Brown Brothers appear to have been, originally, a company involved in the business of  "...general hardware, cycle accessories and general warehousemen...". Their name also appeared in connection with early Colchester lathes - for whom they must have been agents - while they also built, or had built, the Brown Bicycle, Brown Motorcycle and the Brown Tricycle, the latter probably supplied with a complementary pair of brown trousers to hide the rider's stark fear as the contraption plunged, out of control, down a Lake District hill. Over many decades of association with the motor, aircraft other trades, the company - by then described as a "car component maker" - was taken over in 1997 by Partco. 
Almost certainly built from either late in the 19th or early in the 20th century, the Brown was a small, simple, round-bed wood-turning lathe, little different many other run-of-the-mill, inexpensive amateur types. Held together with squared-headed bolts, it was obviously built down to a price, though at least the makers did add weight by using a steel bar rather than a thick-walled tube for its bed. However, the Brown did have one interesting difference, a spindle than ran in two plain bearings with bolt-on caps - the more normal arrangement on many similar models being a single front bearings with the outer end of the spindle supported against an adjustable, hardened steel point. Examples of the single-bearing type stretch from lathes such as the well-built, popular and still common Pfeil, through the less-well-known Goodwin "Leader" to the much more complex, expensive and beautiful ornamental-turning  Hayward..
Chosen for economy of production, numbers of wood-turning lathes with single bar beds have been produced including the Myford ML8, Rollo, various models of Coronet, the versatile Australian-made Herbert Home Woodworker, Marsh and Caley..