Lieutenant Colonel E.J. Brown (1909-2001)

After graduating in Science from Bristol University, EJB or Jim took his first teaching post at The Downs School in September 1933. He had been in the Territorial Army while at Bristol University so was already in the reserves. On 3rd September 1939 he went straight into the Royal Artillery as a 2nd Lieutenant. Ironically on September 10th he was asked to attend the Cricket Trials for Somerset for whom he had always wanted to play.

EJB was evacuated at Dunkirk after which he was specially trained to run an establishment based in Laggan House in Scotland, where more than fifty people were employed to create a remarkable series of hoaxes and misdirections. There he was responsible for developing methods of camouflage, concealment and deception, attaining the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

Before the D-Day invasion, the plans were to convince German High Command that plans to storm Normandy were untrue so they created a fictitious army, complete with hundreds of dummy landing craft, tanks and planes. A huge retinue of skills were used to deceive the enemy visually and with clever sound effects for an army that never was. He wrote nothing about his experiences during the war, probably due to the constraints of the official secrets act.

His wife, Marjorie, was also a science graduate and stood in for him at The Downs for part of the war. On demobilisation he returned directly to The Downs School, being known in Colwall for some time as “Colonel Brown’s wife’s husband”. He stayed at The Downs for the rest of his career becoming Headmaster in 1969. Jim’s experiences in the war led him to take a Master’s Degree in Military History at Brasenose College, Oxford after he retired as Headmaster in 1974. His particular study and subsequent thesis, was called “Deception in Warfare. A comparison between Marlborough and Wellington”.