He was appointed by the archive's founding curator, Ernest Lindgren, upon its creation in 1935, and remained in the post until his retirement in 1984.
Born in Walthamstow, the son of a maker of nautical instruments, Brown joined the British Film Institute (BFI) as an office assistant aged 15 in 1935, two years after it was established.
He was possibly the first archivist to research systematically the decomposition process of nitrate film, and consequently to show that it can be inhibited by storage in a cool and dry atmosphere.
[1] He designed and built specialist step-printers to enable the preservation copying of shrunken and otherwise damaged originals.
[2] In retirement, Brown was a prominent volunteer with the Projected Picture Trust, restoring and operating historical projectors at a museum in Bletchley Park.