a typically hard but fair Borders forward of the post-war era.
Almost straight from school, aged 16, he broke into the Melrose first team and for the next decade and more he made the Melrose number eight jersey his own, until a raw teenager emerged from Galashiels Academy to challenge him and, recognising something special there, the Melrose selectors moved the former club captain into the second row to accomodate the young Jim Telfer.
He retired from playing in 1965, a momentus year for him, during which he married Janet. His father died the same year and between taking over the family business and being newly married, he realised he would have to hang up his boots.
If he had been a great club man as a player, his greater service to Melrose was ahead of him, as a committee member, long-serving club secretary and president. Indeed, he only stepped down from the club committee during the final few months of his last illness. He also represented the club in the game’s corridors of power, as a member of the SRU’s general committee following his election in 1984.
As grounds convener for eight years he played a pivotal role in the redevelopment of Murrayfield into the modern stadium of today. Most of the redevelopment work was done on his watch. He was SRU president in 1998-99, the season in which the national team won the final Five Nations tournament in dramatic fashion.
Away from rugby, he ran the family business of joinery and undertaking, he was the fourth generation to take charge, although such a happy, smiling figure must have found it hard to put on the solemn face demanded of undertaking.
The business, Melrose and rugby took up much of his time, but he loved a game of golf, until worsening arthritis forced him to put his clubs away 18 months ago.
Just as he followed his own father into the service of his beloved Melrose, so he has been followed by his son Robbie, a stalwart in the great Melrose side of the 1980s and early 1990s and now one of the coaches at the Greenyards, assisting Jim Telfer with the Melrose Wasps side.
If he was the fourth generation of his family to play for the club and Robbie the fifth, a sixth Brown is already connected to Melrose; Robbie’s son Thomas plays for the under-15s.
He bravely battled cancer but was able to rise from his bed, get dressed and watch the Third Test between the Lions and Australia on television – it would be the last rugby he would see.
On July 12, sitting up in bed, looking out over the Eildon Hills, he passed away – for a Melrose man, there can be no better way to go. He is survived by Janet, their children Marnie, Robbie and Jeni, and six grandchildren, Sheridan, Cora-Mae, Thomas, Laura, Andy and Richie.
Article source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/disability-sport/23309113
Former Scottish Rugby Union president;
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