MOST TRAVELLERS ENCOUNTER prejudice at some time in their lives. My wealthy neighbours in Wood Lane, Uttoxeter, had made it quite clear they did not want me there and nor did many of the town councillors. They claimed my site was unkempt, there were roaming dogs and insufficient screening for my forty-five-foot trailer. It was all nonsense. I offered to fight the entire council in a ring at once – with gloves on if they wanted – and if they were able to beat me I would leave. They didn’t accept. My temporary permission to keep a trailer on the site was due to expire in December 1990, so I needed to hit them with something.
I decided to play them at their own game. In November, I submitted plans to build a ten-bedroom mansion, with a swimming pool and tennis courts. ‘It will be the poshest house in Uttoxeter so the neighbours will not be able to run me down any more,’ I told the papers. ‘I am going to build it myself out of tons of old stone I have collected.’ I also said I’d put a curse on the planning officer if he didn’t pass it. ‘As long as we’re not turned into field mice by Mr Gorman’s curse, a report will be compiled for the committee to consider,’ a deadpan council spokesman said.
They agreed to let me stay but would not give me planning permission, which would have made the land worth a lot more. Then I saw in a newspaper the headline, ‘Convoy of New Age Travellers passes through Birmingham’. It gave me an idea. New Age Travellers were a big issue at the time and I publicly announced that they could stay on my site. I told the papers my plot could house up to 300 people whom I would teach to live off the land and help to find work on nearby farms as labourers. The chief of West Midlands Police, who just wanted them out of his county, got wind of this and told the ‘NATs’ – which was what the police called them – that they could stay at Bartley Gorman’s place in Staffordshire. Soon after, a big bus pulled up outside my property, driven by an out-of-work landscape gardener with his wife and their German shepherd dog.
‘The Chief Constable sent us to you, Bartley,’ he said.
‘Pull on then.’
Within a month they were arriving from Stonehenge, the New Forest, all over the place. Eventually about 100 came. They were quite a sight: some with dreadlocks, some with fifty earrings in each ear, and dressed in all manner of clothes. One came in with a mobile home forty feet long with one end cut out of it and put together with another forty-footer to make an eighty-foot home. There was a double-decker bus with red and purple spots on, and the men in it only came out at night. They all had aliases and nicknames.
The Burton Mail described them as an ‘unwanted army’ and the council went nuts. They were worried that loads more would arrive when the festival season ended and I was served with an order to evict them within a month. ‘It will take an army to get them off because I am going to put up barricades,’ I said. ‘I am bracing myself for a battle bigger than Bosworth.’ I know how to bull when I want to. Someone tried a different tack – setting fire to my £15,000 trailer. Fortunately I wasn’t in it at the time, because it was gutted, but I could have been killed.
The NATs themselves had ten campfires going every night and lit up the place like an Indian reservation. They were very artistic people and some of them played in bands with names like the Red Cadillacs and the Mushroom Brothers. They were very good. They would bring a chair out for me and put it in front of the big tent and play. Sometimes half a dozen groups were playing at the same time in different areas, like a mini Glastonbury. The problem was that they liked their music loud, with huge amplifiers. We had murder with the neighbours and the council slapped a noise abatement notice on me.
The NATs were intellectual and some came from wealthy backgrounds – though they did smell bad. There was one lovely girl whose daddy was a millionaire and sent her £1,000 a week. Others’ parents brought them bootloads of food. But they were no angels. Once they rammed a police car outside my gates and a breakdown truck had to tow it away. One of them had a scanner and would monitor the police frequencies. There were often fights. Two of them went after each other one day with axes. I didn’t interfere. The police came and arrested several of them. I said, ‘Listen, this is nothing to do with me. If a man commits a murder in a council house on a council estate, you can’t charge the council with murder, can you?’
They brought me gallons of festival wine. Some of it was yellow, some was blue, some orange, some pink, and it had bits floating in it. By God, it had a kick. My Uncle Nack, old Ticker Gorman’s brother, came over to stay. He was a man of eighty-four and had seen all the gypsy fighters. The New Agers were fascinated by him: they called him Old Redhammer. Uncle Nack ran out of cigarettes so I asked one of them to roll him a fag. Instead they rolled him a spliff. Nack had a bad stammer and after several deep drags he turned to me and said, ‘B-b-bye G-g-god, these j-j-jucks can roll a f-f-fag!’ He didn’t know what it was but he smoked the lot.
