THE GYPSIES WERE fanatical over me when I was fighting. No matter where I went, men would study me from yards away. If I went into a pub they would all crowd in. Most just wanted to be in the company of the champion fighter but there were others whose intentions were less friendly.
They lurked in corners, in pubs and clubs, at fairs and on campsites, and would stand and stare, trying to catch my eye, itching for trouble. Many were wild, unknown men. I called them Suicide Fighters. As I got older, I could sense more and more of them coming out of the woodwork and could spot them a mile away. They would rarely walk up and challenge me to my face. They liked to study me and pick their moment. ‘They will come for you when you are drunk, my lad,’ Will Braddock would warn.
I was at Newcastle Fair with Tucker Lee when half a dozen Suicide Fighters came into the pub in turn and challenged it out. I was sitting with a crowd of Lees and Prices, watching as each of these roughnecks came in and declared, ‘I’m the best man in Wales,’ or, ‘I’m the best man in Staffordshire.’ This was for my benefit, though not one said anything directly to me. I let them blow off: when I didn’t take them up, they had to fight each other. ‘There was that many fights that if a man had gone round afterwards with a ragbag collecting the clothes off the floor they would have had a good weigh-in,’ Tommy Lee said later.
In the end Will Braddock stood up and announced, ‘I will put an acre of land on this man.’ Then he turned to me. ‘You had better say something here.’ So I stood on the table among the beer glasses, ripped off my shirt and challenged out every man in the pub. Suddenly nobody wanted to fight. I sat down again. Beside me were Ivan Botton, the champion of Nottinghamshire, and Pete Tansey, a bodybuilder who was one of my sparring partners. It would take a brave man to push his luck with them – but there were those willing to do it. An eighteen-stone, dark-haired man – not a traveller – walked in. He was Micky Leek, said to be the toughest man in the Potteries. He came straight to our table and, in a stiff, formal manner, said to me, ‘I hereby challenge you out to a fight. I am not a gypsy but we will call it the Heavyweight Championship of the Midlands.’ He put both his hands on the table and leaned towards me as he said it.
I was a bit taken by surprise. ‘Will you?’ was the best I could manage.
‘Yes.’
He was calling my bluff. Then I got my bearings. ‘I’ve no need to fight for the championship of the Midlands when I’m the champion of the country.’ I stood up. ‘Come on then, let’s get it on.’
‘No, no, no. I mean in six months’ time when I’ve done my training.’
He had thought I would duck out. I insisted that we fight there and then but he backed down.
It was no good relying on the Queensberry Rules. You had to be ready for anything: wrestlers, streetfighters, headbutters, martial artists. One of the latter was Robert ‘Rodey’ Shaw. He had been one of my young unlicensed boxers a decade earlier but after Doncaster I had lost interest in promoting and hadn’t seen Rodey in years. Then one afternoon I was sitting in the long grass at Fort Woodfield having a little picnic of ham, tomatoes, spring onions and a glass of beer. Enjoying myself. Up came a man on a motorbike. It was Rodey. He had to introduce himself because he was a big man now – 5ft 10in and 15st – and I didn’t recognise him. He had made himself like a rock, really fit, a scary man with black curly hair and eyes that met in the middle.
We shared some food and drink and he told me that for ten years he had been studying the martial arts and had become a fifth dan. He had been to China and Japan, wore black shoes like slippers and could walk without making a sound. He later fetched me books and photos of him training with monks. He had also been in the Army, in the SAS or some such: he could hide in the grass and ten men couldn’t find him, until all of a sudden he’d leap up in front of you. He had some moves. He could grab you by your nipples, pull you to him and butt you. Rodey took to hanging around my site, prowling about practising his martial arts in his black outfit and belt, showing off these lethal moves. A lot of men visited and they were all wary of him; they thought he was a madman. I laid down one rule to him: ‘Rodey, when any travelling men come around here, don’t start showing moves in front of me. You can show anyone else but don’t bother with me.’
