IF YOU HAVE a tongue in your mouth and a brain in your head you can earn money. I loved hawking. I would buy anything, sell anything and trade anything. Money came, money went. Despite the success of my boxing promotions, they took a back seat once I met the Braddock brothers. They got me into horse dealing; it was their life. They always had more than 100 horses, ponies, mules and donkeys at any one time and would puv them – get permission off a farmer to put them on his land (puv is the Romany word for field) then later sneak them all out, owing the farmer a lot of money. Will and Bob would also rustle cattle. I was forever getting them out of scrapes in the middle of the night, horses or cows all over the road, trying to get them into horseboxes with policemen everywhere.
I never stole but sometimes did the odd bit of poaching; well, no-one owns the animals of the earth, do they? Once we were near Rugeley, wheeling and dealing, and pulled up in the countryside in a bullnosed Bedford dormobile. There was a bit of a reservoir and then a hill with a herd of sheep on it. Gandy Hodgkinson said, ‘We’ll rustle a sheep.’
‘Okay then.’
So four of us got out and ran up the hill into the field. The sheep took some catching but eventually we grabbed one and I gave it a bull-hammer straight between the eyes. We got the stunned beast in the back of the dormobile and took it to Gandy’s house, where Soldier Dave killed, skinned and gutted it in the bath with a carving knife. We decided to have a big roast the next day and invite lots of people. The sheep was left in the bath to go cold and eventually we all went to bed.
An eighty-year-old ex-soldier called Alfie rented one of the rooms in Gandy’s house. We were awoken in the middle of the night to hear Alfie wailing, ‘Gandy’s dead, Gandy’s dead.’
Alfie used to get up in the night to go to the loo, but instead of using the toilet he would piss in the sink. After doing his business he had stumbled over the side of the bath in the dark, fallen on the sheep and thought it was Gandy. We couldn’t eat the sheep knowing that Alfie had urinated on it, so in the morning Dave and Colin Morfitt washed it, cut it up into chops and gave them out to all the people in the road. They thought Christmas had come early. I asked one of them later what his chop was like. ‘It was nice,’ he said, ‘but a bit salty.’
Our travels took us all over the country, living by our wits. Once I was with Soldier Dave coming back from Manchester and had no money and hardly any petrol. We got as far as Macclesfield when the fuel gauge hit empty. So we called at a couple of farms, scrounged some plastic bags and filled them with cow muck, then went round a couple of nice housing estates selling the bags at five bob a time as best horse manure. We got back home with a full tank of petrol and enough for a meal and few pints that night. We did it regularly after that. We’d get paid off the farmers for clearing their cowsheds of muck and then paid by the householders to put it on their roses. We couldn’t lose. Scrap metal was another regular earner. We would get dynamos, break off the casing and get all the strands of copper inside. Used batteries were also valuable. You could go out in a mini-van and make a week’s wage in a few hours.
By now I was practised at handling people from all walks of life. I once bought 200 bars of blue steel, each twelve feet long, off a scrap man for a quid each. I put them on a lorry and hawked them round factories for two or three quid each. I went into one big factory with my last fifty bars and the foreman took me up a flight of stairs to see the boss, a self-important little man sitting behind a huge desk. I told him how good this steel was, no rust on it. He came out, had a look, and said, ‘How much?’
‘Three quid each.’
‘I’ll have all of them,’ he said. ‘Take them over there and count them out,’ he ordered his foreman. The foreman counted them and said there were fifty.
‘When will you pay me?’ I asked. This was a Friday and I wanted some cash.
‘I’ll pay you at four o’clock and I’ll pay you by cheque,’ said the little Hitler.
I went back at four and he was in his office, chewing a fat cigar and paying out his men for the week. They were all around him like lapdogs.
‘I’ve got a question to ask you,’ he said, showing his men how tough he was. ‘Where did you get this stuff from?’
He was clearly implying it was stolen. I looked at him and said, ‘Do you think I’m going to tell you where I got this from? What a fool do you think I am? For you to go and buy it at the same price as me? Come on, give me my cheque or I’ll take it away.’
He squirmed down in his seat like a little weed. That man was so pleased to be talked down to for once, instead of all the men lapping up to him. ‘Bring him his cheque,’ he ordered.
We would buy anything, often just for a lark. I once acquired a broken-down piano and left it on the lawn of my friend Manchester Ken. His missus went berserk. Ken had the last laugh. He sold it on to someone after showing them how it worked by playing a tune on it; they didn’t know that only eight keys functioned on it and Ken had memorised which ones they were.
