ONE DAY IN 1970, I was thinking about boxing and how I couldn’t fit in with the authorities. I was an outsider. And it dawned on me that the sport was not really controlled by anyone. World title fights were sanctioned by two rival bodies, the World Boxing Association and the World Boxing Council. In the UK, the professional game was run by the British Boxing Board of Control (BBBC), which licensed fighters, ringside officials, managers, matchmakers, trainers and promoters. It seemed to me that the BBBC did not have the sole right to authorise bouts: after all, fairground boxing booths had been going for decades, perfectly legally, outside the Board’s remit. I listened to the pirate station Radio Caroline at the time – it was broadcast from a ship in the Irish Sea – and suddenly had a brainwave. What was to stop me from putting on pirate boxing shows?
I decided to promote an unauthorised event. I knew all the boxers – and the streetfighters – in the area and had no trouble getting enough of them for a show, which I staged at the weightlifting club in Rocester, Staffs. Top of the bill was a four-round no-decision exhibition bout between our Sam and a boxer called Don Halden, known as the ‘Blond Bomber’. They were a nice contrast: Halden came in the ring immaculate, with his carefully styled blond hair and a spotless white towelling robe, while Sam had an old hessian sack over his shoulders with ‘Gypsy’ written on it. The referee was Guy Harrison, who used to work the cargo ships to the USA and fought bootleg fights in every port. The place was packed to the rafters, and I knew I was on to something. I was young and ambitious. I decided I could go bigger than Jack Solomons and Harry Levene, the two top licensed promoters at the time. And that was how I became the father of pirate boxing in Britain.
Getting Don Halden was a coup. He was a young pro heavyweight from Rugeley who had been on the fringes of the British top ten. He was also managed by wily old George Biddles, who had trained world champion Hogan Bassey. Don had been a sparring partner to British champ Jack Bodell. We had trained together as amateurs in Wogga Wood’s gym and I had kept tabs on his pro career through the Boxing News while on my travels around East Anglia and Scotland. Halden was a real kayo artist. If you left a gap against him with your left, you’d be in serious trouble.
He was also a terror outside the ropes. I saw how he could fight one day in a pub called the Bell Inn, the drinking den of large numbers of Geordies who had come down to work in the pits and power stations around Rugeley. They were barbed-wire characters. We had been told that two men in the Bell wanted to fight Halden and me, the boxer and the prize-fighter, so we went in one afternoon with our friend Mick Mould, a very dangerous man who looked like Ronnie Kray. Mould and I went into one part of the pub while Halden went into another. We heard a commotion and when we got to the other bar Halden was smothered in blood, fighting with four men. Someone had glassed him with a beer mug.
I tried to stop it but someone took a swing at me and at it we went. It was a terrible brawl, with bottles and glasses and chairs flying all over the place. The Bell was virtually demolished. We were heavily outnumbered but more than held our own. No-one could stop it until about thirty police arrived and we were all arrested. Mould, who had cut a man’s throat with a knife, hid it down his sock.
We were charged with affray and ended up at Stafford Crown Court. They fetched us up from the old dungeons there and we had to stand with our hands up while we were searched, to impress the judge. We were all going to plead not guilty but my QC had a word with the judge in chambers, who agreed that if I pleaded guilty I wouldn’t go to prison. I talked Halden and Mould into accepting and they were both given suspended jail sentences. I was fined £30.
Halden was dynamite in the ring but loved to look his best before a fight and hated anyone messing up his blond hair. I once went to see him fight while he was still licensed and walked into the dressing room.
‘Bartley’s here to see you, Don,’ said George Biddles.
I mussed his hair.
‘Don’t do that, don’t touch my hair,’ he said.
I didn’t care if they put a sack on me. I wanted to be rough and rugged like Jack Dempsey, get them down and out. I think I knew after that incident that one day Halden and I would get down to it. Anyway, he retired from licensed boxing at just twenty-three and joined my unlicensed stable.
Apart from Halden, my main attraction was my brother Sam. We called him ‘the Rhino’. No-one would mess with Sam; not even me. I saw men move in and smash it out with him but they always backed off first. You couldn’t push him over. He fought flatfooted and was no fancy dan but he could take hooks, jabs, crosses, anything, and just smash and batter back like a big Marciano. He was awesome. Joe Phillips, whose yard we lived in, had his own taxi service with a contract to transport prisoners around the country. Sometimes he would pay Sam to drive the men because they would never try to escape with him in the car.