One day I was lying on the floor in the mobile home watching a wildlife documentary on the TV. Outside was a group around a fire, talking. I was building on the site at the time and had five or six tons of concrete blocks lying around. Rodey would smash them, breaking the blocks with his fists, his feet, even his forehead. Sometimes he’d have you hold a block up and he’d sidekick it and break it in two. I was always telling him to stop or I’d have no blocks left. He wanted these men to hold one for him but none had the nerve to do it. I was watching this thing about wildebeest on the African plain when I heard a shout.
‘Bartley, will you come and hold this block?’
I’m thinking, I wish he’d stop breaking these blocks. ‘Hold it yourself.’
They all came to the door and started nagging. I got up, looked out and there was another load of blocks broken.
‘Give it here,’ I said. I held a block and Rodey kicked it in half straight into my chest.
‘There you are. Now, you broke a hundred blocks, just pack them up and let me watch this programme.’
I went to walk back into the mobile home. Rodey blocked my path. He sank into a stance and threw a lightning volley of punches and kicks an inch from my face while growling and making animal noises.
‘Excuse me Robert, I want to watch the television.’
He wouldn’t let me pass. Now I was really annoyed. He’d broken my blocks, stopped me watching the documentary and done what I told him never to do, bother with me in front of other men.
When you are messing with a boxer in the ring, you don’t play him at his game. Otherwise he’s onto a winner; it’s like trying to sing against Tom Jones. My motto with a boxer is attack and never finish until he falls at your feet: don’t give him a chance to do his moves. It was the same with this man: give him time and space to do his thing and he could take your Adam’s apple out with a kick. I’m a bareknuckle prizefighter: rabbit punch, the lot. The fifth dan is going to do the same. So my thinking is to move in on him and put him on the defence all the time. Otherwise he would destroy me. He wasn’t there to play games.
So I walked straight at him and unloaded the heavy artillery. He staggered but didn’t fall; instead he tried to grab my hands to get me in an armlock. I blasted him back and he ripped his teeth across the edge of one of my hands: I found out later they call it the ‘tiger’s teeth’. But I was too fast and punched too hard for him. I backed him up against the side of the trailer and would have slaughtered him if the other men hadn’t restrained me.
‘Rodey, I did warn you.’ I was annoyed, blood on my hands.
He went to swill his face off with water. ‘We must never do this again Bartley,’ he said, cleaning away the blood. ‘No-one was doing anything, only you.’
Rodey eventually lost it mentally. He had done too much fighting. He came to see me one day after an argument with his wife and asked for a piece of string: he wanted to hide out in the woods and was going to use it for snares to catch animals. I told him to go home to his family. That was the last time I saw him. Not long afterwards he was driving to Burton upon Trent and crashed into a lorry and died. The strange thing was that the lorry had ‘Robert Shaw’ on the side, which was his name. He was only thirty-eight. I was very upset because he was a very kind man and even though he was only a labourer he left £10,000 to the Freemasons and a lot of money to children’s charities.
*
LIAM GALLORAN WAS built the same as Rodey Shaw: a short block of a man with mixed Irish and traveller blood. He had seen the inside of a few jails and was a notorious prison fighter; he had once knocked out a warder and had a run-in with Paul Sykes, a former heavyweight title challenger from Yorkshire who was one of the most feared men in the prison system. He also went to Ireland for prize-fights.
I once went into a bar with Liam and he called for two pints. For some reason – perhaps Liam was barred – the landlord refused him. Liam smashed the entire bar to smithereens in less than ten seconds. I stood there with my mouth hanging open while he wrecked all of the fixtures and fittings with a chair. I knew this was a police job for sure so I left sharpish and drove off in my Transit van. I don’t mind admitting I wanted to get away from the scene of the crime. I didn’t know that Liam had followed me out and jumped onto the roof rack. When I finally pulled up I opened the door and this grinning head looked down from the roof and said, ‘Are you all right, Bartley?’