I spent a lot of time in Liverpool, a place my family knew well. My grandfather’s brother, Jimmy Gorman was a ‘tatter’, a rag-and-bone man, all around Merseyside, and is buried in Birkenhead. Many a time I went down by the docks to do deals, buying metal and broken anchors and drinking in pubs so rough the police wouldn’t go there. I had fights in back streets I wouldn’t want to walk down now, and brawls with men on club doors – I always went round with my shirt ripped up the sides and the sleeves rolled up, and they’d try to stop me going in by saying I had to wear a tie. Once inside I used to take off my shirt and dance near the band. They must have thought I was a caveman. Danger was all around me but I couldn’t see it. I thought I was immune to it, because of the way I had been brought up. I was arrogant; there is no point in denying it. For all I know I might have been in the Cavern Club dancing to the Beatles in the early Sixties. The names of the bands meant nothing to me then. I didn’t take any notice of the pop charts. I just liked good rock ’n’ roll.
I was in one dockside pub in Liverpool with a London traveller called Joe Lock, who had four tits, and an Irish tinker called Jackson Delaney. We were talking about fighting.
‘There is no question about it,’ Jackson said to me, ‘I could beat you if I was a bit bigger.’ He was a very good welterweight.
‘Well, I bet you could give me a good fight anyway, Jackson,’ I said. ‘But you ain’t big enough. You know Joe here? He’s your weight. If you’re so good, fight him.’
Joe was straight up for it. He got his shirt off in the pub, his four nipples showing.
‘No, I won’t fight you,’ said Jackson.
I goaded him. ‘Come on, you are making an idiot of yourself.’
Eventually they went out into the yard. It was dark but there were lights in the yard. I was referee: I had to break them and count if one went down. Another man fetched a water bucket. They were both skilful and fought for thirty minutes. Jackson split Joe Lock’s lip so badly that I stopped it. They shook hands afterwards and Joe went to get his lip stitched.
I was often called upon to referee fights because men knew I would see fair play. I even refereed a fight between two women in Moss Side, Manchester, at a pub crowded with gypsies. One was a black-haired Ward, the other a redhead, and they’d had a row. They stripped off to their bras and Dave put the headlights on the motor outside to give them some light. It was a vicious fight, too. There was blood running down between their breasts. A policeman came by, one of the travellers slipped him some money and he just kept on walking, looking the other way. The pub was so rough that every night the police had to come in to call time.
Moss Side was one of my regular haunts. In the Seventies it was a demolition zone: many of the rows of terraced slums were being pulled down to make way for high-rise flats and there were derelict buildings and rubble everywhere. It was full of travellers, especially Irish, who would pull their trailers onto the demolition sites and could easily find casual building work. I went all around there doing deals. You could sell anything in the pubs – antiques, furniture, tools, clocks, you name it. I always made out I only had one of a particular item, even if I had another ten on the motor outside. It made it more desirable.
In recent years Moss Side has become infamous for gang wars and drugs but it was plenty rough in the Seventies too, I can tell you. Imagine a place full of black immigrants off the plantations of the West Indies, mixed with Irish navvies and the local Mancunians, most of them poor. There were boxing gyms and illegal drinking dens and illicit gambling dives, open all hours. If you wanted a fight you could find one in an instant.
One dark night I had come out of the pub and was standing in a shop doorway eating some takeaway food when two black men approached. They both pulled out knives. Without even thinking, I kicked my heel through the shop window behind me and picked up the biggest shard of glass. The two would-be muggers looked at me, looked at the spear of glass, looked at each other and walked off, as coolly as they could. Sensible men.
A man with a bit of a reputation mouthed off at me in the pub one day. I walked outside with Soldier Dave to have a word with him and he jumped in his mini-van and locked the doors.
‘If you want to fight, fight me man,’ I shouted. ‘Get out the van.’
He wouldn’t get out. Dave said, ‘Leave it, he’s a waste of time, all mouth.’
I was still mad. ‘I’ll show him,’ I said, and lifted up the front of his van. That’s how strong I was. He started the van and the wheels were spinning but he couldn’t get away. But neither could I now – if I dropped it he’d run straight into me and kill me! Eventually he cut the motor and I let him go.
Spending so much time in places like Moss Side and the Dingle in Liverpool, I developed a sixth sense for danger. Everywhere I went I was ready for trouble. I needed to be.
*
ONE CHRISTMAS, JOHNNY Wheeldon and I went to Manchester in an A60 van to earn a bit of dough. Johnny, the brother of my girlfriend Gwendoline, had been one of my boxers and could look after himself in a brawl. On the first day I bought a load of copper for £40 and sold it for £150. We went on the beer and were driving back through Moss Side to our digs at the end of the evening when we saw a man lying in the gutter, surrounded by police and flashing lights.
‘Pull over. Travellers,’ I said to Johnny.
The man in the gutter was in a blue serge suit, face down in his own blood on the concrete. He looked dead. It was drizzling with rain and the wet road shone under the streetlight.
‘What’s happened to him?’ I asked the nearest policeman. ‘Was he hit by a car?’
