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Pitch Publishing Ltd - Alex Daley

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197 pages

English

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Fighting Men of London explores the lives of seven former professional boxers who fought in the capital between the 1930s and 1960s. Set around a series of interviews, it resurrects a golden age of the sport when boxing was as popular as football and Britain's leading fighters were working-class heroes. Dramatic, poignant, inspiring and at times funny, the book covers such subjects as booth fighting, exploitation in boxing, East End poverty, World War Two London, Jewish culture, fame and success, crime, prison life and encounters with such figures as the Kray twins, the Great Train Robbers and Britain's most infamous inmate, Charles Bronson. Fighting Men of London takes us on a journey through a lost era of smoky fight halls, ramshackle boxing arenas and courageous fighting men. It features the previously untold stories of 1950s boxing star Sammy McCarthy, Bethnal Green knockout specialist Ted Berry (an associate of the Kray twins) and Sid Nathan, who as one of Britain's last surviving 1930s boxers once shared a fight bill with the great Jack Kid Berg. This isn't a single story, but seven stories of seven very different men. The common bond they shared was boxing.

Sujets

Gran Londres

Greater London

Boxing

Xian de Boxing

Grand Londres

London

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Publié par	Pitch Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	01 juin 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781909626805
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2014
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Alex Daley, 2014
All rights reserved under Internationaland Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been grantedthe non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No partof this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or storedin or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express writtenpermission of the Publisher.
A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 978 1-90962-665-2
eBook ISBN: 978 1-90962-680-5
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ON THE BILL
Foreword by Colin Hart
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Sid Nathan (Aldgate)
2. Ted Berry (Bethnal Green)
3. Jock Taylor (Sidcup)
4. Jack Streek (Sidcup)
5. Albert Carroll (Bethnal Green)
6. Teddy Lewis (Dagenham)
7. Sammy McCarthy (Stepney)
Photographs
FOREWORD BY COLIN HART
W HEN I was a lad growing up in east London just after the Second World War, you could watch boxing every night of the week. In those days there were more than 3,000 boxers licensed by the British Boxing Board of Control.
With so many fighters looking for work it wasn t difficult for regular shows to be held at Leyton Baths, West Ham Baths, Hoxton Baths, Poplar Baths, Manor Place Baths, Lime Grove, York Hall, Seymour Hall, Mile End Arena and many other popular venues on both sides of the Thames.
And it wasn t uncommon in the 1940s and 50s for some fighters to perform four or even five times a month. Many were exploited by ruthless managers and promoters who paid them a pittance for risking their lives.
With ringside seats costing just a few shillings many of the youngsters starting out on their careers were paid no more than a fiver a fight. And the facilities they had to put up with in the majority of arenas were spartan to say the least. For example, at the Mile End Arena there wasn t even a tap for the boys to have a wash when they got back to the dressing room.
Alex Daley, who has a deep love of boxing, wrote a riveting book about his grandfather, Nipper Pat Daly, and has followed it up with Fighting Men of London . He wanted to put on record what it was like for the fighters of 60 and 70 years ago; men who despite the hardships they faced and the little money they earned always gave London fans value for money.
Daley, because he has such a feel for the sport, has produced seven fascinating interviews that make for a most enjoyable read. Sammy McCarthy, Teddy Lewis, Albert Carroll, Jack Streek, Jock Taylor, Ted Berry and Sid Nathan were a great credit to boxing. The stories they told Alex Daley are not only entertaining, I also found them educational.
Colin Hart was boxing correspondent of The Sun for 31 years. He left the staff on reaching retirement age 14 years ago and since then has written a regular boxing column for the paper. He broadcasts regularly on TV and radio. He was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame (IBHOF) at Canas to ta, USA in 2013 .
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
F IRST and foremost, I would like to thank the seven exboxers who gave freely of their time to share their thoughts, feelings, reminiscences and philosophies with me. Without them there d be no book.
I am also grateful to Colin Hart for writing his excellent foreword, to my friend Miles Templeton and boxing memorabilia collector Larry Braysher for generously supplying photos, programmes and other material, to Boxing News editor Tris Dixon for allowing me access to the Boxing News archive and to the London Ex-Boxers Association (in particular Stephen Powell) for making introductions to five of the boxers possible.
I would also like to thank Derek O Dell, who introduced me to Jack Streek, and Mary Taylor (Nink) for introducing me to her wonderful father, Jock Taylor, through whom this book began. My thanks also to Mary s sister June for providing added insight into Jock s life after boxing.
