His Origins
Sometimes, being the son of a great man has to be difficult. Such a man finds himself with big shoes to fill, and conversations often turn to the great man himself: “I remember when your father, he…” or simply, “They will never be another man like your father.”
Some such sons can grow bitter. Others take the legacy and run with it, maybe not surpassing the old man, but at least rivaling him, and earning a reputation in their own right. That’s not always easy to do, especially when your father is one of the greatest of the greats: John Moses Browning. But John’s son, Val Browning, proved to have some of the Maestro’s talent himself, earning a considerable place in the history of gunmaking.
His Lineage
Val Allen Browning was born in Ogden, Utah, in 1895. At that time, not only was Val’s father John still working in Ogden, madly designing innovative and superior firearms for the world’s military forces as well as for hunters and sport shooters, but the senior Browning, Jonathan Browning, was still running his gunsmith shop in Ogden. Val grew up around guns, around new designs and prototypes; it was, one might say, in his blood. After graduating from Ogden High School in 1913, young Val went on to Cornell University, where he studied law and engineering, a combination that would serve him well in later years.
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But then, the Great War happened, and Val Browning was among those who volunteered to go Over There.
His One-Man War
When he volunteered, the Army had a sudden rush of brains to the head as to how to best use the young man whose father was the world’s foremost designer of firearms of all sorts. The Army handed Val Browning a commission as a Second Lieutenant (later promoted to First Lieutenant) and assigned him to the 79th Infantry Division. There he was set to train the troops in weapons handling, and his responsibility was training them in two pieces in particular: The M1917 Browning water-cooled machine gun and the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle.
Val Browning wasn’t assigned to the front line, but that didn’t stop him from the occasional foray, known or unknown to his superiors. He was known to have been at Verdun, closer to the lines than Paris, although what he did there was kept on the down-low, other than training. He was awarded the World War I Victory Medal, which is honestly a “thanks for coming” award. Still, though, who better to train troops on Browning weapons than a Browning?
After the war, he immersed himself in the family business. In 1920, he was appointed manager of the manufacturing of Browning arms in Liege, Belgium, and served as John Browning’s personal representative to Fabrique Nationale de Herstal. That’s a position of considerable trust, which Val went on to prove himself worthy of.
When John Browning died in 1926, at his bench in the FN plant, Val was faced with an eyebrow-raising task: Finishing his father’s unfinished designs. Son or not, how does one hope to carry on the work of the Maestro, the Leonardo da Vinci of guns, probably the single greatest firearms designer in history? But Val Browning was down for the moment. He completed the design work and manufacturing start-up of John’s last design, which became the Superposed over-under shotgun, as well as the Browning Hi-Power pistol, for which he worked with an FN engineer, one Dieudonné Saive, who had been old John’s assistant. Val Browning also actually improved on his father’s design for the Superposed, adding later a single-trigger version, the first such in an over/under shotgun.
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Then, in 1935, Val returned to Ogden as the president of the Browning Arms Company and started in with some ideas of his own.
His Designs
Perhaps Val Browning’s best-known design, of his own from muzzle to buttplate, was the Browning Double Automatic Shotgun. This was a neat, innovative thing indeed. An old friend of mine had one for many years, favoring it for shooting doubles at trap, and it was a lot of fun to shoot; light, quick, easy to handle. It didn’t have or require a traditional shotgun magazine; instead, when one put a shell into the loading port on the left side of the gun, it was automatically chambered, and the bolt closed, after which the second round could be loaded into the loading port.
Val Browning registered 48 patents in all. Here are a couple of key examples:1946: A blowback-operated repeating carbine, capable of either semi- or full-auto fire.
1952: A speed-loading mechanism for shotguns, used in the Double Auto, later adapted for the Auto-5.
Those seem to be the big ones, but that doesn’t mean Val Browning wasn’t busy. Much of his work wasn’t entire firearms, like his father’s proliferation of prototypes; instead, he improved and added on to existing designs. In addition to his work on the Double Automatic, he also worked on improvements for things ranging from magazine catches, improvements to the Hi-Power (again, proving to be one of the very few people to have improved on a John Browning design) along with safeties, magazine and loading improvements, and so on.
In 1955, Val Browning was awarded a Knighthood in the Order of Léopold by King Baudouin of Belgium, who praised his contributions to the “Gun Making Art.”
His Golden Years
In or about 1975, Val Browning and the family sold their interest in the Browning Arms Company to Fabrique Nationale. Val then immersed himself in personal philanthropy, supporting colleges, hospitals, and a variety of charitable causes.
Val Browning died in 1994, at age 98, in his home in Ogden, Utah. His obituary gave the cause of death as cancer.
Val Allen Browning lived up to his father, if not in the volume and variety of new designs, but in innovating in his own right, and in keeping up the quality and workmanship shooters all over the world came to expect (and still do) from the name “Browning.”
