Brown, Egbert Ethelred

The Reverend Egbert Ethelred Brown was born in Falmouth, Jamaica, British West Indies, in 1875, the first of five children of James Alexander and Florence Adelaide Brown. While Brown was still a child, the family moved to Montego Bay, where Ethelred (he stopped using Egbert while still a youth) grew up. In 1894, at age 19, Ethelred placed third in an Island-wide civil service placement examination. In 1898, with a secure job, he married Ella Matilda Wallace, whom he had known since childhood. The following year he was promoted to first clerk of the treasury and transferred to Spanish Town.

In 1907, with a wife and four children, Brown was dismissed from the civil service. He saw this change of fortune, which he later termed both “tragic” and “providential,” as a sign to change careers and enter the ministry. Making a “decision of conscience” based on exposure by an uncle and subsequent studies, Brown had chosen the Unitarian faith. Despite this inward belief, however, he continued to serve in Methodist churches as a lay preacher and musician. After his dismissal from his civil service job, Brown turned his back on the security of an African Methodist Episcopal church in favor of the more doctrinally compatible Unitarian church. He therefore wrote to the Meadville Theological School in Meadville, Pennsylvania, on the referral of Rev. George Badger, Secretary of the Fellowship Committee of the American Unitarian Association, requesting enrollment and ordination. Though accepted to enroll in the Fall of 1907, upon entering the United States Brown was immediately deported to Jamaica as a “contracted alien.” His second attempt to return to the United States was stopped at the eleventh hour by his father, who took back the money he had given his son for the trip. Ethelred had to continue working as an assistant accountant for another year to pay for his passage to the United States. He finally arrived in the United States and began his studies in September 1910.

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