Though he lived in Manchester, Liam used to hang around in Stoke-on-Trent with some Irishmen, a couple of whom had been slung out of America for prize-fighting. I sometimes went for a drink and a song with them. On this particular day we were in the Five Towns pub in Hanley and these men were saying they had tried to get Liam a prize-fight in Boston but it had fallen through when they were deported.
One of them said, ‘Well, why go to America when you can have a fight here?’ and indicated me. We were all drinking, my sleeves were rolled up and the pub was full. ‘You ain’t got the money for him to fight me,’ I replied. I had no intention of fighting Liam; he was a friend.
Liam said nothing at first, then piped up, ‘You don’t have to have money if you are a travelling man. I’ll fight you for nothing as long as we remain friends after.’
‘Let’s go out on the car park,’ I said.
‘No,’ said Liam, ‘where the argument starts, I settle it.’
He ripped his shirt off in the pub and we fought. I shouldered him over towards the doorway and threw a thunderous bull-hammer right. Liam ducked, I hit the door frame, the brickwork gave way and the wall collapsed. It was like something out of a film. I knew I could hit hard but this was ridiculous – there were bricks and dust everywhere. Liam took one look at me and that stopped the fight. We had to go because the pub was wrecked. It was only an old rotten bit of wall, dangerous really, but I still demolished it. Liam talks about it to this day.
I have cleared many a barroom and I agree with my grandfather that a bareknuckle fighter should be a drinker as well. I don’t know much about football but I was in a pub in Uttoxeter in the Seventies when five Derby County soccer hooligans picked on a friend of mine, whom they accused of being a Stoke City fan. I got so annoyed I ripped the pub door off its hinges and all five of them fled.
Another time I was in the King’s Head at Newcastle-under-Lyme with Will Braddock and loads of travellers, all wearing a load of gammy gold rings I had sold them, when one man there made a remark about me and when I pulled him over it, he shoved me away. I knocked him out. The landlord was a big Italian, about forty-five years old in white silk shirt and gold chain, and everyone was scared to death of him. He came around the bar and grabbed me with his forearm around my neck. I pushed him back onto the bar and hit him. He was nearly breaking my neck. I hit him in the ribs and he went down like a burst balloon.
His hysterical wife, a blonde all in gold, came charging round the bar with a huge ornamental sword. She slashed at me four or five times as all the travellers jumped back. She was mad as hell. Braddock got behind her and took the sword off her but she was cutting curtains and everything. I left – again.
*
FIGHTING WOMEN WITH swords is not advisable, nor is taking on a gang of men on your own, no matter how tough you are. ‘Two can worry a bull,’ is an old gypsy saying, and it’s true.
It happened to me twice, not including Doncaster. The first time, I was jumped by four men outside a pub. I actually knew them: Billy the Black, Paul ‘Beaky’ Smith, Colin McVeetch and Keith Tompkinson. I had been dealing scrap with a friend called Ken Cooper and whatever we earned, we drank. We would have a weigh-in, get the money and go straight to the pub. We were drinking this afternoon in Uttoxeter with Billy the Black – an Irish-Scot brought up by travellers – and some Scotsmen. An argument started, I think over a game of brag, and someone pushed Ken, who was terrible for starting fights.
‘Don’t push him,’ I said.
I had no sooner said it than one of them down-charged Ken and he was out for a few seconds. I went to get hold of the man and Tompkinson and Billy the Black interfered and kicked the table over. There was a bit of a commotion and the landlord threw these other men out.
