Douglas Clifton Brown, 1st Viscount Ruffside, PC, JP, DL (16 August 1879 – 5 May 1958) was a British politician who represented the Conservative Party (UK).

[1] His maternal grandparents were Charles Rowe, who was mixed race, due to being of African descent, and his Lima-born wife Sarah.

[citation needed] Clifton Brown was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge.

[4] Clifton Brown was a lieutenant in the Lancashire Artillery when on 26 March 1902 he was commissioned a second-lieutenant in the 1st Dragoon Guards,[5] serving in South Africa during the end of the Second Boer War.

[citation needed] He was sworn of the Privy Council in 1941[7] and raised to the peerage as Viscount Ruffside, of Hexham in the County of Northumberland, in 1951.