MY FIGHT FOR THE title was arranged by two of the most notorious gypsies who ever lived. Will and Bob Braddock were living outlaws: cattle rustlers, horse dealers, fighters and drinkers, pure-born gypsies who lived on hedgehogs and duck eggs and ate tripe green. They could earn money like water yet would give you their last farthing; lived by their own code and feared no one. They were my type of men.
‘Look out for the man with a straight finger,’ my dad used to tell me. I never knew what he meant until one day our Sam came to me in Uttoxeter and said, ‘I have met this man and once you see him you will never leave him while he lives.’ It was Will Braddock. He came to one of my boxing shows and I saw that he had a straight finger: Will claimed he had been bitten by a stallion and had been unable to bend it ever since, though I later learned it was his brother Bob who bit him. He also claimed they were related to James Braddock, former heavyweight champion of the world. My dad had known I would find these men one day.
Will wore cream-coloured breeches and Luton shoes – yellow leather riding boots with elastic down the sides – and carried a cane. He was the greatest dealer you ever saw and used to shout ‘Hellfire, pops-a-lary’ when he was excited. Bob was six foot four, wore a watch and chain, a suit with big checks and a bowler hat. He had more cuts and scars than any man I had ever seen and had twice fought the great Atom Bomb, Tom Lee. Bob could eat for three hours: he would put out a market stall, lay it with a table cloth and then cover it with boiling hens, ham hocks, salted beef, boiled pigs’ tails, cows’ udders and sheep’s panshers, washed down with bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale.
They lived their own way. For all his rough edges, Will never swore or cursed in his life, and they had a skewed sense of propriety. Once all four Braddock brothers – the other two were Jack and Isaac – decided to visit the Queen. They drove down to Buckingham Palace in an American sedan, arrived at the gates and demanded to see ‘their’ monarch. They thought they could just walk in and have a visit with Her Majesty and were very disappointed when the police arrived and escorted them away.
Will had bought a smallholding near what is now Alton Towers amusement park, not far from where I lived, and his base was the Raddle, a country pub with horse brasses and framed prints that overlooks the ancient Croxden Abbey and Hollington quarry, from where red stone has been cut for centuries to build churches and stately homes. The quarrymen would drink in the pub and that’s where it gets its name – the red clay on their boots would stain the floor, and ‘to raddle’ means to make red. It had been a notorious pub but had quietened down until Will came on the scene.
We drank in there all night. There was singing, shouting, wenching, brawling and dealing, always dealing. Will and Bob were never happier than when buying and selling and both carried enough folding money to choke a horse. Hands were always being slapped to close deals, and they were shrewd. They could make a man bid twice what he wanted just by psychology.
We also had a tarmaccing team. ‘Cowboy’ Jessie Evans had black catgut around his eyes where he had stitched his own cuts after fights. He could lay tarmac as thin as a razor blade and was known as ‘Skimmer’. Reg Martin, another one of the band, was the biggest conman in the country. He once had a fight with Hans Strieger, the all-in wrestler, at Longnor Races and was thrown all over the place; I was then going to fight Strieger but it never came off. There was also Black Nelson Boswell. I found him parked at the side of a country lane in a three-wheeler Reliant Robin with a trailer behind it and chickens, greyhounds and ducks in little cages. He had on a great trilby hat and a handkerchief round his neck with a wedding ring through it, and his eyes were that dark he looked like Herman Munster. He was so big I couldn’t believe he could fit in the bubble car.
‘Can you find me somewhere to stop, brother?’ he asked.
‘There’s a good tan down the road.’ Tan means a stopping place in Romany; gratch is the equivalent in Cant. He moved onto Will Braddock’s smallholding and became part of our group. We travelled in cattle boxes to tarmaccing jobs and at the end of each job, when we were paid, we’d have what Braddock called ‘the big bust-up’, an all-night drinking and singing session.
