Records of Councillor Ronald E Brown OBE

The records below mainly relate to County Council constituency matters but some document his time on the Parish Council. The correspondence has been weeded during the course of writing the book and only letters on matters which REB regarded as significant have been kept: sometimes he draws attention to their significance by a later note. These letters have mainly been arranged by parish, though there are a few subject groups. The parish correspondence shows him acting as a channel of communication between parish councils or local residents and County Council departments. There are letters to him and occasional drafts and copies of his replies, as well as notes for talks to annual parish meetings and other formal events. Descriptions give the main topics covered by each file

In addition to constituency correspondence, the records include material on REB's Chairmanship of the Sussex Co-ordinating Committee of the Second National Games of Special Olympics UK which were held in Brighton in 1986

<p>Biographical notes on Council members have been listed at R/C79/1 - 2</p>

Records deposited by Ronald Brown, Feb 1992 (A5848) and March 1994 (A6249)

Ronald Ernest Brown was born in East Sussex on 4 June 1912. He has lived in Plumpton since June 1958, having retired from the Colonial Administrative Service in Nigeria six months earlier. His final appointment there was as Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Justice and Local Government in the Western Region. On his return to England he adopted a new career at the London headquarters of the P-E Consulting Group, then one of Britain's four largest firms of management consultants

Between 1962 and 1965 he was a member and Chairman of Plumpton Parish Council (for the Council's records see P446) and in 1970 he was elected to the County Council as Councillor for the electoral division of Ditchling (parishes of Chailey, East Chiltington, Ditchling, Plumpton, Streat, Westmeston and Wivelsfield). He was re-elected to the reorganized Council to represent the same constituency in 1973 and continued independent of party affiliation despite the increased politicization of the new Council. He served until 1985, becoming Chairman in 1983 for his final two years. His experiences are described in his book, An Independent Councillor, AMS6324/17