Hugh D Mcintosh

Vocation

Australian show-business entrepreneur born to parents of Scottish and Irish origin. McIntosh lived a very colourful life, claiming to have run away from Sydney to Adelaide as a silversmith's assistant at the age of seven, to have worked for BHP at Broken Hill at nine, then in a variety of occupations culminating in working for a surgeon at twelve. Certainly by seventeen he was a chorus boy in a Maggie Moore pantomime Sinbad the Sailor in Melbourne. In 1897, while working as a barman in Sydney, McIntosh began selling pies at sporting venues, and by the age of twenty-six was the owner of a catering company, then in an audacious leap that was to become a trademark, embarked on sports promotion. First it was cycle racing, then boxing, then rugby league football. In 1911 he headed a consortium that acquired the Harry Rickards Tivoli theatre chain, importing international stars such as W. C. Fields and expanding the Tivoli repertoire to include musical comedy with the vaudeville, pantomime, revues and melodramas. He owned the Sunday Times newspaper from May 1916 to 1929. In 1935 he opened the "Black and White Milk Bar" in Fleet Street, London. It proved highly profitable, but when he expanded it into a chain, the enterprise foundered. In 1897 McIntosh married art teacher Marion Backhouse. She was to remain at his side to the end, through financial crises and numerous infidelities, notably with actress Vera Pearce, whose nephew Harold Holt, was to become Prime Minister of Australia. McIntosh's last years were spent in England, where he died in a London hospital on 2 February 1942, aged 65. Link to Wikipedia biography