After Hughie Burton had failed to turn up Doncaster Races, I had challenged out every site in the British Isles but no-one would fight me. So Will contacted travellers, horse dealers and scrap metal merchants around the country to find the best fighter willing to take me on. Will also wanted to make a bit of money by betting on me. At that time there were a lot of trailers housing men working at the JCB plant at Rocester, not far from the Raddle pub. Some were relatives of a top fighter called Jack Fletcher, from London way. He was contacted – unbeknown to me – and said he would be happy to fight me.
We were tarmaccing the Raddle’s car park and on this particular day I barrowed twenty-eight tons of tarmac single-handed: two men shovelled it in and I pushed it. The landlord paid us and it was time for the big bust-up. Yet for some reason, Will didn’t want me to drink. Everybody was on the beer except me and I was a bit put out by it.
‘If you drink, owd lad, I’m going from here,’ said Will. ‘You are supposed to be getting fit.’
I listened to him because I respected him, but I was upset. I also couldn’t figure out why the phone kept ringing for him, and he kept getting up to make calls himself, because he was never a phone man. The later it got, the more fed up I became – I’d only had a couple of barley wines – and was about to go when Bob ordered some dinner to get me to stay.
I should have realised something was afoot. Will used to tell me, ‘They will only come for you when you are drunk, owd lad.’ (His prediction about them coming for me when drunk would come true when I met a fighter called Henry Francis – but that comes later.) He was keeping me sober for a reason. He knew that I only wanted to fight Big Just; anything less did not mean much to me. If he had told me about Fletcher I would have rowed with him and gone home, but he knew that once the man arrived I would not back down.
It was closing time when the door opened and a large crowd of travelling men came in. This was very unusual in such a remote place. They included Nunns, Webbs, Kidds and Fletchers, all gypsy breeds. The Kidds and Nunns in particular were wealthy men, dressed to the nines in suits and ties. ‘Big Daddy’ Walter Harrison from Cheshire arrived, a twenty-stone giant and one of the great gypsy fighters. I couldn’t understand what they were all doing there.
‘Hey, there’s a man here to fight you, owd lad,’ shouted Will Braddock.
The newcomers had brought Jack Fletcher with them and he was outside in a motor home. Fletcher had a reputation: he had beaten some good men in Ireland and Scotland, including Lander Scarrott, and had drawn with Levi Silks, a hard man from East Anglia. I had heard of him but thought he was just on the verge of past it, aged about thirty-seven. He wasn’t a full-bred gypsy but three-quarter-bred, I believe, and worked as a roadway contractor. They called him ‘Ganger Jack’.
‘Where is this man, then?’ I asked.
Will beckoned me outside and we went, followed by the rest of the pub. There was this big motor home, like a converted bus, and Fletcher was inside it, lying on a bed. Will knocked on the door and Fletcher opened it. I was taken aback: he looked just like Hughie Burton, the exact size and build – shorter than me but heavier. His eyes were narrow and close set, he had a drooping blond moustache and wore a white shirt and Luton shoes laced at the front. I was fit back then, like two Jack Johnsons, but this man looked a handful. Everyone was looking at the two of us but saying nothing. It was up to us.
‘Have you come to fight me?’ I asked.
‘I haven’t come for a picnic,’ said Fletcher. ‘We’re going to fight for Burton’s vacant crown.’
To be honest, I didn’t really feel up for it; I was stiff from moving all that tarmac. But I was showered, shaved and sober and had no excuses. There’s no putting a fight off for a day with travellers: when you’re challenged, you fight. With Will and Bob leading the way, we all set off to walk the few hundred yards down a gravel track that cut through fields into Hollington quarry. The moonlight was so bright you could pick up a pin. The quarry was a levelled area a few hundred yards across, enclosed by cut walls of stone: a natural amphitheatre. In the middle was a building with a large spotlight on the side. Someone switched it on and the yard was bathed in a yellow glow. You could make out the big saws and lumps of stone lying all around, spindles and broken church crosses and puddles of water in the reddish mud where lorries had driven through.