‘No. His son did it.’
He nodded towards a big, blond-headed man being restrained by four policemen. I got out of the car, my sleeves rolled up to the top of my biceps.
‘Have you just done that to your own father?’
The blond man stopped struggling with the officers and looked at me like dirt. He was as big as me and as strong as a bull but was drunk.
‘Yes, and I’ll do worse to you,’ he slurred.
Whether the police let him go, or he broke loose, I don’t know, but anyway he came at me like a madman. I waited for his rush and then bull-hammered him straight to the face. As he began to crumble, I hit him with five or six more full-blooded shots. The policemen watched as he collapsed in a heap.
‘He deserved that,’ I said. Then I got back in the car and we drove away.
A few days later we were still hawking round terraced houses, up entries and in factories, and a man asked me for a feather bed. I went to an antique place, got a mattress for £1, put it in the motor and ran it round to the address he had given me. It was a boarded-up townhouse that looked half derelict. I knocked on the door and they said, ‘Come in.’ Johnny and I took the bed in.
Moss Side is a dismal place in December. It was freezing in this flophouse but there were people living there, with a fire on and a Christmas tree and holy pictures on the wall. Some men were drinking hard liquor. I gave them the bed for nothing, a present for Christmas, and while Johnny was taking it upstairs I crouched in front of the hearth in the living room to warm myself. I happened to look up at a man in an armchair and saw that he had black stitches all over his face. It was the father who had been lying in the gutter a few nights before. He still had on the same blue serge suit. I was startled for a moment and he caught my eye.
‘Hey, you,’ he said, in an evil rasp. ‘You were just looking at me.’
‘No I wasn’t.’
I was thinking, the son must be here, the one I beat up. There’s going to be a riot.
‘I seen you looking at my face,’ he rasped. ‘I’m asking you a straight question, you with the red hair. Do you think you can do better?’
There’s gratitude for you.
‘Yeah, I could. A lot better.’ I stood up.
Suddenly the house came alive. Men appeared in the gloom out of different rooms. This was a death trap. Fortunately Johnny had come down the stairs and quickly weighed up the situation. He pulled a huge knife out of the back of his trousers, held it in front of him and grabbed me by the shoulder. We backed out of the house and got away.
The next day, we went to a demolition site and I asked the foreman if he had any old metal.
‘I’ll sell you the iron,’ he said.
‘Okay.’
‘Come back at one o’clock.’
Now we needed a truck to transport the iron. ‘Let’s go and get some travellers and I’ll take them in on the deal,’ I said to Johnny. We went to a demolition site where forty trailers were parked and the first man I saw was an Irishman called Paddy Doran. I didn’t know him then, but Paddy would later become my best drinking pal. If he saw a butterfly kill an elephant he wouldn’t turn a hair, he has seen that many things.
‘Hey pal, has anyone got a big truck?’
‘My friend Felix has,’ he replied.
Felix Rooney was about fourteen years older than me and one of the best fighters in Ireland. We had met years before when I was a teenager hare coursing in Wales but I barely remembered him.
‘Come in,’ said Felix.
We went in to his trailer and they made us breakfast while we explained the situation. Felix had a twenty-ton tarmac-laying lorry and said he would rent it to us. Then Felix, who was very much the main man on the camp, said, ‘Shall we go to the pub?’
This is typical of the Irish travellers. It was still only midmorning.
‘Okay, but I’ll only have a half,’ I said, fool that I was.
Felix, Johnny and I went into the heart of Moss Side. By the time we’d visited two or three pubs, we were well into the drinking, with the festive atmosphere and more travellers joining us all the time, in big old pubs full of blacks and Irish. Of course, that was the end of going back for the metal at one o’clock. We decided we’d see the foreman the next day.
Johnny ended up having a row with a man in a pub. They went outside and a few of us were watching them fight when the police arrived, arrested us and took us in. They took our names down and did a check to see if we were wanted for anything. ‘Not wanted at the present time,’ it came back. They let us go but warned us, ‘Don’t drive that motor for two hours because you’ve been drinking.’
We walked around for a bit and went into a butcher’s shop with a lot of sheep hanging up with muslin over them. I bought a complete Canterbury sheep for thirty shillings and put it in the back of Johnny’s van. We couldn’t wait two hours so after fifteen minutes we jumped in the van and headed to a pub with a huge, dingy cellar, like a dungeon. There were white prostitutes in there and a full-size photo of Muhammad Ali on the wall. The black man behind the bar was draped in a fake tiger skin. ‘I’m a witch doctor,’ he said. It was one of the roughest pubs in Manchester.
Felix Rooney was by now quite loud and attracting attention. I got drinking with a little black guy called Bobby, who wore a pork pie hat. He was telling me all about Moss Side when suddenly he paused. ‘Don’t look now,’ he said, ‘but they’re going to roll you on the stairs when you go out.’
