Hugh D. McIntosh

Hugh Donald "Huge Deal" McIntosh (10 September 1876 – 2 February 1942) was an Australian show-business entrepreneur born to parents of Scottish and Irish origin and modest means in Sydney's Surry Hills, then a ramshackle suburb with a reputation for crime and vice among the largely Irish immigrant population. His policeman father Hugh Fraser McIntosh died when he was four.

According to an obituary, he was educated at Marist Brothers College, St Marys Sydney. but in an interview for Triad (a show-business periodical) in 1925, he gave a more colorful account, claiming to have run away to Adelaide as a silversmith's assistant at the age of seven, to have worked for BHP at Broken Hill at nine, then 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.

Sports promotion

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, notably seven-day events, while he was secretary of the League of New South Wales Wheelmen.