Raymond Frederick Brown

Sir Raymond Frederick Brown (July 19, 1920 – September 3, 1991) was the founder of Racal, and the British government's chief arms salesman from 1966 to 1969.

Brown was born at 4 Nettleton Road, Greenwich, London, and started work as a tea boy at the age of 14. In 1950 he and his partner George Calder Cunningham founded Racal, which gradually grew to become a major supplier of military radios and telecommunications equipment with Brown as its Managing Director. In 1966, he joined the Ministry of Defence as "head of defence sales" in the newly created Defence Sales Organization (DSO), now known as the Defence & Security Organisation, where he was given wide latitude to promote British arms exports. According to The Guardian, his office explicitly participated in bribery to advance sales, as noted in the Guardian-supplied quotations below. When one British ambassador's deputy inquired:

"My ambassador feels we must have a clear answer to this – are HMG prepared, through an agent, to enter into a government-to-government contract in the negotiation of which there will have been an element of bribery and which will itself reflect this bribery (though in a concealed form) in that the price will include hidden commissions of one sort or another?"

the response was as follows:

"The answer is Yes," scrawled one civil servant back in London. "It is up to the agent to deploy his money as he sees fit."

Added Harold Hubert, the director of army sales in the Defence Sales Organization (DSO):

"People who deal with the arms trade, even if they are sitting in a government office, live day by day with this sort of activity, and equally day by day they carry out transactions knowing that at some point bribery is involved. Obviously, I and my colleagues in this office do not ourselves engage in it, but we believe that various people who are somewhere along the chain of our transactions do. They do not tell us what they are doing and we do not inquire. We are interested in the end result."

Within a few years, Brown became frustrated with the British government's efforts to limit such activities. Although Denis Healey attempted to ease him out of his government position, Brown served out his full term. Brown subsequently managed Muirhead Ltd., and served as a director of the Standard Telephones and Cables company. He purchased Witley Park in 1982, where he lived until his death, and is buried nearby in the All Saints Churchyard, Witley, Surrey.

References

• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
• The Gun Merchants: Politics and Policies of the Major Arms Suppliers, Cindy Cannizzo editor, Elsevier, 2013, pages 84–96. ISBN 9781483148038.
• The Guardian: Sir Ray Brown
• The Guardian: The Ray Brown Years
• Commissions and British Government-to-Government arms deals, a set of declassified letters
• Find-a-Grave entry