I leaned back in my chair and casually looked through the corner of my eye. Three or four evil-looking men were leaning on the winding staircase. We were like varmints in a trap. It didn’t look good, especially as they would almost certainly have weapons.
Loudly enough so that they could hear, I shouted to the barman, ‘I’m starving for something to eat. Is there anywhere I can eat?’
‘My brother has got a restaurant up above,’ said the barman.
‘How long is this place open for?’
‘All night.’
‘Then get some more drinks in for everyone, we’ll get something to eat off your brother and we’ll be back down.’
So he gave them the nod on the stairs and they moved, leaving it for later. I got Johnny and Felix and dragged them out. We jumped in the van and were gone.
The evening should have ended there but the real drama had not even begun. We next went to see Felix Doran, who was Felix Rooney’s father-in-law and one of the biggest tarmaccers in Manchester at the time. He was playing the pipes. Old Felix is famed as the best uilleann pipe player in Ireland. By now we were almost legless and after a couple more it was time to go. ‘I’ll leave you now Felix and see you tomorrow,’ I said.
One of the women in the pub, some relation to Felix, stood up and said, ‘You fetched him with you, you take him back home.’
So we put him in the motor and went drinking again. We drank until the pubs shut, singing and carousing. Then Felix said, ‘Let’s go back to my place and have a takeaway,’ by which he meant a crate of beer each. So we did.
I said, ‘Felix, I don’t want to go back to your camp with all the children asleep, we’ll go to some boarding house.’
‘I know a place then,’ he said, ‘not far from the trailers.’
It was a three-storey Victorian house, the only building standing on a crossroads surrounded by rubble and swan-necked lamps. We took the crates up to the top floor. There were rows of beds and two Irishmen in there. We gave them a drink. One had a melodeon with button keys and he played it while Johnny and Felix play-wrestled on the bed, drunk.
I asked the men if there was anything to eat. By now it was one o’clock, too late to buy anything, and they had only bread. Then I remembered the sheep: we could cut it up and fry some chops. I went down the stairs and out into the foggy night. As I got to the van, I found a man in the back taking the sheep out … it was the man in the blue serge suit with the stitches in his face. He looked at me, then ran away with the sheep on his back. ‘Come back with my sheep,’ I shouted. It was farcical. I chased him but he went up some alleyway and I lost him in the fog.
There was nothing I could do but trudge back up the stairs. Eventually Felix decided to go back to his camp, which was less than half a mile away. We’d see about the scrap metal the next day. I lay on a bed and threw an old coat over me and was just drifting off when I heard a terrible commotion outside, shouting and barking. I went to the window and saw Felix in the middle of the road, under the streetlight, with his fists up, roaring, ‘I’m the best man in the thirty-two counties of Ireland.’
There was a mob of men, women and children facing him in a very angry mood. At the head of them was the man who had stolen my sheep.
‘Felix is going to be killed,’ I shouted to John.
We ran down. As we got out, there must have been sixty people attacking Felix. I said to Johnny, ‘Get the motor, quick.’ There was no point running in; there were far too many of them. We got the van and drove into them. They smashed the van to scrap with iron bars and bricks. Felix was on his knees in a mask of blood. I thought he was going to die. I couldn’t even get out of the van, there were that many bricks bouncing off it. Johnny drove off, then turned and came back at speed. We drove at them three or four times to get them away from Felix, with our heads down. The windows were all broken.
On one foray, I shouted, ‘Get under the Morris 1000 van, Felix.’ He managed to crawl under it and the mob never had enough brains to tip it over to get him. Now somehow we had to distract them. We pulled up 100 yards away and got out with the motor still running. It was brick for brick then with forty men. They were overpowering us, coming from the alleys and ginnels, like Indians calling each other in the dark. I got hit in the shoulder and then nearly had my leg broke with a brick. Johnny nearly had his head crushed and was also hit between the legs. We got them away from the Morris 1000 but we couldn’t hold them off any longer.
Felix’s camp was only a minute’s drive away, so I sped there as quickly as I could. A passing driver had rung the police and I saw a blue light at the camp. The policemen were staring at our smashed up van as we yelled, ‘Come on, they are killing a man under a Morris 1000.’ Most of the men from the camp had gone to a dance but Paddy Doran came back with us as we led the police to the scene. Felix was still under the motor with the mob going mad in the streets. I jumped out of the van and shouted, ‘Come up one by one and I’ll fight you all.’
Four riot vans arrived and officers jumped out with their batons ready and dogs snarling at the leash. The Irishmen immediately started brawling with them. Loads were arrested. We managed to get Felix into an ambulance and then followed him to the hospital. He was in a terrible mess but at least he was alive. Johnny and I finally got to bed in another lodging house. It was horrible: you went up stairs and there were rows of damp beds with men on them. I had to sleep with a club under my pillow.