Ken and I stayed drinking for another hour. When we left, four men came out of the bushes and trees at us; they had been waiting all that time. At least they didn’t have weapons. The first to run at me was Beaky Smith, who had been one of my boxers. I knocked him down with one punch. Billy the Black, a pretty big fellow, jumped on my back and tried to pull me to the ground with his hands around my throat while McVeetch and Tompkinson punched me. I ran backwards into the wall three or four times and knocked the stuffing out of Billy, forcing him to let go, then set about the other two and beat them. They were scattered among the bushes and elder trees, scratched and torn. Billy the Black jumped in a van. I gave chase while he shouted abuse out of the window. The van was only running on two cylinders and had no acceleration but just as I would catch him he would manage to put on a spurt and get away.
I walked to another pub, the Three Tuns, and saw Ken Cooper standing by a wall.
‘You’re a handy man, Ken. You ran off and left me.’
‘I never ran away from anyone.’
‘Yes you did. I’ve two minds to break your jaw, Ken.’
‘If I ran away, hit me,’ said Ken. So I knocked him straight over a privet hedge. He came round and said, ‘If you feel that bad, hit me again,’ so I knocked him over it again. This time he didn’t come back.
Then who comes walking up the street but Beaky. I collared him and he said, ‘Listen, you couldn’t beat Chuck Bodell in a million years.’ I don’t know why he said it.
‘I can beat Chuck Bodell any time, my friend,’ I said.
Beaky said, ‘Look, if I hit you I can knock you out.’
‘I know you can’t. I’ll give you a shot then.’
‘If I don’t knock you out, though, you’ll hit me back.’
‘Why are you worried about that? You just said you would knock me out.’ But I swore I wouldn’t hit him back.
I stood with my hands down and said, ‘Hit me.’ What an idiot. He was a very good middleweight boxer. He spat on his hand, clenched his fist and wound it up. I expected him to aim for the point of the jaw or the temple, just as I had taught him. Instead he hit me flush in the mouth and bust open my lip.
I said, ‘You’re a disgrace. You hit a man in the mouth to knock him out?’ I never hit him back but said to him, ‘If you ever tell anyone that you hit me and I didn’t hit you back, I’m going to break your jaw.’
‘Fair enough,’ he said and we shook hands.
The next day my lip came out like an orange. I walked into the Black Swan and Beaky was playing cards with a load of men. ‘What happened to you?’ one of them asked. I claimed that I had run into a door. Beaky was laughing into his beer but daren’t say what had happened. He never did tell anyone. He told me later that in all the boxing he did, no one had ever decked him until I knocked him down.
The other time that I fought a group was against some bouncers, and is described later in this chapter. There was also an occasion when I fought two Irish travellers at once. It started, as so often, in a pub, when my pal Alan Wilson called me from the Black Swan in Uttoxeter and said this pair had come from London to see me. I was getting ready to go somewhere else and was determined to have just a quick shandy with them but once I got there and found out they were Irish, that meant goodnight to whatever I had planned. ‘Flash’ Gerry Doran and Lee Harbour were womanisers, gypsy playboys, but fighters too. I had known Lee when I was a teenager in Wales and we’d nearly had a fight with some men in Newtown. He had come after all these years to see what sort of man I really was. I ignored it when he said, ‘You don’t seem the man that we’ve been hearing about.’
Ann Shenton, my girlfriend (Gwendoline and I had split up) was driving us so we went to Derby drinking, then to Nottingham, then to Burton, then back to Uttoxeter. All the time they kept muttering to each other, ‘I don’t think this man can fight,’ and all this. Eventually I’d had enough of it – it was clear what they were after – and challenged them to a fight. I took off my shirt and went into the car park of the White Horse in Uttoxeter.
Neither of them came out. Apparently they were arguing over who was going to go out first. I went back in and they said, ‘Which one do you want to fight?’
‘I’ve had enough of this. I’ll fight the two of you now. Come on.’
