Browning Takes Off, page 19
part #4 of Richard Browning Series
4. A variety of the highly successful single action Colt army revolver.
5. Modern ethnological opinion does not confirm Sergeant Fraser's theories. Indians and Eskimos are thought to be descended from a common stock of Asian people who entered the American continent from the north.
6. Browning's experiences as a stowaway are documented in the two earlier volumes of his memoirs, 'Box Office' Browning (1987) and 'Beverly Hills' Browning, (1988).
7. Jefferson Randolph 'Soapy' Smith, was born in Georgia in 1860, ran away from home when young and became a cowboy and later a gambler. He perfected the three shell game and devised a con in which he and a partner would set up a soap-selling stand in a likely town. Smith would announce that several of the bars of soap on sale had twenty dollars bill inside them. A planted shill would buy a bar and 'discover' the money. The nick-name 'Soapy' stayed with him although he moved up in the gambling world to run his own saloon and gambling establishments, first in Leadville, Colorado and later in Skagway, Alaska. With a band of toughs to enforce his directions, Smith became the virtual ruler of the town, extracting money from the miners in crooked gambling games and by outright holdup on the roads. In 1898 a vigilante committee of Skagway citizens called the Committee of 101, after failing to persuade Smith to release his grip on the town, stormed his saloon and shot him dead.
8. 'Wheat lumper' was an Australian term for a labourer who loaded bags of wheat onto a truck or railway car. The standard weight for a bag of wheat so transported was 112 pounds.
9. Browning refers to the Melbourne Cup, one of the richest horse races in the world. Lord Nolan won the race in 1908, Tulkeroo finished second.
10. Browning was almost certainly making reference to Phillip Island, a tourist attraction in Westernport Bay, Victoria, Australia. The island has a cooler climate but is home to about 4000 so-called 'Fairy Penguins', a species protected by law.
11. As so often, Browning reveals his shaky grasp of even quite recent history. Scott's expedition, on which he perished and during which the badly debilitated Oates sacrificed himself, was to the South Pole in 1910-12.
12. The Burke and Wills expedition left Melbourne in 1860 with the aim of crossing the Australian continent from south to north. The four man party reached the Gulf of Carpentaria in February 1861 but the leader, Robert O'Hara Burke, the second in command, William John Wills and a third member died of exhaustion and starvation on the return journey. One member of the expedition survived due to the attentions of friendly Aborigines. Burke's name in Australian history is synonomous with poor judgement and stubborness.
13. James Joseph 'Gene' Tunney was heavyweight boxing champion of the world from his defeat of Jack Dempsey in 1927 to his retirement in 1928. Charles Augustus Lindbergh, American aviator, made the first solo flight from America to Europe – in the Spirit of St Louis, from New York to Paris, in May 1927.
14. Australian for scamp or rascal.
15. The members of the Dawson Patrol were Inspector F. J. Fitzgerald, Constables G. F. Kinney and J. R. Taylor and Special Constable W. S. Carter. Carter was the ex-Mountie. See R.C. Fetherstonhaugh, The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Garrick & Evans, N.Y., 1938), pp. 160-5.
16. Browning is mistaken. Snow does fall in Sydney but very rarely. See, The Second Australian Almanac, (Angus & Robertson, 1986), p. 7.
17. A perusal of available historical records has failed to reveal any information on the second Dawson Patrol. It is possible that the weather was too adverse, but more likely that the idea ran into organisational problems and was abandoned.
18. Browning is quoting from the famous Australian poem by A. B. 'Banjo' Patterson, 'The Man from Snowy River':
And one there was among them on a small and weedy beast
That was something like a racehorse undersized
With a touch of Timor pony, three parts thoroughbred at least
And such as are by mountain horsemen prized
19. The 'White Australia Policy' was the name given to a series of restrictive acts which governed immigration to Australia from Federation until the 1970s. Designed to maintain the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic predominance in Australia, the legislation was designed to deter Asians, Africans and other non-Europeans from applying for entry. Among the more objectionable provisions was a dictation test which could be administered in any language to an applicant. Thus a Chinese whom officials wished to exclude might face a test in Swedish.
20. A quirk of Australian humour is to apply totally inappropriate nicknames – thus, 'Blue' for a redhead, 'Lofty' for a very short person etc.
21. Mayor William Dever.
22. William Morris 'Billy' Hughes was Prime Minister of Australia during World War I. He attempted to introduce conscription for overseas service and it was by attempting to evade this that Browning found himself in the forces. He appears to have retained a lifelong antipathy to Hughes. See references in 'Box Office' Browning.
23. 'Machine Gun' Jack McGurn (1904-36) was born James Vincenzo De Mora in Chicago's Little Italy and dropped his Italian name in favour of an Irish one when he began his career as a boxer. His father was killed by mobsters over a conflict about supplying sugar to bootleggers. This brought McGurn into action in revenge and he eventually became an 'enforcer' for Al Capone. McGurn was identified as one of the perpetrators of the St Valentine's Day massacre in which seven members of the gang of Capone's rival, George 'Bugs' Moran, were killed, but he was never indicted. Eight years later, on the eve of St Valentine's Day, he was shot to death (with machine guns) in a Chicago bowling alley by two survivors of Moran's old gang.
24. Browning, as was his habit, is reducing his age. Born in 1895, he was around thirty when the events he describes took place.
25. See 'Box Office' Browning for Elizabeth MacKnight's incriminating information on Browning and also below, p.191.
26. Colonel Roscoe Turner was a fighter pilot in World War I who later established many flying records including a transcontinental crossing record of ten hours, two minutes and fifty-seven seconds. In 1935, flying a high-powered Northrop Gamma, Howard Hughes beat Turner's record by thirty-six minutes. Paul Mantz, one of the first pilots to work regularly in the movies, was technical adviser to aviatrix Amelia Earhart.
27. See Appendix.
28. Marie Dressler was a vaudeville and Broadway actress who made her film debut in Chaplin's Tilly's Punctured Romance in 1914. She turned more seriously to films in the 1930s with great success, winning an academy award in 1930. Charles Farrell entered films as an extra in 1923. In the late twenties and early thirties he made a number of successful romantic films, with Janet Gaynor as his co-star.
29. Another reference to the Melbourne Cup. Spearfelt won the race in 1926.
30. J. T. 'Jack' Lang was a radical Labor politician twice elected Premier of New South Wales, 1925-7 and 1930-2. He passed many social reforms of the kind deplored by MacKnight and attempted to deal with the Depression by adopting Keynesian economic policies greatly feared by conservatives. In 1927 the ACTU (Australian Council of Trade Unions) was formed. The ACTU was intended to act as a Federal governing body over the whole trade union movement. This objective was not achieved but many powerful unions joined the Council.
31. Browning refers to the famous 'long count' incident in the second fight between Dempsey and Tunney. In the seventh round Dempsey knocked unney to the canvas with a long left hook. Instead of going to the farthest corner as the rules dictated, Dempsey stood in his own corner, almost directly over his opponent. The referee instructed Dempsey to move; Dempsey argued but eventually complied. The referee then began the count at 'one', although Tunney had been down for four or five seconds. Tunney used the extra time to clear his head and for the remainder of the fight, which he won, he outboxed Dempsey. He got up at 'nine' but may have been down for as long as fourteen seconds.
Peter Corris, Browning Takes Off