Most of my fighters were from Staffordshire and many I knew well, like Johnny Wheeldon, who was my girlfriend’s twin brother, and Colin ‘Mighty Moff’ Morfitt. There were some tasty boxers, like Billy Williams, the ‘Cannock Ball of Fire’, a former ABA finalist and National Coal Board champion who fought Ken Buchanan as a pro, and Tommy Beardsmore, who was Territorial Army champion for eight years and beat Alan Rudkin as an amateur. Tommy was never counted out. I trained all these men at several different gyms. One was the Wheatsheaf, one at the Black Swan, one in an old scout hut. This was my world, of sweat and liniment, of skipping ropes and medicine balls and leather bag mitts.
Through friends and contacts, I assembled a syndicate to finance the shows. It included respectable men: one who is now on the bench in Lincolnshire, a doctor, a lawyer and a millionaire. I knew the Boxing Board would go nuts about my unlicensed shows and I wanted these men backing me in case it went to law. At the other end of the spectrum was Mick Mould. He owned a chain of fish and chip shops and was basically a gangster, dressing in a different suit every day and driving a new car every year.
We booked the Victoria Hall in Hanley for a show in December 1971. The BBBC soon got wind of it and weren’t happy; they didn’t mind scrappy shows in small venues but the Victoria Hall was well known and too big for their liking. We even paid to have twenty policemen on duty at £2 each. A Mr Johnson from Stoke-on-Trent council requested my presence at a meeting at the town hall. They wanted to ban the show. Harold Groombridge, my main partner at the time, and I went along and were ushered into a boardroom dominated by a huge, polished wooden table.
‘Mr Gorman,’ said Johnson, ‘I have arranged for you to meet the Lord Mayor. Now I don’t want you to get nervous.’ He must have been trying to rattle me.
‘I wouldn’t get nervous if it was the Duke of Edinburgh,’ I replied
‘Do you have the receipt for the venue booking, Mr Gorman?’
I took it from my pocket and placed it on the table. He inspected it.
‘You definitely have paid for it, haven’t you?’
‘Yes.’
I reached over and slid the receipt back to my side of the table. His eyes narrowed.
‘Mr Gorman, I don’t think you trust me.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Mr Johnson, you look like a real gentleman to me.’
‘Well, you have pulled the receipt away from me.’
‘Well, it is my receipt.’
He tried to tell me that my tournament was illegal but I knew it wasn’t. They were boxing with gloves, under rules, with officials. It was certainly more organised than the booths.
He got up and went in to see the Mayor. A cup of tea was fetched. When Johnson returned, he still seemed unhappy but he realised there was little he could do.
‘I tell you what I’ll do, Mr Johnson,’ I said. ‘I’ll make sure you are in the front row.’
His eyes lit up. ‘And the family, Mr Gorman?’
‘Yes. There’ll be six seats for you.’
‘You are a gentleman.’
Top of the bill was Don Halden against Chuck Bodell, half-brother of Jack Bodell, the former British and Empire heavyweight champion. Chuck was a streetfighter from Swadlincote, a colliers’ area, and was a fearsome sight, with a bald head and a bear-like body covered in black hair: he looked like a granite gorilla. Blue-eyed Halden was just the opposite, clean-shaven and with a hairless chest. They weighed-in at a hotel and Halden couldn’t help looking at Bodell through the corner of his eye. He knew he was in for a tussle. We billed it for the Heavyweight Championship of the Midlands and it turned out to be one of the toughest fights I have seen in my life. It was a good sales gimmick having Jack Bodell’s half-brother and once again the venue was packed.
I loved gimmicks, anything for a few newspaper column inches to sell a show. We matched eighteen-stone John Peaty and twenty-three-stone Zue Shaw and billed it as the greatest combined poundage in ring history. Another bout on the bill featured Barry Fradley, who was six foot eight, and Peter Bartram, who was six foot four. They were both like rakes and we billed them as the two tallest middleweights ever to fight, which was probably true. Fradley had been due to fight Bartram before but had pulled out without explanation. This time he came to me and said, ‘Can I have a private word with you?’