They both pulled off their shirts. Harbour had on a vest. I hit him a shot and he sucked his stomach in that much his trousers fell down before he hit the deck. Doran squared up to me with his friend on the floor and I tripped over Harbour’s body as I tried to get him. I swung at Doran, hit the bar and broke the two last fingers of my right hand. The landlord ran around to break it up just as I stepped back, and my heel broke his toes. It was like a Popeye cartoon. Eventually I put Doran out of action as well and left the pair of them in a heap. The landlord ushered me out. The next day I sent Alan Wilson down to see the landlord and he had a block tied to his broken toes. He had been going to send for an ambulance because they couldn’t bring the two of them round but in the end they got them awake and into a motor: they are tough nuts, those Irish.
A week later they were with some friends of mine in a pub in Hemel Hempstead. Harbour had a broken jaw and was supping Guinness through a straw with his mouth wired up. He had little pliers in his pocket so he could cut the wires if he was going to spew up. Doran could still speak but had a ruptured spleen. ‘Bartley is as good as they say,’ said Doran. He was telling the whole pub what had happened – exaggerating his own fighting abilities a bit – while Harbour had to listen, mute. Then Doran got up to go to the toilet and groaned with pain. Harbour pointed at him and tried to laugh, which only made his jaw hurt even more, and he started moaning too. Everyone cracked up at them.
*
USUALLY MY FIGHTS were man against man. Caggy Barrett told me that there was a hard Scotsman on the Springfield estate, a very rough area near Cannock, who wanted to challenge me. I wasn’t interested because he wasn’t a traveller but Caggy said, ‘He’ll fight you whether you are a gypsy or not.’ Another Suicide Fighter. Shaft and Wilf, two of the men who came with me when I handed out the leaflets at Doncaster, knew this Scotsman and met us in the Globe in Rugeley. They said he was from up in the Scottish Highlands and had come down to join his relations working in the local coal pits. A couple of his pals were in the pub and said they could take us right to him.
We drove to a pub with bouncers on the door on the Springfield estate. I waited in the car park. He came out and he was a big fellow with a flat nose, just a beer-bellied Suicide Fighter. We stripped off and I knocked him on his arse straight away. He didn’t want to know after that. I made Caggy count to ten just to make sure.
We went back to the Globe and got drinking. That day I had bought a Rover car for £10. A ginger-haired man bought it off me for £20. We went back to someone’s house, taking three two-gallon plastic containers of cider. In the early hours, I said, ‘Take us back.’ Ginger who had bought the car drove us. I was in the front with him and Caggy was in the back.
The minute we got into Uttoxeter, a blue police light came on. Ginger, who was legless, wouldn’t stop. So the police passed us with the siren on and pulled up in front of us. We just drove on straight past them. I climbed into the back seat with Caggy and said to the driver, ‘This is your motor now, I want nothing to do with this.’ A big drum of cider spilt all over us. The chase was on. The police car passed us three or four times and each time we got away. We got onto a dual carriageway, took a bend and the police car spun round to block our way. The doors flew open and uniformed bobbies jumped out. I said, ‘It’s up to you Ginger,’ opened the door, jumped straight through a hedge, through barbed wire and ran, ripping off nearly all of my clothes. The others did a bunk as well. I went through another hedge and looked behind me and someone was running over the fields after me. We took hedges and ditches, even a tennis court. I was pulling thorns out of me a month later. When I got into the town I was virtually naked.
Now, everyone in Uttoxeter knows Bartley Gorman and so this was a rather embarrassing situation. I was going to ask the first person I saw if they could put me up. I saw a man and I beckoned him, trying to hide my nakedness, but he wouldn’t come. Instead he was beckoning me. It turned out to be Caggy: he had been chasing me, not a policeman. That’s cider for you. We made it back to his place and got away but they arrested Ginger and he got a few months inside.
*
THE WILDEST SUICIDE Fighter I ever met was the Staffordshire Wolfman. This was another attack that came out of the blue, at a Bonfire Night party at the bungalow of Peter Sellars, a wealthy travelling man. Peter had put up a marquee with a band and scores of travellers were there. I was talking inside the bungalow when this big farmer hit a woman and cut her lip. I can’t abide that sort of thing so I asked no questions but moved straight in on him and slaughtered him against the Welsh dresser. There were broken plates and dishes everywhere.