My cousin Booty Kelly also came to stay and had a bareknuckle scrap with one of the best fighters of the NATs for three gallons of wine. I went away for a few days, like a fool, and left a wardrobe full of jugs of this wine in my trailer. ‘There’s two jars there for you,’ I said to Booty. ‘Don’t touch the other eight in the wardrobe.’
I came back four days later to find fifty NATs in my trailer with Booty and Nack. Arms and legs were sticking out of the windows. They had quaffed all the wine and were so drunk they couldn’t speak.
It became a village. They were coming back from Africa, Goa, Spain, all over the world. There were dogs everywhere. Even my Irish traveller friends, who have seen everything, couldn’t believe it. Eventually there were about seven council notices on me. I had a licence for only one caravan on the site, so I applied to extend it to 100 caravans. I knew they would refuse but would leave a technicality in there – they always do – and I could home in on that and go for it again. It could have gone on for ten years. John Wren, the council’s director of services, finally came up.
‘They have to be moved.’
‘I’m not moving them.’
‘I want them moved.’
‘I want a bungalow there.’
‘I will give you one if you move them.’
‘Take off every notice first.’
‘No.’
I knew that if I moved them off with the notices still on, I wouldn’t be able to move them back again, and would lose my trump card. In the end they took off all the orders except the noise abatement one. But by then I didn’t have the heart to move the travellers because we had become friends. I had lights on the pillars and two signs saying, ‘All travellers welcome’.
My friend Malcolm Barrett, a very successful businessman, set up a meeting between myself and Mr Wren at his offices. Malcolm has all these leather swing-round chairs with brandy and cigars and chocolates on the table. Wren tried to lord it over me and said, ‘I give you my word you can have a house if you move them, but they must be gone within three months.’ I couldn’t do it. They had babies there. Some had been conceived and born there.
When I failed to move them, Wren came to see me again.
‘I don’t want a bungalow, I want a house,’ I said.
He replied, ‘If you want a house you will have it there and nowhere else.’ And pointed to a spot on the ground which was where I wanted it anyway. We agreed.
Now I had to devise a way to get the travellers off without upsetting them. I knew that Billy Varey, a travelling man who owns a lot of land, wanted planning permission for some farmland in Nottinghamshire. I told him that if he could get the travellers to move onto it, he could work the same trick as me, killing two birds with one stone: I would get rid of the travellers and Billy would get his planning permission. He came and pretended to sell me his land. We had this fake bidding war and slapped hands on me buying his land. Then I told the NATs I was sick of the media bothering me and was moving to this land in Nottinghamshire and wanted them to join me. I stayed there with them for two months but when I left Billy got nervous and pulled out and it is now agricultural land.
In 1993 the council allowed me to upgrade my plans and gave approval for a six-bedroom mock Tudor mansion – yet the truth was that I had no money to build it. I had never made a bean from fighting. I had beaten the system but couldn’t cash in. I considered starting up the pirate boxing again and holding an open-air tournament to find the ‘heavyweight fighting champion of Great Britain’ but couldn’t get it going. So when I was approached with an offer that could have set me up for life, it was too good to refuse. There was only one problem: I would have to fight the most dangerous man on earth.
*
THEY SAID JADE Johnson was six foot seven, nineteen stone and black as charcoal. He came from Alabama in the Deep South and had been fighting for money since boyhood. When he was not in the penitentiary he worked as a sparring partner for some of the best heavyweight boxers in America. He was reputed to have killed two men in death matches. Even if half of what they claimed was true, this would be a test like no other.
I was told about Johnson by Marcko Small, a mysterious gypsy whose grandfather, Strong John Small, had been the undefeated champion of south-west England; he would stand on a hill and throw his hat down into the hollow to challenge his opponents. Marcko, a short, stocky man, was the best fighter in Devon, Cornwall, Dorset and Somerset. He could also take out a man’s throat with his knife and was known as ‘Hangallis’, which means a man likely to hang by the gallows. I first got to know him when he wrote to me from jail. He had seen me at fairs, had been following me for years and had even had fights in prison over me.
Marcko was well connected with travellers in the United States and in the autumn of 1994 he told me that a gypsy syndicate was putting forward this black giant to decide who was the bareknuckle champion of the world. I could not turn it down. This was what I had wanted through all of my fighting life: to call myself champion of the world. It would also set me up financially.
