Roy Brown

Who was Roy Brown?

Francis Roy Brown was a politician in Manitoba, Canada. He served in the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba as a Liberal-Progressive from 1953 to 1958.

Brown was educated in Winnipeg. He enlisted in the Cycle Corps at the beginning of World War I, and served overseas in France, seeing action at Ypres, Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele. Brown joined the Royal Flying Corps in 1917, and remained with this group until the end of the war.

Francis Roy Brown was throughout his life mistaken for the pilot that shot down Baron Von Richthofen, a.k.a."The Red Baron". That credit remains with A. Roy Brown, of Carleton Place, Ontario. Both Roy Browns were enlisted with the Royal Flying Corps at the same time. They both returned to Canada with English 'war brides', and both established their careers in the early aviation industry flourish of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. For the remainder of their lives, F. Roy Brown would be known as "Arctic Roy", while A. Roy Brown was known as "Richthofen Roy". They met for the first time at a POW reunion in 1937.

Brown was intrinsic to the discovery of a group of seven men who were lost in the Arctic in late 1929. It was the greatest air search and rescue in Canadian history and remains as such, given they had no radar or radios. Col. C.D.W. MacAlpine and his exploration party of cartographers, geographers from McGill University set off to the chart the North, and after the undercarriage collapsed in their aircraft, they were lost in the far northern reaches of the Arctic, near Baker Lake see The Montreal Gazette November–December articles entitled "Lost in the Barrens!".