The man’s best friend, a scrap dealer called Johnny Mellor, interfered. Johnny was ten years younger than me, a stocky lad and a reasonable fighter. He used to take the stance of a fighting cock. His father, old Johnny Mellor, had been the greatest horseman at Appleby Fair. He said something about me hitting his friend so I said, ‘Well, I’ll fight you then.’
‘All right. This Sunday morning.’
‘Let’s fight now.’
‘No, I’ll fight you for five thousand pounds, Sunday morning.’
‘Okay.’
Jimmy Braddock, Will’s son, shouted, ‘I’ll have another five grand on Bartley.’
With the fight arranged, Mellor left. The music was on and everyone was enjoying themselves. I went outside with Pat Finney and Maria Maguire, the wives of two friends of mine, and was walking arm in arm with them along the driveway when someone took a running kick at me and tried to break my leg.
It was the Staffordshire Wolfman. His real name was John and he was known and feared throughout the county: he would fight a badger barehanded, go down a hole with men holding him by his feet. He was a proper hunting man, kind of a wild man. He once lost his licence for drink-driving and so used to come down the high street in a pony and trap, go to the pub, have ten pints and go home in the trap.
Immediately he kicked me, the band stopped playing and the crowd ran over to watch. We were at the end of the drive near the road.
‘So you want to fight, do you?’ I said.
I hit him, bull-hammer straight to the head, and down he went. Instead of leaving him there, I bent down to pick him up and he wrapped his arms and legs around me, digging his fingers into the veins of my neck, and sunk his teeth into my face. The harder I tried to push him away, the deeper he bit. He wouldn’t let go. I couldn’t shake him off and ended up on the floor with him. I’m not used to that kind of fighting. There was only one thing for it: if he wanted to fight like an animal, we’d both fight like animals. So for the first time in all my life, I bit a man back. It could be no other way: this was gutter combat. I got his nose in my mouth and chomped so hard my teeth were nearly meeting.
I thought, if you take this man’s nose off, God will never forgive you. Also, he stank. So I let him go. He was calling me ‘w* * * *r’ without stop. I straddled him, put his head on the pavement and every time he said it, I punched him. His mouth and nose were bleeding but he never stopped saying it until a police car came and I got up off him. There were so many crowded around that the police didn’t know who to arrest, so they left me alone. Later Peter Sellars got a hosepipe to wash the blood off the road.
I was in court several days later for a motoring fine and there was the Wolfman with two big plasters over his nose. ‘You are mental,’ I told him, ‘to cause that trouble. Why did you do it?’
He said he’d recently had a fight with Colin Morfitt, one of the toughest men in the area. ‘I wanted to see who was hardest, you or Morfitt,’ he said.
I still had the business of the fight I’d arranged with Johnny Mellor. This would be totally different: not an all-in brawl but a properly organised prize-fight, to take place shortly after dawn on the car park of the Little Chef restaurant at Uttoxeter. Mellor was a heavyweight and had fought Billy the Black forty minutes to a draw, so he was no slouch. Word spread like wildfire. I was a legend among travellers but the vast majority had never seen me fight. Now was their chance. Within four days there were 1,500 of them in town. They came from all over Great Britain and Ireland and as far afield as France and Spain. My place at Fort Woodfield was thick with gypsies and there were campfires burning all night. I woke up one morning and fetched a pint of milk to make tea, only to find out there were 500 people wanting some.
On the morning of the fight, Rodey Shaw came up on a motorbike and changed into his karate gear. He was stalking around outside while the travellers eyed him warily. He did look dangerous. There were gypsy fighters everywhere, old veterans and young up-and-comers like Henry Francis, ‘the Outlaw’. One man had a false eye made of gold with a diamond in it.