The men formed a loose circle around us and Fletcher took off his shirt, his braces still dangling from his waist. He was butty and solid and even in the half-light I could see his skin had a sheen; he wasn’t some drinking man just pretending to be fit. He was in prime condition. Good. That was what I wanted. Fletcher had been building up to a big title affair and I hadn’t: in a way it felt like just another street fight to me and I didn’t have a nerve in my body.
There was a brief but lively argument over having Nelson Boswell as referee. The Kidds claimed he wasn’t independent but in the end accepted him. Nelson had seen a lot of fights and knew what to do. I stripped off, ready to go in jeans and American shoes, though I would have liked my handkerchief to tie around my waist, like the old pugilists used to.
Bob Braddock stepped forward, his bowler hat held high in his hand. ‘This fight is for the championship of the gypsies of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales,’ he declared. ‘Whoever witnesses it here tonight must go forth and tell it how it was, and if they do not, then they will answer to me.’
Then Nelson took off his shirt, revealing a big white belly and dark-tanned arms. He told everyone to keep back and motioned us together. There were to be no rounds, no kicking and no hitting a man on the deck.
‘He’s going to test you out, owd lad,’ whispered Will Braddock into my ear. ‘You had better win this one because I’ve got an acre of land on you.’
And so, heel-deep in red clay mud under the glare of the quarry spotlight, we fought to be King of the Gypsies.
*
WITH A SHARP JAB flush on my nose, Fletcher drew first blood. I was too confident, with my hands too low. They haven’t fetched a mug here, I thought. I unleashed some power on him and he fell back against the door of a corrugated shed. He let go a right and it missed but as he came back he hit me with an elbow below the eye and put pins and needles in my head.
The boundaries of a prize-fight are fluid; there are no fixed ropes to keep you in. You can cover a lot of ground, moving, jumping, tripping over things, banging up against buildings, with the crowd all the time melting and reassembling around you in a swarm. We scuffled around, the mud up to our ankles, as the Kidds shouted, ‘Muller him,’ which means ‘kill him’ in Romany, and our Sam shouted, ‘Carib,’ which means the same in Irish Cant.
Fletcher pulled me in. He had the grip of a wrestler and nearly threw me with a cross-buttock. I ripped myself free and after that there was no need for Nelson Boswell or anyone else. I unloaded with both hands and demolished Fletcher. He floundered, ducking down to avoid my blows and I knew he was finished. He caught me with a desperate body shot but I smacked an almighty left hook into his jaw and he fell in the clay.
‘Count,’ I ordered Nelson. I was always a man for the count – it means there can be no argument afterwards. Nelson tolled off the seconds up to ‘ten’, but there was no way Fletcher was getting up.
My friends came around me, our Sam slapping me on the back, the others shaking my hands. ‘We have a new champion now,’ declared Bob Braddock. I raised one bloodied fist aloft. I had done it. I had fulfilled my destiny. I was King of the Gypsies, bareknuckle champion, the toughest unarmed man in the country. Little did I know that my trials were just beginning.
Fletcher’s friends helped him up. He and I had nothing more to say: I rarely talk to my opponents afterwards and anyway, he didn’t seem too friendly. We went back in the pub and the celebrations began. By 5am I had drunk twenty-eight bottles of Newcastle Brown, and the party went on nonstop for three nights and days. The Nunns disappeared back to the flatlands of Norfolk but other travellers arrived at the Raddle from Ireland, Wales and Cornwall, pulling their trailers onto the car park and the surrounding fields: Prices, Lees, Hearns, Finneys, Calladines, Rileys and many others. We sang all the old songs: The Wild Rover, The Black Velvet Band, The Shade of the Old Apple Tree and Will’s favourite, The Man You Don’t Meet Every Day. Though thousands of pounds had changed hands in wagers, I never got two shillings out of it. All I wanted was the title – I had considered myself the best man for years, and now it was ‘official’.
