Coppin. However, having been pressured by his wife to refuse the position, Coxwell then suggested Brown for the role.
Brown’s acceptance of the offer resulted in some questionable dealings regarding the supply of balloons to Coppin. Having ordered two new balloons, Coppin was persuaded to settle for one refurbished and one new balloon. The former, the Tavistock, was a poor flyer and the latter, the Australasian, a hastily built and untested craft. Notwithstanding this Brown imagined his success in Australia as being beyond doubt and he arranged his journey to the Antipodes with a sense of expectation greater than the circumstances warranted.
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Nothing in Brown’s correspondence gives any indication he had the slightest idea that he was likely to be met in Melbourne by a public which, if not hostile to his venture, was at least indifferent. The later successful flight of the Australasian from Cremorne Gardens was reported in the Melbourne papers as an item of entertainment; only ‘condescending mention was made of the triumph of science’. The single correspondence to appear in the newspaper columns after the initial ascents from the Gardens was a letter from the poet and a would-be politician, Richard. H. Horne, who had once written an article on ballooning for Charles Dickens Household Words, and who now expressed the faintly encouraging opinion that ‘ballooning may, one day or other, assist in the progress of science’.
When he arrived in Australia Brown had high hopes that the opportunity to undertake aerial exploration of the country’s interior would be offered him. It never was. In truth Brown was unsuccessful in many of his endeavours, but he is nonetheless representative of a group of some importance. So, while receiving no more than an occasional mention in aeronautical history, and having failed to fully realise his aspirations, the correspondence of this relatively obscure person provides a meaningful contribution to the history of aviation, and the letters that Charles Henry Brown compiled serve as his true memorial.
* * *
To avoid misunderstanding, I have elected not to use Brown’s title Aeronautica as an introduction to his correspondence. The prospect of confusion with Monck Mason’s work is too great. As 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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PART I Correspondence England, 1843–1857
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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.
Mr Hampton, you are doubtless aware, made a very remarkable and successful parachute descent the most brilliant affair of the kind, considered as a spectacle, that was probably ever exhibited.1 The first balloon ascent that ever took place in Cheltenham was I believe in 1813 when Mr Sadler Jnr ascended in a balloon inflated with gas procured from sulphuric acid and iron filings 35 cwt of the former, and a ton and a half of the latter being used. When inflated, the balloon would not carry Sadler by himself, and consequently his son, aged 16, too his place.
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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