I was driven to the car park in the back of an Escort van. Half the town was waiting – and a line of police riot vans. Too bad, I wasn’t going to stop now for anyone. We pulled through the crowd and I jumped out of the back of the van right among the crowd with my fighting gear on, shouting, ‘Where is he?’ Sam and John joined me, both stripped to the waist, and we prowled through the crowd, a Beatles tape blaring out from a ghettoblaster. But it was clear that Mellor wasn’t there. Someone had tipped off the police and he had been arrested leaving his father’s farm.
The officer in charge, in a peaked cap, came over and told me to go.
‘I’m going to make a speech,’ I said.
‘If you do, I will arrest you,’ he said.
I went to make my speech, saying I was the King of the Gypsies, and he did arrest me. They put me in the back of a riot van, right behind the driver, who turned round and said, ‘I’m not driving this motor an inch until you move him from behind me.’ But I was quiet as a lamb: I was brought up never to put my hand on the Queen’s uniform.
They convened a special Sunday court for Mellor and me and we were charged with disturbing the peace. I was asked my occupation and replied, ‘Beggar,’ because I was so annoyed. Mellor said he was a contractor. They fined us £250 each and bound us over to keep the peace for two years in the sum of £1,200. ‘Police KO gypsy bare-fist fight’ was the headline in the next day’s Daily Mirror. Mellor and I later had a big drinking session to bury the hatchet and that was the end of the matter.
Another fight that never came off was between me and Bobby Frankham, a young relative of Johnny Frankham. In January 1988, the Daily Mirror published a double-page spread on me after I challenged Frankham – who had recently been barred from boxing after attacking the referee in the ring – for ‘£1 million a side’. It was a load of hokum about how I dined on hedgehog stew, rubbing the grease into my skin to toughen and keep it supple, and how I soaked my fists in petrol. At the end of the piece the journalist, William Marshall, wrote, ‘To all concerned: If you have a million nicker and your friends quite like your face the way it is, stay out of a fight with the red-haired bloke smelling like a pitstop and spitting lumps of hedgehog ...’
Sound advice, and Bobby Frankham took it. Years later, he was asked to advise the actor Brad Pitt on bareknuckle fighting for a movie. Pitt visited him at his site in Watford and Bobby told reporters, ‘I was once offered a million pounds for an illegal fight in the hold of a container ship in the North Sea but I decided against it on the advice of my dad.’
In September that year several doormen didn’t take heed. I went with my friend John Taylor to watch my cousin John Fury boxing at a sporting club dinner at the Grand Hotel in Leicester. It was a black tie do and we were in a posh motor and both in new suits but they wouldn’t let us in. I offered them £100 just to let us stand by the curtains to see John fight but these men had heard of me and wouldn’t have it. I guess they wanted to show their authority.
I was okay until I was manhandled. Two of them grabbed me by the arms. I decked one, then the other. John Taylor put another one over the bonnet of his Bentley. We beat up four of them altogether. They weren’t worth a carrot anyway; just bouncers – I had no respect for them. All they do is hit little kids and drunks. We had to disappear after that because I was still bound over to keep the peace over the Mellor fight but somehow the newspapers got hold of it. ‘PRIZEFIGHT GYPSY KO’S SIX BOUNCERS’ was the headline in the Daily Mirror. Some onlooker told them, ‘The first two bouncers were big, beefy guys, well over six foot, but he poleaxed them.’ That bit was true but I don’t think there were six of them.
I don’t want you to get the impression that I was fighting every day – far from it – but I did have to be watchful all the time with these Suicide Fighters; you just never knew where the next one would come from. You could be out having a perfectly pleasant time – as I was one day in Coventry with a gang of Irish, Welsh and Scottish travellers – when something would happen. On this day we’d all had a drink and were driving back to the Aston Firs site at Hinckley in four cars. It was only when we were halfway there that one of the men in my car said we were going to the camp because there was a man who wanted to fight me. He was known as ‘Ginger’ or ‘Red’ Bob McGowan and was a very tough Irishman who was in Coventry labouring.