The only way to pull off the contest– and make a lot of money – without all getting arrested was to stage it on a ship outside territorial waters. This was an idea I had been kicking around for years. Even old Hughie Burton had once said to me, ‘Bartley, I’ll fight you on a ship. But what if I knock you into the sea?’
‘I would swim out and kill you,’ I said.
Marcko knew a former sailor, Denis Browne, and recruited him to find a vessel. It was a full-time job. Denis studied piles of books on maritime law. He said there was a three-mile limit around the British coast that applied to fishermen and a twelve-mile limit outside which you were in international waters. Once we were that far out, it appeared that no-one could stop it.
Trying to find a vessel that was seaworthy, met all the safety requirements and had navigation equipment in order was no easy task. We couldn’t just get a heap of scrap because we would have been breaking the law that way. The original plan was to hire a ferry and stage the fight in the hold where they park the cars. Denis was on the phone constantly to people in Holland, Belgium and Germany and eventually found a Dutch company with a 25,000-tonne ferry that could fit up to a dozen articulated lorries down the length of the deck. That would have been more than big enough for the spectators. However, the ferry proved impossible to get, so instead Denis went for a coaster. He said it would have fifteen feet under the hatches which could be illuminated and where we could put up a ring and have spectators around the top and also in the hold, all in suits and ties. For the size of coaster, there would have been a maximum of sixty tickets, and even then no guarantee everyone would have got on.
The cheapest tickets were to be £5,000 and the dearest £10,000. We would have no problem selling them all. Marcko was getting calls booking three and four tickets at a time. We had enquiries from wealthy gypsies, famous rock musicians and film stars. There were to be two doctors on the ship and paramedics in helicopters. We needed a crew of five or six – the engineer, captain, first mate and a couple of able seamen – and a security team. The destination would have been secret. Once the vessel was in position out at sea, they were to telephone to get the fighters on. I was to be flown in by helicopter from England and Johnson from France.
I had never fought outside Britain’s shores before. I was once supposed to go to Canada to fight the champion traveller there but said, ‘If he thinks he can beat me, let him come to me.’ There had also been talk of my fighting Jose Urtain, the Spaniard who boxed Henry Cooper and who was said to be a gypsy man, but he wouldn’t meet me bareknuckle.
We deliberately leaked news of the fight to the media to drum up interest and help us sell television and video rights – and it worked. We sent stuff off to the New York Times, the Toronto Star, the Irish Press, Reuters, Transworld Sport, Sky, Granada, Sankei Sports in Japan, Cable Tel Communications, the BBC. Marcko was fielding dozens of letters and phone calls and they were talking about a satellite link-up to the United States.
Denis also had several visits from the local constabulary, who threatened us with the Offences Against the Person Act and the Merchant Shipping Act, but really they were powerless. They could have stopped the ship from leaving port but they’d have needed hard evidence of an offence. What happened in international waters was nobody’s concern as long as it was not an act of war or terrorism. Really the Devon and Cornwall police just wanted to ensure that it was not going to happen on their patch – they were afraid that there would be thousands of gypsies coming to watch and they wouldn’t be able to cope. ‘We’ll have all these gypsies hooking up their caravans and coming down into Devon and blocking all the roads,’ said one officer. ‘Is there any way you can let people know it won’t be in Teignmouth?’
Both sides wanted an independent referee so we decided to ask Muhammad Ali. We approached him through the Irishman Paddy Monaghan, a good friend of Ali’s who ran his fan club in Britain. Paddy wrote back to say, ‘I’ve been talking to Muhammad over the phone and I’m sorry to have to tell you he will not be able to accept Mr Gorman’s kind invitation because of the sad news that his mother has recently had a stroke and he feels the need to be by her side as much as possible. I am sure you will understand.’ I suspected also that he didn’t fancy going out on the ship.
I would be fighting with Jem Mace’s original silk around my waist. I had acquired this gypsy treasure from a pub landlord who had bought it off Mace’s granddaughter. It says: ‘The original silk of the Swaffham Gypsy – Jem Mace – Bare Knuckle Heavyweight Champion of the World, Champion of the Gypsies.’ The landlord had it hanging on the wall behind the bar in the Queensberry Arms in Teignmouth and I was desperate to have it, so I went in with my best suit on and with big gold rings on each finger and said to Marcko, ‘Say nothing, leave this to me.’