I later found out that they took Fletcher to his relations on the JCB site and in the middle of the night he got up spewing blood. He was taken to Burton Hospital and kept in for nearly a week with two broken ribs. I hadn’t come out unscathed either; I had a black eye and a bloody nose. I never saw Fletcher again, but a year ago someone told me about him and said, ‘He will never forget the fight he had with you, Bartley.’ I won’t forget it either.
Within twenty-four hours, every gypsy in the country knew I had won Burton’s crown. Hughie himself even sent me a telegram of congratulations. He could still call himself a King of the Gypsies – once you have held the title, you are King until you die – but I was now the champion. I think he was glad to be rid of the most dangerous title on earth.
There was also a police enquiry after the fight and both Braddocks were hauled in for questioning. ‘Never again, owd lad,’ Will said to me.
*
THE BAREKNUCKLE WORLD was now where I belonged and, as champion, I could expect the challenges to come – and come they did. The first was in a pub in Buxton, Derbyshire, one quiet afternoon. Alan Wilson was there with his girlfriend, whom we called the ‘Black Widow’, young Geoff Barnett and a couple of others. It was a real pub – sawdust on a worn pine floor, old wooden stools, hand-pulled beers – and we’d had a few drinks when in walked a dozen men.
They wore big, dirty coats with the waists tied up, string tied around their breeches, and clogs. I knew there was going to be bother the minute they walked in; I always know. They had ferrets with them, terrier dogs, greyhounds and lurchers, and steam was coming off them. They were carrying dead rabbits, hares and pheasants, and stank of dead animals. They were hunters. Killers.
There was nobody else in the pub except an old man in the corner smoking a pipe. They came and sat around us. I was in the prime of my life then. If I had a new shirt I’d rip it up the seams and roll the sleeves up to my shoulders. We were drinking heavy beer – even the women were drinking pints – and we got talking to these men. One introduced the leader of them. ‘This is Henry Quentin, gypsy man.’
I’d heard of him. He lived in a wagon in a wood on a hillside in Derbyshire. He had shot his own half-brother dead and done ten years for it. He was taller than me, a big, fine-looking man with jet-black hair and wore an old soldier’s coat with brass buttons, the sleeves pulled up to his elbows. The others were a mix of gypsy men, half-bred gypsy men and non-gypsy men: a band of what we call slinks – troublemakers, for want of a better definition. Their greyhounds were slobbering and panting all around me in the sawdust.
‘How much do you want for a couple of rabbits,’ I asked Quentin.
‘A pound for two.’
‘I’ll have two then.’
The rabbits were still warm. Quentin took a peg knife from his pocket, held up one of the rabbits and stuck the blade in. He cut the sinews of one back leg and pushed the other through it, then stretched the rabbit so it stayed stiff when cold and could be hung by the crossed legs. Then he stuck the knife in its stomach, slit it open and pulled out its guts. He held the bloody mess in his hand – guts, kidneys, liver, shitbag, the lot – lifted it to his throat and swallowed it whole. Then he got his pint of beer and swilled it down. He got the other rabbit and did the same again. I’m rough, but I had never seen anything like this. It nearly put me off buying them.
I have always been one to get my round, even for people across the other side of the pub who are part of our group but not sitting with us. I wouldn’t go in a bar if I couldn’t buy my round. So after I bought the rabbits, I got up and bought drinks for everyone. There was only one of Quentin’s band, a little fellow in a Robin Hood hat sitting with a bottle of Guinness, who refused a drink. There’s always a screw that you can’t unscrew and always some man that’s going to cause trouble, and he was it. A couple of times I got up to fetch trays of drinks and both times he declined.
Everything was going okay, the jukebox was playing, I was talking about hare coursing and they were on about badger baiting and cockfighting and fox killing. Then this little feller put his hand on me and said, ‘I tell you something. I’ll never drink with you again.’
‘Why not?’
‘You bought everyone a drink that’s around this table but you never bought me one.’
‘I asked you two or three times.’
‘No you didn’t.’