Felix recovered but was never the same man after. I didn’t see him again for three years but he said he got every one of them back, one by one. That night had taught me a very important lesson: one man cannot fight a mob.
*
ONE-ON-ONE was my style but by the mid-Seventies no gypsy man wanted to fight me; they can deny it now but it was true. Others didn’t know who I was and didn’t care.One I encountered in the Travellers Rest pub near the Winking Eye in Derbyshire, a beauty spot from where you can see all the Cheshire plain and the North Wales mountains. I was in there with Will Braddock and a gang. Braddock was rustling cattle at the time and had some in a horsebox outside. I was lying on top of the bar against the handpumps, with a load of women around me, the gypsy fighter. That’s how I was when I was younger. Some of them were pouring Guinness over me and rubbing it into my muscles; Braddock told them it helped condition me.
‘I’ll put an acre of land on him to fight any man in England,’ Will told the pub.
‘I’ll fight him.’
We looked around to see who had said it. There was a big lump of a fellow sitting in a corner drinking a pint of beer, with a group of men. The locals called him ‘Big John’. A lot of men would get jealous when they heard I was King of the Travellers. They’d get the hardest bloke in the pub and wind him up: ‘Go on, challenge him, tell him you’ll give him five hundred pounds if you lose.’ I also used to have a lot of women around me and that made it worse.
‘He only fights travelling men,’ said Braddock
‘I’ll fight him,’ repeated Big John. He got up, walked over and slammed his hand down on the bar. ‘There’s six fivers. That’s all I’ve got.’
This is what happens. Men come from nowhere.
I said, ‘No.’ I didn’t want to fight the guy for thirty quid.
But Big John insisted. He had dark eyes, a white face, a smashed nose and big lips. I found out later he was forty-two years old and an ex-Marine. He looked like he knew the drill. So we agreed to meet the next day on Ladybower Dam on the River Derwent.
We arrived early in the morning. Will Braddock and his men cut down two evergreens with a chainsaw, made four posts out of them, tied rope around them and put saddles on the corners to stop us hitting our heads. That was the ring. The word had spread among the local farmers and labourers and dozens came in tractors and hay carts, hanging off the sides. The one unusual thing about Big John, he never took off his long coat. It did little to protect him – he was big and strong but he couldn’t fight too well and I had little trouble with him. He took some punishment before he was counted out.
In 1974, my Uncle Bartley died. He asked me to go to his deathbed but I couldn’t because I knew he would ask me never to fight again and by now I couldn’t stop. The main arenas for the gypsies were the pot fairs, horse fairs and race meetings. There are many of these events during the year: Appleby, Barnet, Cambridge, Coventry, Doncaster, Epsom, Horsmonden, Nottingham, Stow-in-the-Wold, St Boswells and Musselburgh in Scotland, Ballinasloe and the Puck Fair in Ireland, and so on. I challenged out many of them, with no luck. I remember strutting around Nottingham Goose Fair with our Sam and Bill Braddock and nobody would fight me, even though it was packed with travellers. Nobody would say boo. Yet there were plenty of good men in the Seventies. These were the best of them:
SAM GORMAN
Our mother had made me promise that I would never fight Sam, either in the ring or out. I’m glad, because I would not have cared to fight him: he was the best of the lot, with an eighty-four-inch reach compared to my seventy-five inches, and didn’t care who he was fighting. He smashed Tim Wood, a British champion, to pieces in the gym when Wood was in his prime. He also tried to demolish me in Jack Gardner’s gym at Highfields, Leicester, and I had to get on my bike and tell him to ease off.
‘I could take you, boy,’ I said to him later.
He came back with a line of Muhammad Ali’s: ‘If you even dream that, you better wake up and apologise.’
In 1971, the American heavyweight contender Jerry Quarry came to England to fight the reigning British champion, Jack Bodell. Quarry was class and was looking for top-quality sparring partners. Sam went down to the gym with his gloves and was taken on. After two days, they paid him off. Quarry couldn’t do anything with him; Sam wouldn’t take a backward step, not even to a world-class fighter. Quarry went on to knock out Bodell in one round, so that shows you how good he was. Sam always had the greatest respect for him and later named one of his sons Jerry.
Jack Gardner, the former British heavyweight champion, was on the lookout for a protégé and took Sam under his wing. He said Sam had the best left jab he had ever seen. He also wanted me to sign for him but I said, ‘No, I’m a bareknuckle prize-fighter. I don’t fight with women’s powder puffs on my hands.’ I didn’t really mean it. Eventually Sam was lined up to have his pro debut on a Jack Solomons show at the Café Royal in London. A few days before the bout, Gardner called him to one side and said, ‘Look Sam, I have got a lot of influential friends coming to this show. I don’t want you under any circumstances to let me down.’
