Young Pluto: Joe Brown’s Boxing Career
Young Pluto, later known as Joe Pluto, was the ring name of Joseph William Dudley Brown, a boxer closely associated with Australia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His career included repeated meetings with Young Griffo and an 1899 contest against world featherweight champion George Dixon in New York.
Career and championship record
His birth details are disputed. Biographical accounts variously place his birth in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, or Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, with dates around 1870–1872. His own later account identified South Africa as his birthplace. The conflicting records make a single precise birth date and location uncertain.
Pluto boxed in Melbourne during the 1880s and met Griffo several times. Historical ledgers record draws and no-decision contests between them, with differences in the listed lengths of some meetings. Their December 12, 1889, encounter is commonly described as a seventy-round draw, although another historical compilation lists forty-eight rounds and notes the seventy-round alternative.
The Griffo series belongs to an era when contest lengths and decision rules differed from later championship boxing. The surviving records should therefore be read with their stated qualifications rather than converted into a uniform sequence of modern points decisions. They establish repeated meetings, while leaving some details of the results and duration unsettled.
Pluto later became associated with Western Australia, working in Coolgardie and winning a Western Australian lightweight contest against Benny Marks in 1894. Accounts of his career also describe travel to the Yukon during the Klondike gold rush before his appearance against Dixon in the United States.
Dixon defeated him by tenth-round knockout at the Lenox Athletic Club in New York on January 17, 1899. The bout is recorded as a world featherweight championship contest. South African historical coverage identifies Pluto as the country’s first world-title challenger while also acknowledging the uncertainty surrounding his birthplace.
He returned to Western Australia and continued boxing into the early 1910s. His later life included work outside professional boxing, and his sons Bill and Cyril also boxed. Pluto died at Mosman Park on March 3, 1931, and was buried at Karrakatta Cemetery.
Sources
Additional sources: https://cyberboxingzone.com/boxing/griffo-young.htm; https://boxerlist.com/boxer/young-pluto/9054; https://www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times-daily/sport/2022-01-16-blast-from-the-past-de-villiers-roars-to-dakar-rally-victory/; https://library.brooklyn.cuny.edu/pages/archives/findaid/Kaplan/pdf/Kaplan%20Container%20List.pdf
Additional sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Pluto; https://boxrec.com/wiki/index.php/George_Dixon_vs._Young_Pluto
Related reading: boxing