‘I did.’
‘Well,’ he says, ‘I’ll never drink with you again.’
He caused everything to go quiet in the room. I knew this was trouble. I had been there a thousand times before.
‘Right,’ I said, ‘I’ll get you a drink now. And you’ll drink it.’
‘I won’t.’
I went to the bar, bought a bottle of Guinness and put it in front of him.
‘I won’t drink it,’ he said.
‘If you don’t drink it, I’m going to push it right down your throat. Now drink it.’ So he did.
Slowly, Henry Quentin got up. He was a tall man. He turned towards the jukebox, took a running kick at it and smashed it. Then he kicked two or three tables over. This was all for my benefit. The poor barman didn’t say boo. I knew Quentin could fight but I didn’t know he was a prizefighter. I later found out he’d had about ten prize-fights and lost only once.
‘Do you want that man out?’ I asked the barman.
He didn’t answer. He was frozen with fear.
‘Hold it,’ said Quentin. ‘Who’s going to put me out? You?’
We were now facing each other at the bar.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘before we go any further, do you know who I am? I’m a gypsy man.’
‘Yeah? Do you know who I am?’
‘No.’
‘I’m the king of them.’
As I said it, he threw a right cross at me. ‘Hang on, hang on,’ I said. I wanted a prize-fight, not a bar-room brawl. He stopped.
‘So you’re the King of the Gypsies?’ he said. ‘So if I beat you then I’m king of them?’
‘Yeah.’
So they pulled the chairs back and a title fight began there and then. That’s the way it is.
Quentin put up a good fight. He backed me into the wall, knocked a picture frame down and caught me with a few because he hadn’t long been in and I’d had a few drinks. He was determined to beat me and all his men were shouting, ‘Go on, give it him!’ The Black Widow jumped on the bar screaming, ‘Go on, Bartley, beat him,’ and Alan Wilson was yelling too. I accidentally trod on one of the dogs and made it yelp, and as I looked down at it, Quentin almost broke my jaw with a right. Someone else threw a dead rabbit at me, hitting me on the side of the face.
I backed Quentin along the bar but he kicked me in the shins with his clogs: hard wood on bone. I drew back and bull-hammered him so hard that he flew through the swinging doors of the pub. Outside, on the pavement at the crossroads in the middle of Buxton, were some railings and somehow his head jammed in them. That brought a hush down in the pub.
‘Is there any of you other men wants a fight with me now?’
I glared at the rest of them. You have to – you can’t sit back down drinking once the ball’s gone up. A blond-haired man with a flattened nose looked a tough one and I thought he was going to fight me, but he shook his head. We drank our beer – I never, ever, leave the beer – then left. As we walked off down the street they were still trying to pull Quentin’s head from the railings.
We split up and I went with young Geoff Barnett to a place at the top of the square where they sold takeaway food. We heard a fire engine heading down towards the pub to cut Quentin out. I jumped in the Mini with Geoff and we sat eating our chicken and roast ’taters when who should come along but the man in the Robin Hood hat. I gestured him over.
‘Come here.’
He stopped.
‘Let me tell you something,’ I said. ‘Never, ever, ever, cause anything like that in a public house with me again, for no reason. Else I’ll break your nose.’
He was too mean to be afraid. He stared back at me with his beady eyes. ‘If you touch me, I’ll blow your head off,’ he said. He meant it.
‘You’ll blow my head off? Well, if you’re going to do that, I’d better give you a reason to do it.’
I grabbed him by the shoulders through the open window, pulled him into the Mini and headbutted him half a dozen times, then threw him out and threw his hat on top of him. We left him there in a heap and went into the Eagles pub, stopping for half an hour before we headed home.
Five minutes after we had left the Eagles, the little man came in looking for me with a twelve-bore gun. When he saw I wasn’t there, he had a row with another man and blasted him stone dead in the bar. It was in News of World the next day. The landlord and customers identified him and he got fifteen years. I later heard he killed another man in prison.