‘I tell you what I will do Mr Gardner,’ said Sam.’ I’m letting you down right this minute.’
He grabbed Gardner’s hand, shook it and walked out. It was gypsy pride: he wouldn’t be talked to like that by anyone.
JOHN-JOHN STANLEY
The Stanleys are an old and venerable breed from the New Forest and John-John was their champion. A top fighting man, he is still respected and feared down in Berkshire and Hampshire. He would wear an old-fashioned silk around his waist and was in the papers occasionally for fighting at fairs and shows. He is also a gentleman. A newspaper once reported that he and I were going to fight at a fair but it never happened. He’d have been a handful, even for me. He fought in a low crouch and punched almost exclusively to the body: barefist blows to the ribs can be terribly effective and don’t damage your hands as much as headshots.
John-John’s most famous fight was against his friend ‘Boxer’ Tom Taylor, another name known wherever gypsy men talk fighting. John-John was the bigger man but Boxer Tom could really go: he once beat five bouncers in a fight and can still do somersaults and handstands today. They fought for fifty-five minutes in a field near Watford in 1972. At one stage they had to cut the swellings on Boxer Tom’s eyes with razors so he could see but he kept going. Finally John-John unintentionally caught Tom in the eye with this thumb. His eye was pulled out from its socket and hung down on his cheek and they had to stop the fight. John-John refused to claim victory because it was impossible for Boxer Tom to carry on and they called it a draw. They are very best friends now.
MARK RIPLEY
I fought Mark Ripley down in Kent in the late Sixties. He was a few years younger than me but utterly fearless and by the Seventies was known as a man to avoid. He and I never went at it again but he’d have given me a stern test. I did hear that Ripley wanted to fight Cliff Field, an unlicensed boxer who at the time was the daddy of all them in London – what they call the ‘guv’nor’ down there. That never came off either. I don’t know who would have won but I do know that in a streetfight Ripley would have eaten most men alive.
BOBBY and JAMESY MACPHEE
Two notorious fighting brothers from Scotland, their father, Old Bobby, had been a top man in his day and was head of the clan, descended from Celtic tinsmiths. They went on the rampage at Musselburgh one year and chopped up a load of trailers with buzzsaws, for some reason. Big Jamesy was the champion of Scotland, a mountain of a man who was said to fight in a kilt. I was willing to take him on any time but we never got to it, though I was once on the same ground. I had gone up to Musselburgh Fair, near Edinburgh, which is held every August, to fight another top Scottish knuckler called Jackie Lowe. It never happened – Lowe was warned off by the police, who also came to see me about it. I still went to the fair and that was when I saw Big Jamesy, through the crowd. He was a fierce-looking man and was definitely the Scottish champ, though Lowe disputed it. He never came to me, even though I was on his patch.
Lowe was a very good man but I later heard that he and Jamesy had a row and Jamesy picked Lowe up and put him headfirst through a one-armed bandit. I don’t know if it’s true because I wasn’t there. Lowe was a good technician but Jamesy was an all-in merchant, a big, rough man. He would be in his late forties today and weighs in at over twenty stone. Brother Bobby was another rough diamond but became a born-again Christian, like quite a lot of former gypsy fighters.
JOHNNY FRANKHAM
The Frankhams are from the south-east of England and one of them, Eli, was chairman of the National Romany Rights Association. They also have a long fighting pedigree. Gypsy Johnny was four years younger than me and one of the best British boxers of the Seventies, a skilful light-heavyweight. He was a bit of a clown in the ring and liked a drink but he could use his fists, inside and outside the ropes. He had a couple of very tough British title fights in 1975 with Chris Finnegan, who said Frankham was ‘slippery as a jellied eel’. There was a riot at the Royal Albert Hall after their first fight, when Frankham won by half a point and both sets of supporters piled into each other. Johnny used to gamble away his purse money on the dice.
I challenged Johnny a couple of times to meet me bare-knuckle at Doncaster Races but he didn’t show. I would have liked to test his boxing skills against mine. I was bigger than him but he was quick and experienced. His brother Sam was another good man and one of his relatives, young Bobby Frankham, became a barefist fighter in the Eighties.
SIMON DOCHERTY
The Dochertys are a vast clan of Irish travellers living in England. They had two top fighters called Simon: one was known as Blond Simey and the other Black Simey and they never fought each other because they were cousins. Blond Simey is the son of Barney Docherty, the great Irish knuckle man who was coming to England to fight Big Just when he mysteriously died on a train. I nearly fought Blond Simey several times. I had been out drinking in Coventry with Will Braddock and my younger brother John and drove our Transit van onto an old building site where lots of English and Irish travellers were stopping. Some men came round the van and we got talking to them through the windows. The conversation turned to fighting and one of these Irishmen said, ‘Simon Docherty is the best man among travellers.’
