Percy Browne

Who was Percy Browne?

Percy Basil Browne was an English businessman, farmer, amateur jockey and Conservative Party politician. He was Member of Parliament for Torrington from 1959 to 1964.

He was educated at Eton before joining the army in 1941, and fought in North Africa, Sicily and Italy before joining the D-Day landings in Normandy in 1944, reaching the rank of Lieutenant in the Royal Armoured Corps. After the war he took up farming in Devon with his first wife, Pamela Exham, who died after a hunting accident.

After his wife's death, Browne moved to Dorset where he took up steeplechasing, and rode in the 1953 Grand National. He then remarried and moved to Gloucestershire, where he bought and ran a coal merchant's business. He later married for a third time and moved to Wiltshire, where he died in 2004.