‘Sure.’
‘The reason I won’t fight is because I’m ashamed of my body,’ he said. ‘I’m that thin. If you let me go in with a vest on, I’ll fight him at the Victoria Hall.’
‘No problem. But I want a guarantee you’ll fight this time.’
On the night of the show, I sat at ringside in dinner suit and bow tie, smoking a cigar. The two beanpoles came into the ring, Fradley with his vest on. I leapt to my feet.
‘Hold it. Hold everything.’
The MC looked at me.
‘Doesn’t that man know this is a professional tournament? Tell him to take that vest off.’
If looks could kill. Fradley was furious, and took it out on his opponent. Bartram knocked Fradley down four times but Fradley knocked him down five times, and won on points. Oh, and I forgot all about the tickets for poor old Mr Johnson from the council, and he was stuck right at the back. I waved to him from my front-row seat.
The response from the BBBC was terrible. They sent detectives and were threatening the boxers that if they fought on my shows they would never be allowed to appear again in the licensed ring. Some had to box under assumed names. I told the MC to announce, ‘Bartley Gorman has given instructions that all members of the British Boxing Board must stay out of the fighters’ dressing rooms, please.’ They hated me even more for that.
Once we realised how popular our shows were, we changed our name to the Anglo-American Boxing Federation, to give ourselves an international flavour. In a further snub to the Board, we adopted a different rule system. I wrote to the well-known promoter Chris Dundee, whose brother Angelo trained Muhammad Ali. He wished me well and sent me the eighty-eight-page rulebook of the New York State Athletic Commission. It stipulated that decisions should be rendered by the referee and two judges, rather than just by the referee as in England.
I didn’t box on my own shows because I was too busy. I tried to run it properly but there were all sorts of shenanigans. For one show, Sam was due to fight a coloured fellow, but two days before the event his opponent was nowhere to be seen. I jumped in the motor and started touring around. You’d be amazed what you can find if you just keep your eyes open. Driving past a roadway construction gang, I saw a large black man wielding a pickaxe. He looked the part. I pulled up and shouted to him.
‘Can you fight?’
He put down his pick. ‘I’ll fight anybody,’ he said.
I told him what it was all about, agreed a purse with him and two days later he was boxing as ‘Alanzer Jansen’, allegedly a top heavyweight from the United States (the name was copied from Alonzo Johnson, a decent boxer of the time). He did his best but Sam made short work of him.
I devoted myself to promoting full-time. My headquarters was the Wheatsheaf, just around the corner from our campsite in Uttoxeter. I was a heavy drinker, like John L. Sullivan – I loved Bass beer with brandy and port chasers – and smoked cigars. ‘I smoke and drink to give the other man a chance,’ I used to brag.
In February 1972, we staged a show at the Elite Cinema in Uttoxeter. It featured Halden against Rocky Davies for the unlicensed Heavyweight Championship of the Midlands, but the drama was on the undercard. ‘Big Hearted’ Artie Meadows – whose son Shane is now a film director – kayoed a vicar’s son, Dave Smash, in ten seconds, knocking out his front teeth. Smash was unconscious on the ring floor and his leg started twitching. Officials from the BBBC were in the crowd – and we didn’t have a doctor. I could sense a tragedy.
I got someone to rush me round to the local physician, Dr Penty. I begged him to come immediately and, if anyone asked, to say he had been there all night.
‘I can’t come,’ he said.
‘I need you badly, Doc,’ I said, and pushed £25 into his hand. He was out of the door before he even had his coat on. It was a good job his house was only 500 yards away. He got an ambulance to take Smash to hospital, still unconscious. He came round after half an hour. It taught me a lesson to always have a doctor. Amazingly, the BBBC never caught on.
But whenever things are going well, fate has kicked me in the teeth. I’m almost like an undertaker, the people I’ve carried to their graves. First my dear Aunt Rose died, then my father fell terminally ill with cancer. He was taken into hospital at Burton-upon-Trent, where he lingered for six weeks. Though he had encouraged me to box when I was younger, my father had never really wanted me to be a fighter. Yet secretly he was proud of me. He was heavily sedated on morphine, but one day they took him off it and when I arrived to visit him, he told the nurses, ‘This is my son. He’s the heavyweight champion of Ireland.’
