Hugh D. McIntosh

Who was Hugh D. McIntosh?

Hugh Donald "Huge Deal" McIntosh 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 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.