Photo credits: The photograph of Ted Berry with Reggie, Ronnie and Charlie Kray is reproduced courtesy of John Griffiths with permission from Rita Smith. The photo of Ted Berry and others at the Old Horns pub is courtesy of John Griffiths. The photo of Sid Nathan refereeing a boxing match is copyright Derek Rowe and reproduced with his permission. Other photos are courtesy of the boxers themselves, the Boxing News archive, the Larry Braysher collection and the author s collection.
Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be glad to rectify in future editions any errors or omissions brought to their attention.
INTRODUCTION
F IGHTING Men of London started life one autumn day in 2011 - quite by chance. I had just spent an absorbing few hours talking boxing with Jock Taylor, one of Britain s leading light-heavyweights of the late 1940s, after discovering we lived in the same town; and our chat planted the seed of an idea.
After my first book, Nipper: the Amazing Story of Boxing s Wonderboy , I wanted to wait a few years before I even thought of starting another, but my conversation with Jock made me rethink my plans, as a realisation dawned on me
British boxers of the 1940s and 50s with strong recollections of their fighting days were still around, but the details of their career and life experiences would, before long, be lost for ever. The job of recording their recollections could not wait five or ten years. If I wanted to preserve some of their stories (and I did) , I needed to act now.
Thus began my quest to track down pro boxers of the 40s and 50s, with Jock as my first subject. Six other interviewees with interesting stories to tell were enlisted, the common theme being their connection to London boxing.
But why London? And why the men of the 40s and 50s?
Well, London in those days was the epicentre of British boxing. Innumerable top fighters came from other parts of the country, but London was where they flocked to get ahead, for it housed the nation s leading managers, promoters and gyms. The places to get noticed and the people who pulled the strings were London-based on the whole.
The 1940s and 50s was a fantastic time to be a British boxer or boxing fan, and London was about the best place to experience this special era. Britain s working classes have long forgotten the love affair they had with boxing, both on the paid and unpaid side of the sport.
Yes, London - and Britain - were boxing-mad, and packed-out shows gave fight addicts their fix in a variety of permutations, ranging from the smoke-filled small hall (the grass roots of boxing) to the grandiose outdoor stadium. On almost any given night boxing took place somewhere, and there were then thousands of Brits trading leather for money (though they may have worked as labourers or market porters during the day).
The status of the British professional boxer then was much higher than it is now. Like today s Premier League footballers, British champion boxers were household names and schoolboy idols. And there were just eight British weight classes then (there are now 15), which made competition in each division all the more intense.
Globally, aside from disputes over vacated titles, boxing in the 40s and 50s had only one champion at each weight - that s just eight universally recognised world champions. By contrast, today world boxing has 17 weights with four bona fide titles up for grabs at each one. This means four men at 17 weights can all share the glory of being champions of the world; potentially that s 68 concurrent world champions, instead of eight. Given these facts, it s difficult to dispute that boxing titles were more meaningful years ago.
The stories in this book track the development of British boxing on several levels. The 1930s saw the sport reach its peak in popularity, both in the number of shows and the number of active pro fighters. There was an inevitable downturn during the Second World War when many boxers were called up. But a postwar boom brought the number of shows and active pros close to pre-war levels. Then, with little warning, a 33 per cent live entertainment tax introduced by the Tory government of 1952 put countless small-time promoters out of business - a blow from which British boxing never fully recovered.
Then there were social and technological changes. The poor and the hungry have always flourished in professional rings. In pre-war London this meant a generation of young Jewish men, but in the late 40s and 50s they were replaced by fighters from the Caribbean and West Africa, who arrived in Britain in growing numbers. The rise of TV and cinema as rivals to live entertainment, improvements in living standards and eventually the disappearance of boxing from schools would finish the fight game as a sport of the British masses. Afterwards the country s once thriving fight industry lived on, but on a smaller scale and with narrower appeal.
I hope this information will set the scene for the boxing milieu of the men in this book. Before I finish I will briefly outline my intentions and methodology in writing it.
My aim was to understand what led the fighting men of this golden era to lace on gloves for a living. I wanted to find out what the fight game was really like then, to know about their backgrounds - where they came from, where their journeys in life had taken them - and to learn their thoughts, feelings and philosophies on boxing and life.
Theirs was a London far removed from the modern metropolis; a London of ration books, pea-soup fog and old-fashioned values; a site of much adversity where community spirit pulled people through. It was a simpler yet tougher time and the prize