I would sit with him for hours. One day near the end, when I was leaving after a visit, he feebly waved me over to his bedside and spoke in a hoarse whisper. ‘Test them all, son,’ he said. ‘Test them all.’ He was only fifty-five when he died. I will never forget him lying in the casket of Japanese oak, the hardest wood in the world, with more than twenty silver crucifixes made into the handles. He was laid out in the trailer with yellow candles around the casket and white sheets around the walls and on the ceiling, pinned with purple bows. It was beautiful but horrible at the same time: what a taste of sorrow. I sat up with him every night until the funeral. I can still see him now with his big gold ring on, the diamond catching the light of the death candles, all the weight gone off his body but still with his head of black hair – a hard, strict, old-fashioned man with strong values, who beat me and loved me at the same time.
The hospital was full of travellers every night, great friends of my father like American Billy Finney, perhaps the richest man among all travellers (he once offered to back me against the London fighter Roy ‘Pretty Boy’ Shaw for a £100,000 straight bet), who came every day in his Rolls-Royce, and my aunt Sibby Deadman, a true Romany, who was ninety years old and would weep as she held my father’s great hands, looking for all the world like Queen Victoria, with the Salvation Army Band playing outside the window. The funeral cortege was a mile long.
Shortly after my father was buried, I was summoned to a meeting with Rabbi Boswell. He had been a close friend of my father and was a very wealthy, influential travelling man. He had been to a couple of my boxing shows in his Roller, but now he wanted it to end. ‘I want you to stop doing this and start earning a living,’ he said. Rabbi thought I was getting too famous. He wanted me to keep a lower profile and to live a simple gypsy life, following in my father’s footsteps hawking and selling carpets. He was an utter gentleman and spoke what he thought was for our own good. I listened respectfully to his words but was set on my own course. I continued promoting and Rabbi never came to another show.
One day I rang up Bramcote Barracks and arranged for an Army boxing team to take on my fighters in a tournament. They thought it was sanctioned by the Amateur Boxing Association (I wonder where they got that idea) but, come the night of the tournament, they found out the truth. The sergeant-major came to see me. He had two Dalmatian dogs on leashes.
‘It has come to my attention that your fighters are all unlicensed,’ he said. ‘My men can’t possibly box on your show.’
How was I going to get out of this one? I had a full house.
‘You are the British Army, aren’t you,’ I said. ‘You can fight in the Congo and in the jungle and in Belize?’
‘That’s correct.’
‘And yet you are telling me that you can’t fight in a boxing tournament in Staffordshire?’
That clinched it. He immediately gave permission for his six boxers to fight my men.
Another night we had a packed house and were five minutes away from the 8pm start when I realised we had no gloves. I briefly debated whether to let them fight bareknuckle – my boxers would have done whatever I asked them – but again there were busybodies from the BBBC in attendance. Wogga Wood’s gym was about fifteen miles away, so instead I jumped into a friend’s E-type Jag and it almost left the ground, the speed we went. I found Wogga in the pub, got him to open up and we grabbed all the gloves we could.
I made sure my boxers were always evenly matched and value for money. I wanted them all to be tested. As a result, we had queues for every show, and every pub for miles would have posters. Some of the businessmen backing me wanted me to apply for a proper promoter’s licence and go legit but as a traveller I didn’t want to be part of the establishment. The Boxing Board were threatening to take us to court and I wasn’t having that. I wanted to do it my own way and intended throwing them all over – Mickey Duff, Solomons, Levene, the lot. Frank Warren was unheard of then, though he would later rise to success by the same route of unlicensed fighting. I was going to be the biggest in the world. The Boxing News wouldn’t report my fights, which annoyed me, but they couldn’t black out the whole of the media and we were getting good coverage. I was on the verge of national attention and I was planning to hire Earl’s Court in London. We almost got the former British heavyweight champ Joe Erskine to come out of retirement to fight our Sam. Erskine wanted £500, I got him to accept £250, but the minute he told his manager, he wouldn’t let him box for any money. I always rated Erskine highly – a very clever boxer. I even thought about staging bouts in a marquee at Appleby Horse Fair but there would have been murders in the crowd.