When the cars arrived, the camp was pretty empty. Jimmy the Duck was sitting in the doorway of his trailer drinking cider, his shirt off, braces hanging down, round white belly. We pulled up at the bottom of the camp and got out. Red Bob was waiting.
‘Do you want to fight me?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘You will get severely hurt if you do.’
‘No, it will be the opposite way around.’
‘We’ll fight then. Up there on the green.’ I pointed to the top of the camp.
‘All right then.’
We took our shirts off and started to walk up side by side, the others following behind, like in a Spaghetti Western. We passed Jimmy the Duck sitting on his step. ‘Do you want to see a man knocked out, Jimmy?’ I said. ‘Well, you are just about to see one.’
Then I passed my Aunt Nudi’s trailer. ‘Nudi, watch this man get knocked out.’
I could hear the others laughing behind me because they knew Red Bob was a hard case and reckoned I was in for it. I knocked him straight out with the first blow. Unconscious. As he lay there, our Sam drove up. He had been out painting a barn and had paint all over his face. He saw the crowd and ran up, raging at the men for fighting on the camp where he lived. He challenged them all out but none would fight him. Then he picked up Red Bob, slung him in the back of a car and told them all to clear off.
*
IT WAS NOT long after my fight with Red Bob that Uriah Burton died. He’d have been sixty-one or sixty-two years old, and to the last was a demon with his fists. He fought Edmon Evans from North Wales the year before he died, in a stables behind closed doors on his site near Manchester. It was a terrible fight and people could hear the noise inside, like a horse was kicking the sides. The best man walked out: I won’t say who but let’s say that Big Just went to his grave undefeated.
He had devoted the last few years of his life to various causes: he was always a man of principle. Hughie walked from Dublin to Belfast to promote peace in Ireland and offered to do it again accompanied by religious leaders, though none of them took him up on it. He even said he would hire out the King’s Hall in Belfast ‘when I will meet anyone who objects to my ideas, if they wish to be physically aggressive, I will engage them in a boxing ring, but will not attack, only defend myself.’ He called for one world government and the abolition of armies, advocated a single world language like Esperanto and thought prisons should be demolished and miscreants made to do community service or, if serious offenders, sent to isolated islands to provide for themselves.
His death was a shock to me, for I had always admired him. They laid him out on a board in his trailer, with a melodeon on his left and a wreath from me on his right. My message read:
To my gypsy brother Big Just
King of the Gypsies
I know we will meet again.
Traditionally, prominent gypsies were burned in wooden trailers with their belongings, and there was a big debate about having a funeral pyre for Big Just, but the authorities would not allow it. Had it been me, I would have done it and to hell with them. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered in Wales near the monument he had erected to his father.
Bob Braddock died too – indestructible old Bob – and his death was linked to Hughie. Bob and I had been drinking one night when he said, ‘Let’s go over to see Big Just in Manchester.’ He wanted to arrange a fight or something. This was typical of him: drink all evening, then drive 200 miles to see someone on a whim. We stopped at an all-night garage in the Potteries and as we pulled in there was a robbery in progress. Bob leapt out of the car while it was still moving and ran to help the poor woman cashier, who was terrified. I turned off the engine and jumped out and saw some men fleeing. I gave chase and had a scuffle with a couple of them but they managed to get in their car and escape.
When I came back, Bob was lying in a pool of blood. They had hit him over the head with an iron bar. I got a bucket of water and threw it over him and it sluiced the blood all over the forecourt. The police arrived and he was taken away in an ambulance. He never fully recovered and died not long after of a brain tumour.
His brother Will died too. He went blind towards the end. I went to see him and his last words to me were, ‘Take care of yourself.’ The Braddocks were my biggest backers when I was at my fighting peak. They were throwbacks to a different era. They’ll never make men like them and Hughie Burton again.