Australian Dictionary of Biography

Arthur Byron Browning (1913–1997), bookmaker and gambler, was born on 26 October 1913 at Hawthorn, Melbourne, elder child of Melbourne-born parents William Hutchinson Browning, bookmaker, and his wife Nellie, née Whitaker. The family moved to Sydney, and Arthur’s father prospered, bookmaking with poetic flourish as Robert (Bob) Browning at local and regional pony, trotting, and greyhound race meetings before working at the major Sydney racecourses. Educated at St Ignatius’ College, Riverview, between 1923 and 1926, Arthur excelled in arithmetic and participated in boxing, athletics, and rowing. Press profiles in his later life claimed that he had been schooled in England or had been set for a business career there, or that he had learned wool-classing. He certainly spent time in England, as did his mother and sister. In February 1932 he returned to Sydney: tall, well built, with fair hair, blue eyes, and now with a gentlemanly polish. Fully grown, he measured six feet three inches (191 cm) in height.

Understudying his father, Browning became a registered bookmaker, first at pony and country courses, then on the bigger city tracks. He courted controversy in 1937 by taking bets on the Great Public Schools’ Head of the River rowing regatta, to the displeasure of the schools’ headmasters. Along with his father and his sister he acquired interests in racehorses. By 1938 he was licensed by the Australian Jockey Club (AJC) to field at Randwick. Sydney newspapers cultivated his image as a fearless bookmaker handling large bets. Often mentioned in society pages, the ‘debonair’ Browning was ‘known as the “playboy penciller”’ (Truth 1941, 18). His annual New Year’s Eve party became a tradition at his holiday house at fashionable Palm Beach, where he was a member of the surf club.

During World War II Browning joined the Citizen Military Forces on 15 May 1941 and was to spend his entire service in New South Wales, most of it full time. He was appointed as a lance corporal in June, while under training. From December he was attached to the headquarters of the 1st Division. Having been diagnosed with haematuria, he was discharged in May 1944 as medically unfit. He returned to bookmaking, not without some point-scoring in the Bulletin, which called him ‘a young man of athletic appearance who was spared the annoyances incident to fighting in deserts and jungles’ (1946, 13).

Newspapers and sporting magazines now extensively reported Browning’s bookmaking wins and losses, and his gambling exploits. Good Idea, a racehorse he bred and owned, won him large sums through wagers in big races, including the 1945 City Tattersall’s Club Golden Jubilee Cup and the 1946 Brisbane Victory Cup. He donated a well-publicised £12,000 to the Prince Henry and Lewisham hospitals. Coached to adapt to newly introduced automatic starting stalls, Good Idea landed him around £40,000 in a strategic betting plunge in September 1946, winning the Canterbury Stakes. For the 1947 Melbourne Cup, he invested £2,000 on Good Idea at odds of 100 to 1, but the horse finished unplaced. These large sums, whether wins or losses, and often exaggerated in later news stories, always served as useful business publicity. Earlier in 1947 he had been fined £474 by the commissioner of taxation ‘due to unreasonable carelessness’ (Sun 1947, 3) in understating his income by £5,326 over a nine-year period.

Subsequently, Browning minimised publicising his own betting to concentrate on his business. He became the preferred bookmaker for many heavy gamblers and wealthy clients, including (Sir) Frank Packer, and sometimes executed large betting plunges as commission agent. Early in 1958 he made headlines by winning handsomely from a totalisator jackpot betting scheme that had been introduced by Sydney clubs to attract racecourse patronage. He netted a cumulative £16,000 across three jackpots. A backlash from small punters prompted him to declare he would withdraw from jackpot betting. In November that year, combining forces with Florence Vincent (later Lady Packer), he won a £30,000 ‘Telewords’ competition run by the Daily Telegraph, which was owned by Packer’s Consolidated Press, again making front-page news.

Specialising in bookmaking on interstate races—like his father—Browning knew the importance of receiving timely intelligence. This practice required ingenuity and carried the risk of illegality or of falling prey to coordinated betting coups by punters, since federal laws forbade the transmission of betting information and the use of telephones on course. He fielded on both Melbourne and Brisbane races. In 1958 he persuaded the Victoria Racing Club that these restrictions benefited only illegal ‘starting price’ off-course bookmakers, and was briefly granted a licence to exchange live betting information between Melbourne and Sydney racecourses, and to disseminate this to licensed bookmakers. This monopoly created such jealousies among his powerful rivals that the racing clubs took over the scheme themselves. The effect of this initiative was to increase the volume of interstate betting on courses. By the mid-1970s his annual turnover was estimated at $10 million, and he employed a large staff.

By 1942 Browning’s parents had moved to Bulkara Road, Bellevue Hill, and this remained his Sydney address after the death of his mother in 1975, his father having died in 1962. He sold the house in 1981 and moved to a luxury penthouse at the high-rise Winslow Gardens at Darling Point. This was a time when the number of race meetings was increasing around Australia. Unsettled by the increasing workload, that same year he reduced his operations to meetings at the AJC courses—Randwick and Warwick Farm. He retired entirely in 1983, devoting his time to travelling extensively. The Bulletin, now kindly disposed to him, regretted this departure of ‘an ornament to the turf’ (McNicoll 1983, 31). Subsequent astute betting wins occasionally made the press, but he retreated from public view.

Browning died on 13 April 1997 at Darlinghurst and was buried in South Head cemetery, Vaucluse; he had never married, and his chief beneficiaries were his sole niece and his brother-in-law. He left substantial pecuniary legacies to several women friends, including Jean Rilen, ‘who has been very good looking after me and looking after my penthouse’ (NAA B884), and ten thousand dollars to Ignatius College. Discreet as he could be about his private life, he expressed in his will a ‘sincere wish that all letters, diaries and personal papers be burnt’ (NAA B884).