I was determined to go worldwide. We took an office in Stoke and finally named ourselves the International Boxing Federation (not related to the later IBF based in America, though I believe they got the name from us). We couldn’t accommodate all the people at our shows and made a fortune on fight nights but we had terrible arguments in the syndicate. At meetings there would be people shouting and banging on the table and tea cups flying. Most of the rows were over money. I drove a very hard bargain.
One day Colin Morfitt had a terrible hard fight. He won and came for his prize and as he picked up the trophy, part of it broke off. He pushed me over some chairs and stormed off in a huff. Colin, who was known as ‘Mighty Moff’, comes from a very old Romany family called Grapes. He became a very good rugby player and is a successful businessman. I taught him how to fight and he later beat a 6ft 8in American soldier in a cobblestone fight in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. These were the kind of men I had around me. Of course, they wanted paying good money for their boxing matches but I knew if they won I could pay them less because they’d be in a good mood and I’d get the reporters to interview them even if they weren’t going to publish it. I always knocked them down.
Sometimes, however, the disputes took a far nastier turn.
*
AFTER MY DAD died, my two brothers and I used to take turns staying with my mam in her big Morecambe trailer at Phillips’ Yard. If John and Sam fancied a drink, I’d stop in with her while they went out, and vice versa. On this particular night we had all stopped in and gone to bed. Mam was in the bedroom, Sam and John were in the side beds and I slept on the floor in the living room because I was training at the time and wanted to be tough like Jack Dempsey. I was twenty-eight, Sam twenty-seven and John sixteen.
At two o’clock in the dead of night, two cars pulled into the yard and four men got out. Sam was woken by a loud rapping on the trailer and got up in his underpants to see who it was. The instant he opened the door, a huge fist crashed into his mouth and sent him back into the trailer. In stormed Don Halden. Behind him was Mick Mould, my partner on the syndicate, and a garage owner called Brian Perrin, 6ft 2in and 18st. Outside was the fourth man, Paul ‘Beaky’ Smith, one of my boxers.
I woke with a start to see Sam and Halden slugging it out in the kitchen part of the trailer, with Mould and Perrin coming in behind. Pots and pans were falling all over the floor and making a terrible racket. I leapt up and punched both Mould and Perrin straight back out through the door. Then Sam and Halden fell out over the step, still struggling.
Our John and my mother came out to see what was happening. By now I was outside, at it with Mould again. It was vicious street stuff. ‘Stop it, stop it,’ shouted my mam. She hitched up her nightie and ran around to the Wheatsheaf, where she knew the landlord and landlady, Steve and Sue Whitehead, yelling, ‘Help, help.’
I smashed Mould down to the ground and he scrambled up and ran off into the darkness. It was hard to make out what was happening in the commotion, as the only light was that showing through the open door of the trailer and a glow from behind the curtained windows. I saw Sam now fighting with Perrin after Perrin had set about our John.
I knew the mind Mould had and reckoned he might have gone for a weapon, so I ran back into the trailer to the wardrobe where my dad had kept his twelve-bore, double-barrelled shotgun for shooting rabbits and vermin. I hate guns – absolutely detest them – but I thought my family might be in mortal danger and knew that if Mould came back with a shooter then even Sam and I couldn’t fight him with fists. I found the shotgun and shoved my hands into the Crown Derby bowls to find the cartridges. Fortunately they had been thrown out; otherwise someone might have died that night.
I ran back out with the gun, saw Halden, and put the butt of it right over his head, then rammed the barrel into his belly half a dozen times. That wrote him off. Then I ran into the town centre to find Mould. He was outside the police station with some officers. As I approached I could hear him claiming that we had attacked him. I grabbed him and threw him against a wall.
‘He attacked us with my mother in the trailer,’ I said. ‘Don’t believe a word he says.’
The police knew me and knew I didn’t lie. They arrested Mould. I set off back to the yard and came across Halden looking the worse for wear in the middle of Bridge Street.
‘I’m going to kill you stone dead,’ I said.
‘Don’t look at me with those wild eyes,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t worry me. I’ve fought the toughest men in England.’
I set about him and it took five police to drag me off. By the time order was restored, officers had arrived from as far as Stafford, Derby and Stoke. In the car they found the watches, jewellery and coats that Mould and his men had taken off, proving that they had come to attack us. They charged Mould for fighting with me, Halden for fighting with Sam and said Perrin was on the fringe of it.