‘No, my brother Bartley is,’ said John.
‘Is that so?’ said the man. ‘Well if he is that good, go down on the camp now. Simon Docherty is on it.’
I looked over and said, ‘What did you say?’
‘He is down there on the camp if you want to fight him.’
‘Fight him?’
I set off in that Transit so fast we bounced over the foundations of demolished houses, the van going up in the air. Even Will, a hard man to unnerve, was frightened.
‘We’re going to get killed,’ he shouted
‘I’ll show you who’s scared,’ I said.
We got down to a camp of fifty trailers. Parked in the middle were two carloads of men, talking. I spun the van around, jumped out and ripped off my shirt. They set two dogs on me: I kicked one into the air and the other ran off. It was a wicked thing to do but I was in a fury. I ran at the motors and tried to overturn one of them and the men fled. Simon wasn’t there.
Three days later, a band of Irishmen came to my mother’s at Hinckley. ‘Is Bartley Gorman here, missus?’ one asked. ‘He’s got a red TK and we want to buy it.’
‘He hasn’t got one of those,’ my mother replied.
‘I’ll tell you the truth, missus. I’ve come to fight him.’ ‘Well he’s not here.’
They left. Ten minutes later, our Sam arrived and my mother told him what had happened. He went berserk. He jumped in the motor with John and clocked up 200 miles looking for them. Fortunately for them, he never found them.
It was later arranged that Simey and I would fight for a purse of £50,000 but it never happened. It would have sparked a total war and neither family would have had any peace so we called a truce. He and Black Simey always wanted to back me after that. Blond Simey is one of the finest fighters ever to come out of Ireland and he and I are now very good friends. He has recently suffered badly from arthritis but will always be tough as teak and runs three or four camps.
BOB GASKIN
My open challenge at Doncaster in 1972 had reverberated through the illegal fighting world. It had also upset the local gypsies, chiefly a family called the Gaskins and their friends. The Gaskins are a notorious breed, the scourge of Yorkshire and the East Coast. They are blond, not dark like most gypsies, and are not tall – five foot six or eight – but solid and really fearsome people.
Their main man at the time was Bob. He was a vicious character who would fight anyone at the drop of a hat. His grandmother, Old Pol Gaskin, had been the best fighting woman among all gypsies but had a fight with my grandmother – who was pregnant with my Aunt Mary at the time – and lost. Perhaps the Gaskins carried a grudge against my family from then on. Certainly there was no love lost. Bob Gaskin had lots of fights, including three against Blond Simon Docherty. Simey lost one but won the other two.
*
ALL OF THIS time, I was letting the unlicensed boxing slide, and others came in on the act. In London, one or two promoters cottoned on that they could draw big crowds by matching brawlers together outside Boxing Board control. And so the London hardmen came on the scene.
The original was probably Donny ‘the Bull’ Adams. A former Barnardo’s boy who graduated to Borstal and later jail, he had been around for years, fighting on motorway service stations and parking lots. He would go to fairs, place a bucket at his feet and let people have three shots at his chin for a pound. He would also pick up a 56lb weight with his teeth. He had nearly fought Hughie Burton ten years before but he was now well over the hill and going grey.
In 1975, it was announced that he was going to fight a former Essex jailbird called Roy Shaw for the title of ‘Guv’nor of London’. Shaw was no spring chicken either but the papers were full of it, calling it ‘the fight of the century’, while Adams was billed as ‘King of the Gypsies’, which was bullshine, as he wasn’t even a traveller. Shaw was nicknamed ‘Pretty Boy’. I didn’t know anything about him except what the papers said – that he was a vicious criminal who had served fifteen years for a bullion robbery and had been one of the hardest men in the prison system. The pair of them even went on a television talk show saying how they would both fight to the death.
I thought it was all hokum but our Sam and his pal Matt Lee, a London traveller, both wanted to see the fight and kept pestering me to go. So on December 1, 1975, we drove out to this Big Top in a field at a place called Winkshire in Berkshire. Every villain in London must have been there. Sam and I shouldered our way through the crowd – people tended to move out of the way when we came through – and walked down to ringside. Sam looked at me. He could read my mind. I was going to wait until the fight was over, then get in the ring and challenge whoever was still standing.
‘There’s going to be murder if you get in there,’ he said.
‘I’m going to challenge the winner,’ I said.
‘There’ll be murders.’
He was right. The security was very heavy, with bullnecked hired men in monkey suits trying to control hundreds of loud, drunken East Enders. Once the two boxers were in the ring, a burly scrap merchant from Wisbech in Cambridgeshire suddenly jumped through the ropes to challenge them. Adams and Shaw both grabbed him and the security grappled him to the floor and threw him out. If they had done that to me there would have been major problems. After that the security was even tighter – there was no way of getting into the ring.
