Leslie Brown

Who was Leslie Brown?

Leslie Wilfrid Brown CBE was Bishop then Archbishop of Uganda before returning to England to be Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich.

Brown was educated at Enfield Grammar School before studying for ordination at the London College of Divinity. After a curacy at St James, Milton, Portsmouth he went out to the Diocese of Travancore and Cochin on the Malabar coast of India in January 1938, working there for the Church Missionary Society, and eventually becoming Principal of the Kerala United Theological Seminary. In 1952 he accepted the post of Bishop of Uganda, despite having doubts because of his support for indigenisation. He was to serve as a bishop in total for 25 years, first as Bishop of Uganda until 1960, bridging the period of Ugandan independence, then as the first Archbishop of the province of Uganda, until 1965, when he returned to England. There he became first an assistant bishop in the diocese of Oxford and in 1966 Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich.

His lasting contribution is reckoned to be in the field of liturgy, first as a member of the liturgy committee of the Church of South India, which in 1950 produced the influential CSI Liturgy, then working on A Liturgy for Africa, produced in 1964, and also corresponding with the Church of England's Liturgical Commission. A noted author, his history The Indian Christians of St Thomas, was described at the time of his death as "a classic textbook".