While they were waiting for trial, Mould came round to see my mother. ‘Mrs Gorman, help us,’ he said. ‘I’m very sorry, we did wrong. But can you help us get off?’ She spoke up for them but the police were determined to press charges. They ended up pleading guilty at Birmingham Crown Court. Mould got nine months and Halden six. Perrin got a suspended prison sentence. ‘Three brothers attacked at night,’ it said in the paper.
We found out later what it was about. Someone had been making anonymous, abusive phone calls to Mould’s chip shops. Mould had told me about it one day but I thought nothing of it. Then one night when they had been drinking, another one of these calls came in. Mould passed the phone to Halden, who listened and said, ‘It’s Sam Gorman.’ Of course, it wasn’t – it later turned out to be the husband of a woman who worked for Mould – but off they set to do us damage. That is the kind of hair-trigger men they were: violent, quick to anger and slow to ask questions. I became friends with them again afterwards but it was never the same.
Of the four men who came that night, three are dead now, all to do with motor cars. Mick Mould had a heart attack and died behind the wheel of his car, Beaky Smith was run over and Perrin also died in his motor. Twenty years after the incident, workmen took some guttering down from the Wheatsheaf pub. They found a rusty handgun lodged in one of the pipes. Mould and his mob must have thrown it there before the police came.
With the success of the promoting, I had pushed the bareknuckle fighting to one side. But I still had cause to raise my hands from time to time. There was a group of hulking brothers called the Uptons who came from the neighbouring town of Cheadle and were known as the Cheadle Cowboys. They actually would dress like cowboys and march through the town. One night in the Wheatsheaf, my friend Mick Harper had a row with a man trying to tap up his girlfriend. One of the Uptons, known as ‘Mad Dog’, stepped in and threatened Mick, so someone fetched me from another part of the pub and I came through and knocked Mad Dog out with one punch. A lump rose up on his forehead like a mushroom as I looked down at him.
The next day he decided I’d caught him with a lucky punch and challenged me to a bareknuckle fight. We met in a field midway between Uttoxeter and Cheadle and fifty people made a makeshift ring. It was a summer’s evening in August 1971. People were betting on how many seconds it would last, not how many rounds, and it didn’t go much longer than in the pub; he never had a chance to land a punch. I hit him three or four times and it was over. I regarded men like that as ten a penny. They were no match for the true gypsy fighters, though I must say Mad Dog was not the best of the Uptons; that would be his brother, Big Jim, who was always friendly with me and whom I never did fight.
*
I WAS IN my pomp. When I walked into the Wheatsheaf seven or eight men would hold out their empty jars for me to fill. I always sat on the same stool, commanding the bar, a cigar clamped between my teeth and with queues of people waiting to see me about a dozen different bits of business. And I had money to burn – literally. I once lent a man a fiver when he claimed he was skint, only to see him a few minutes later with a wad of notes. I took my money off him, put it in an ashtray and burned it – and a fiver was worth something in those days. I planned to take my pirate boxing to America and was regularly making trans-Atlantic calls. I reckoned I could take the States by storm. Yet for all my ambition, there was still something missing … something nagging. I had not yet been given the credit I deserved as a fighter in my own right.
One Friday in August 1972, I was flicking through the Boxing News when my eyes fell on a story about a tournament for heavyweight boxers:
EDDIE SEEKS HIS HEAVY HOPE
Eddie Thomas, the Welsh manager whose fighters have already brought two world titles to Britain, is setting out to fulfil one more ambition.
His hope is to find a heavyweight with potential enough to become British champion and make a formidable challenge to any in the world.
The hunt will begin with a competition he plans to stage in Wales itself during September or October.
‘In past years such competitions in London produced Joe Erskine, Jack Gardner and, of course, [Danny] McAlinden, which is why I plan to try one myself,’ said Thomas. ‘If there is any youngster now working in a coal pit or making furniture who thinks he can fight I’ll be willing to decide his worth somehow. If I can find the youngster I want, I’ll willingly spend £5,000 to £10,000 developing his potential.’
