Biography

Tipping Brown (1758-1811)

Dr William Tipping Brown from Bishopwearmouth was educated in Newcastle and then studied medicine in Edinburgh. He spent his life in the urban conglomeration of Bishopwearmouth, Monkwermouth and Sunderland where he was a prominent freemason, serving as Grand Master of Sunderland’s Phoenix Lodge. Brown wrote the song for the opening of Sunderland’s new Masonic Hall in 1785 for which William Shield, also a freemason and former member of Phoenix Lodge, composed the music. Brown was a prominent member of Sunderland’s literary society in the final decades of the eighteenth-century and a founding member of Sunderland’s first subscription library. Brown also helped to establish the town’s dispensary. An anonymous biography of Tipping Brown, almost certainly written by his friend, the actor James Field Stanfield, appeared in The Freemasons’ Magazine in November 1794.

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