Bravo Brown! - Terence FitzSimons

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an alternative I’ve opted to use Henry Coxwell’s laudatory exclamation in a letter to Brown, who had procured a financially rewarding engagement for that aeronaut at Bradford. Coxwell was moved to write, ‘Bravo Brown!’ So it is by that title the correspondence will be presented to the reader. As to the letters themselves, while Brown is credited by his correspondents as being an adept with the pen, they themselves were extremely cavalier in their treatment of grammar, and Brown seems to have taken little or no trouble in editing their letters. Punctuation has long been the bane of writers, professional and casual. In this collection of letters the modern reader may find themselves challenged by the vagaries of Victorian punctuation ←8 | 9→which is, at best, erratic; also, the occasional idiosyncratic phrasing has been retained.

      I have dispensed with the original salutations and valedictions except in those instances where they serve to indicate a particular context or tone in the correspondence.

      In the correspondence, Brown’s ‘explanatory notes’ appeared as unnumbered footnotes, identified by a variety of symbols; however, I have now numbered these as this is a style that is familiar to most readers. As to the content of the footnotes, they make interesting, though puzzling reading. Brown, such a strong advocate of the potential benefits of aeronautics, has chosen to add a goodly number of footnotes relating to aerial disasters, great and small.

      For my part, rather than present a confusing mix of footnotes, I have prefaced various letters with my own comments.

      It becomes clear that Brown has not given us a record of all of his own letters, since there are instances where a missive from him is acknowledged by its recipient, but the original is not to be found. This has created an odd imbalance with Brown seemingly having received 210 letters while in England whereas his apparent outgoing correspondence is a mere thirty-three letters. In the six years of Australian correspondence, Brown records receipt of sixty-six letters while ostensibly writing only nineteen in reply. A further thirteen letters were written to newspapers.

      The cut-off point of the correspondence is January 1864, with a letter from Brown to his brother declaring he had been offered the prospect of ballooning in China, Java and India. This undertaking seems not to have materialised.

      There is also Brown’s tantalising declaration of his grand discovery of ‘a new sort of balloon’, needing neither gas or fire to propel it aloft, though nothing seems to have been done to progress this invention, and six years later Brown was dead. However, in those six years, aerostation was making great strides. Henry Coxwell, with his meteorological mentor James Glaisher, was gaining a reputation in international scientific circles and many successful ascents were being made in the Australian colonies. All passed without comment from Brown. To all intents and purposes, he had already quit the aeronautical scene.

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      Other sources, not touched on in this text, reveal Brown as having in later life succumbed to the lure of liquor, though his brother Edwin recalls his younger sibling as being averse to strong drink. Whatever Brown’s shortcomings, none can in any way detract from the worth of his own aeronautical endeavours and the historical value of the extraordinary correspondence he compiled.

      On January 18, 1870, Charles Henry Brown chose to end his life.

      Terence FitzSimons

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      From Mr H. Davies, Cheltenham, April 4, 1843.

      This is a response 17-year-old Brown received to a letter written to Henry Davies, the editor of the ‘Cheltenham Onlooker’. Davis was very active in the social and civic life of that town, though his forte was music rather than aeronautics. William Russum, the aeronaut, was a person with whom Brown claimed to be ‘very intimate’, but later Russum came to be distrusted and considered unhelpful.

      I have to apologise for not replying earlier to your letter of Dec 31/42 enquiring as to the balloon ascent of Mr Russum from this place in August 1841 but truth to tell my daily avocations have so completely occupied my time that I had no leisure to turn to the subject before and I am not able to add much to the information you already appear to possess. I quite forget the peculiar circumstances of Mr Russum’s ascent but this I recollect, that after the many brilliant ascents made from this place by Green in the Nassau balloon, by Mr and Mrs Graham, and by Mr Hampton, that of Mr Russum proved quiet a disappointment to us.

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      Green made an ascent in 1822, accompanied by Mr S. Y. Griffiths. This was the first balloon inflated with the common coal gas, and we have had ascents almost without number of late years. The complete arrangements of our gasworks have favoured these experiments. Very full accounts of all the ascents from Cheltenham could be obtained from the files of the different papers of the time.

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      From Mr Henry Coxwell, Aeronaut. 20 Paternoster Row, London, August 14, 1845.

      The gap of over two years in the record of the correspondence is unexplained. Henry Tracy Coxwell, a 26-year-old, while following his profession as a dentist, had already made something of a name for himself as a balloonist.

      I have really been so busy since your kind letter arrived, that I have been unable to answer several communications respecting my little balloon, allow me, however, now that I have my pen in hand, to thank you for the good feeling you expressed for the success of the magazine. I possess all the works, prints, etc, on ballooning, but it may happen that at some time or other your collections might be useful. Will you kindly inform me on what terms you propose to let me have anything you possess? I think you must be mistaken about Green’s ascent at Beverley, should it however be true, perhaps you will forward a paper with an account and I will in turn send next month’s publication to you.

      From Mr Henry Coxwell, 20 Paternoster Row, London, September 6, 1845.

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      Excuse the abrupt way in which I put these questions, but I am obliged to be brief and explicit, as I have a number of letters to answer. I shall be glad at all times to hear from you, and if you wish the insertion of an article with your name, you may command it.

      From Mr Henry Coxwell, 20 Paternoster Row, London, October 7, 1845.

      The ‘practical aeronaut’ Coxwell believes Brown to be is in fact a Charles Brown of Sheffield, a balloonist who had an erratic career in the air.

      Having

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