Mr Brown's retirement from court work was announced by fellow justice of the peace Russell Atkinson, who shared the Dunedin District Court Bench with Mr Brown yesterday for the hearing of some minor traffic cases.
Mr Brown was sworn in as a JP in 1967 while he was living at Beaumont where he and his wife, Shirley, had an orchard.
He recalled arriving outside the court building in Dunedin - "I think I had a load of super [phosphate] on the truck" - to arrange a time for his swearing in as a JP.
But one of the local judges [then magistrates], Tom Ross, happened to be free so Mr Brown was sworn in that day.
For a long time after his appointment to the position of an official, but unpaid, officer of the court, there were no training courses for JPs.
An Open Polytechnic correspondence course was introduced in the 1990s.
"We were expected to use our common sense," Mr Brown (76) said in an interview yesterday.
Since moving from Beaumont to Dunedin in 1980, Mr Brown has been one of the team of JPs who regularly preside over a variety of court cases, ranging from minor traffic matters to depositions hearings in serious criminal cases.
During his 41 years as a justice of the peace, Mr Brown also spent a year as president of the national association of JPs.