The fight itself was a joke. Shaw knocked Adams down with his first punch, hit him a few more times while he was on the deck and then stuck the boot in. He was pulled off by the referee and the stewards and declared the winner. It was all over in three seconds.
The papers were full of it again the next day. I don’t want to put any man down but Adams looked ancient and Shaw was thirty-nine. I am sure either would have found many a traveller happy to satisfy them on Gallows Hill at Appleby Fair. What did annoy me was that the winner was described as the bareknuckle champion of England. That was my title, and I couldn’t let that go. So I sent a message to Shaw through the pages of the national newspapers. This was the Daily Mirror:
NOW PRETTY BOY FACES A GYPSY’S CHALLENGE
A bizarre challenge has been thrown out to Roy ‘Pretty Boy’ Shaw, self-styled barefist boxing champion of Olde England.
A gypsy ‘king’ wants to fight him in an illegal barefist fight – if necessary on a ship outside British territorial waters.
Burly Bartley Gorman claims Shaw is just a brawler. He said: ‘Bareknuckle fighting is a traditional and honourable way of fighting in gypsy camps. This man Shaw could not stand up to our scientific and historic way of fighting.’
Recently police stopped attempts by Shaw to fight Donny ‘The Bull’ Adams without gloves. Eventually the two met – with gloves on – and Shaw KO’d Adams for the title ‘The Guv’nor’.
Gorman said: ‘I saw that contest and he has no right to that title. I have to fight him for the honour of my people – even if it does mean on a ship outside territorial waters.’
Gorman, who lives in a gypsy camp near Leicester, claims his ‘brothers’ would raise £20,000 for a side stake if he fought Shaw.
Shaw said: ‘I would be prepared to talk about it. He doesn’t worry me.’
As I say, I don’t want to do another man down. ‘As a rough and tumble fighter Shaw is one of the best,’ I told the reporter. ‘But I think I am better. I’m a heavy puncher and a very good mover. Shaw can call himself “The Guv’nor” but if he is using the title barefist boxing champion of Olde England, he has no right to, unless he wins it from me. Someone is willing to stake me £20,000 to win but I’m not interested in the money side. I am fighting for the honour of my people.’
My challenge was serious. There was talk of us fighting at Leicester with two-ounce gloves. Our Sam, Don Halden and Chuck Bodell were going to help me prepare for it and we had a referee and timekeeper lined up. But it came to nothing. Shaw went on to beat up someone called ‘Mad Dog’ Mullins and then won and lost against Lennie McLean. None of these were bareknuckle fights, just unlicensed boxing shows. I had finished with boxing by then. I couldn’t see the point. If you put fences and barbed wire in front of a lioness on the Serengeti Plain, how would it catch a gazelle? It is the same as putting gloves on a man to fight. Who says you have to wear gloves? Who says you have to have a ring?
They made good money and there were some reasonable men on the unlicensed boxing circuit, like Cliff Fields, who had been a half-decent licensed pro, but there was also a lot of bull talked. Shaw never fought a decent bareknuckle man in his life that I know of, while Lennie McLean would later claim to have defeated someone called ‘Pablo the Gypsy’. Never heard of him – and believe me, if there had been such a traveller, I’d know. McLean, a bull of a man who looked the most intimidating of the lot, took the title of ‘Guv’nor’ off Shaw and it became his nickname. He and I would nearly come to it a few years down the line.
I did briefly meet Roy Shaw many years later, at the graveside of the London gangster Reggie Kray, whom I had got to know towards the end of his life. Shaw must have been in his early sixties but he looked fit and tanned and still had an aura of menace. He certainly has a fighter’s eyes. As to who would have won out of the two of us, well I’ll leave that to your imagination.
I will say that these unlicensed shows were nowhere near as rough and dangerous as was hyped. They built up the fighters as invincible killing machines who could knock down walls and uproot trees with their bare hands. Most of them were in fact over-the-hill ex-pros, ageing bouncers or bully-boys too unfit or unskilled to ever make it in the ring. The bouts took place in public, before big crowds, under bright lights, with a referee and cornermen and security staff and medics at ringside. Some of them were fixed – the whole purpose was to make money, so nobody really cared. No-one was going to suffer permanent damage.
Bareknuckle fights are utterly different. They are illegal. They are held in secret. There are no padded gloves, gumshields or foul protectors. No time limit. No ring. The fighting area will be surrounded by the family and friends of the two combatants. Emotions run high. Many in the crowd will be half-crazed on adrenalin and drink, and some will have concealed weapons. And there are no fixed endings – ancient family honour and pride is at stake, not just cash.
In fact the fights became too serious: a matter of life or death. Something I was about to discover in the most notorious event ever at a gypsy prize-fight.