The tournament was to be at the Double Diamond Club in Caerphilly. There were to be eight fighters, with two reserves, and a top prize of £500. It was supposed to feature the debut of Tim Wood, the reigning ABA heavyweight champ, and other entrants included a Nottinghamshire miner, a scaffolder, a seventeen-and-a-half-stone Liverpudlian and a handful of fledgling pros. The search for a star was a big thing at the time and a lot of promoters and managers were looking for the next world-beater.
Thomas said he planned to have the winner working and living in the Welsh mountains for six months, chopping trees and running through the snow and rain. This sounded like the thing for me. It was how fighters should be. And Thomas was a top man, having taken Howard Winstone and Ken Buchanan to world titles. He said he wanted to get some of the men down to his gym to try them out before the competition to see if they were fit to enter it.
Imagine if I could be both bareknuckle champion and heavyweight boxing champion at the same time. No-one from the past could have claimed such a thing, not even my grandfather. And I truly felt I could beat any man alive.
So without even considering it, I jumped straight in the car with Alan Wilson and set off for South Wales. Alan, who was only nine stone soaking wet, was my best friend and trainer. He had tattoos over his knuckles: ‘Irish Tinker’ on one hand and ‘Romany Gypsy’ on the other. We turned up unannounced in Merthyr Tydfil and asked directions to Eddie Thomas. We found him and he took me to his house. He said he knew a lot of Irish travellers. Thomas showed me Aberfan out of the window; I later learned he had been one of the first on the scene at the terrible disaster there and had carried many of the children’s bodies away.
He wanted me to show what I could do, so we climbed these rickety stairs to his gym in Merthyr. The walls were peeling and you could see through the rafters. I had on jeans and a pair of boxing boots, my red, thick-soled size tens that my dad had made for me. I warmed up with a bit of moving and slipping, then in walked a tall heavyweight with head-guard on, trunks, gloves, boots and gumshield, ready to go. He was Roger Barlow, from Coventry. He had boxed for England as an amateur and would later be rated in the top ten as a pro, though I didn’t know him from Ali at the time.
‘How shall we go?’ I asked Barlow.
‘Let it go its own way,’ he said.
I didn’t even have a gumshield. I gloved up, climbed into the ring and we went straight at it. Boxing is a different game from bareknuckle: you get ‘set’ for it, taking a stance and a guard, whereas in a prize-fight you can do your own thing. Barlow was the up-and-coming man at the time but I never missed one left on him. I must have hit him with 100 idle jabs in the first round. In the second, because I was messing with him, he clipped me with a beautiful right cross. It was the most perfect shot I have ever taken. I went back on my heels all the way across the ring and into the ropes, like a stone skipping across water. I wasn’t hurt, more dumbfounded, and I admired him for it. Then I went into him throwing five or six jabs so fast they were like one punch, hooking off the jab, rattling a tattoo on his stomach with left and rights, then rubbed the laces of my glove hard up his nostrils on the sly. Thomas wouldn’t let me go out for a third round. ‘You have got the best left jab I’ve ever seen,’ he said. ‘I’ll enter you for the tournament and you’ll take the £500.’
I went back home determined to stay off the beer and get myself ready. I had no doubts I was going to win. But when I told the Braddocks, they didn’t want me to enter. They thought that boxing in a novices’ tournament was just messing about. I even got a phone call from Big Just. ‘Bartley, what do you think you’re doing?’ he said. ‘You can’t go and fight with those novices, man. Don’t dishonour yourself.’ They all put so much pressure on me that in the end I decided it wasn’t worth it. I never turned up, and my chance of being a boxing champion disappeared.
As one door closed, another one unexpectedly opened. Joe Phillips’s secretary at the garage next to our yard took a phone message and came over with a scrap of paper. She said a man had called and said, ‘Tell Bartley Gorman that Hughie Burton is ready to fight him for the title at Doncaster Races.’ He had left a phone number in Manchester. This was it. Big Just was finally going to defend his title against me. I got Joe’s secretary to ring back and say, in her poshest voice, ‘The coat is the same colour.’ Meaning the challenge was accepted.
How I had waited for this moment. I was in prime condition, yet I knew Big Just would be the hardest fight I could ever have. His pride was insane: he refused to be beaten. A rich traveller called William Lee, who was great pals with Burton, told me how he would take your guts, liver and lights out, and was an animal unleashed. ‘He is the dirtiest fighter in the world,’ said Lee. ‘Beat him to death. Do not let him get going or you will never stop him.’ And this was his best friend!
The challenge was arranged for the Saturday of the St Leger race meeting at Doncaster racecourse. Burton had run Doncaster for years. It was the big meeting for all the rich, flash travellers, who would compete to see who had the best ‘turnout’ of motor and trailer. Everyone would be there. Where better to fight for the title? The whole gypsy world was agog. In the Blackie Boy pub in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a group of influential travelling men gathered. There were Lees and Welches and Francises: ten men in all, and each one agreed to put up £2,000 to back me against Burton, a total of £20,000. They refused to have a drink until the business had been concluded; this was a very serious affair, backing someone against Burton, and they wouldn’t discuss it in drink. That came later. Someone took a photograph of this historic meeting (see photo section).
Come the day, we set off from Uttoxeter in a convoy of half a dozen motors: it is always wise to have enough men to ensure fair play. At the head of the column was my red TR4 with chrome wheels and my left-hand-drive American Galaxy, red and white, with tinted windows and lights like dustbin lids. Only the bravest of my men were there: our Sam – who had been hit by a car and had his leg in plaster – Don Halden, Mick Mould, my Uncle Joe, Soldier Dave, Gandy Hodgkinson, Colin Morfitt, Alan Wilson, Caggy Barrett. I was in the back of the Galaxy with Morfitt driving. As ever before a knuckle fight, I felt no fear. I was twenty-eight years of age, six foot one and fifteen-and-a-half stone, fit, trained and ready. I had grown a chocolate-red quarter-beard and looked like a Viking.
When we reached Doncaster we drove straight to the Park Royal Hotel, where the tough travelling men drank. There was no point in hanging about. ‘Pull up here,’ I said when we reached the pub.
Sam marched through the doors swinging his plastered leg, hammered on the bar with a walking stick until everyone fell silent and announced loudly, ‘My brother has come to fight Burton today – or any other man.’
The bar was jammed with hundreds of gypsy men yet you could hear a feather fall. Then I walked in, bellowing, ‘I can beat any gypsy man in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Europe. I am here to fight Uriah Burton right now on the racecourse.’
In seconds, the pub emptied. To challenge out Doncaster was almost unheard of. Day and night these people would talk about fights and the great fighters, but rarely would they ever get to see them because they were so secretive. To actually turn up amidst a huge gathering and challenge Big Just caused bedlam. Everyone wanted to see this one. They ran out to their cars, trucks and vans and jammed the roads down to the racecourse. I stood on the back of my cousin Pickwick Fury’s transit truck so everyone could see me.
We made our way down to the field. Word had spread like a raging fire and thousands were gathering to see the fight – men, women and children running across the grass to get a good vantage point. There must have been 2000 motors and trailers. The plan was to back four lorries together and tie each corner with rope to make the ring forty feet square. I climbed onto the roof of my dead father’s old A60 van and bawled out my challenge. ‘Burton’s a lemon and I can beat him drunk,’ I shouted. I didn’t mean it – I had too much respect for Big Just for that – but I knew how to drum up interest in a fight. My shirt was off and I had this chocolate stubble and red hair on my chest: the Irish were calling me ‘Thom Gael’, which means Big Red. I shadow-boxed, punching like a robot, my hands electric. Then I began a war dance on the roof of the van, my boots banging on the metal like a giant drum. By the time I had finished the old van was squashed to half its height.
Yet there was no sign of Burton. My people went out searching for him while I continued to shout. They came back and reported that he wasn’t there. He must have been feeling me out to see if I would turn up. I glared into the crowd with eyes like lightning. ‘Bring on Muhammad Ali,’ I shouted. ‘I’m the only white man on earth who can beat Ali.’
When it was obvious Burton wasn’t coming, I challenged everyone out. The best travelling men in England were there but no-one would fight me. For an hour I went berserk. The gypsy world had never seen anything like it.
Burton never arrived. He was testing my mettle and once he learned that I had passed the test, he knew his reign was over. It meant his title was now vacant, and all I needed to cement my succession was to beat another top man. There were no takers that day, and eventually we drove back home. We finally pulled into Phillips’s Yard as it was dark. As Mick Mould left, he put his thumb up to me.