Marcko introduced me as the champion of the gypsies and this landlord, an ex-boxer, fell hook, line and sinker. He thought I was a multi-millionaire dealer, as I was flashing gold-plated watches and a gold-plated chain, and ordering double whiskeys. We chatted about boxers as I smoked a big cigar.
After a good while I said, ‘What would you ask for that?’ He wanted £2,000. I said, ‘Would you take this watch for part exchange?’ I said it was worth £1,000. He said he would, so now I had to give him another £1,000. I opened my pocket and pulled out another watch. I told him I had paid £2,000 for it (I had actually paid £100 each). So I said, ‘Instead of parting with my money I will give you the two watches for it.’
‘It’s a deal,’ he said.
‘Put them in a safe and don’t let them see daylight,’ I said. I couldn’t get away quick enough.
We put a lot of work into arranging the Johnson fight. The plan was to have it just before Christmas, weather permitting. Marcko was talking to the Americans and I was given to believe a lot of people were willing to back the fight and put money into it. Some even paid upfront to be there. Finally Denis was quoted £48,000 for a vessel for three days. He was a week away from getting a boat. I would make enough to retire on and Johnson would get a very good pay packet. Everything was going great.
Then it all went bump. Marcko became quiet and withdrawn. At the same time, he seemed to be walking around with money. One story was that Johnson was worried that the ship would be unsafe and he would end up drowned, so the fight had to take place somewhere else. We discussed having it on a remote beach but it would have been impossible to escape police attention. Weeks went by and I heard nothing. The trail to Jade Johnson went cold.
And so the first world heavyweight bareknuckle fight since John L. Sullivan fought Jake Kilrain never happened. Through it all, I never once met or spoke to Johnson. Some people have since doubted whether he ever existed. I am sure he did, though Jade Johnson may have been a pseudonym; if you enter death matches, you are not going to fight under your real name. So I never fought the American Killer, and have heard nothing of him from that day to this. But if you ever come across a nineteen-stone man-eater from Alabama called Jade, give him my regards.
*
THE PUBLICITY OVER the Johnson fight had put my name back into the limelight and all the tribes started coming out after me. They thought I no longer had the backing now Sam was dead. They were wrong: I had my cousins’ sons, the Furys, to see me fair play. The Furys had been close to my family for over 100 years – from the days of the legendary Black Martin Fury – and had intermarried with the Gormans. Big John Fury was, by the mid-Nineties, the best man in the country, now that I was getting older. They were one breed that no-one wanted to mess with.
I was sitting having a quiet tea with my Uncle Pat in Burton-upon-Trent one day when the phone rang. My brother John was at Coventry Pot Fair, a big gypsy gathering, with 200 Dochertys, the most powerful of the Irish travelling clans in Britain. He was drinking with Par Docherty, who was shot dead in Birmingham a couple of years ago (he managed to stagger to his Shogun shouting, ‘Mammy,’ and died in his mother’s arms). ‘There’s an English travelling man at the Pot Fair who wants to fight you,’ said John. It was a fellow from London called Bugsy Price. He’d been after fighting me for some time and wanted to challenge me for the heavyweight championship even though I no longer claimed it; as I have said, I considered John Fury to be the top fighter but he was concentrating on his boxing career. The Prices are all blond and are one of the biggest breeds in England. This Bugsy had an eagle tattooed on his chest, with the wing tips reaching his shoulders, and had done time for shooting his own father-in-law.
‘I’ll be over soon,’ I said to John, to get rid of him. I had no intention of going; it was a nice quiet day and I was dressed up and relaxed. But he phoned that many times I got sick of it. In the end I thought I had better go because otherwise John might get hurt but I was determined to avoid another Doncaster.
I rang Michael Fury. ‘A man wants to fight me in Coventry, Mike. Will you see me fair play?’ Michael came straight away in a minibus with his sons Craig and Russell, two heavyweights, and was joined by John, Peter and Hughie Fury, Poppy O’Neill, Podge Gorman and a couple of others. They arrived within two hours and I jumped in the motor with them.
Meanwhile, our John and the Dochertys had heard this man with a London accent outside the pub shouting, ‘Where’s Bartley Gorman?’ It was the Prices with a group of Lees. Every Docherty went outside and attacked them. They smashed up every motor in less than two minutes in a show of power.
When I arrived, my brother was in his forty-foot mobile home discussing the situation with twenty men. Big John Fury opened the door and said, ‘Excuse me men, we have got some business to talk about, will you kindly leave.’
They all left immediately. As they were going, one of them got me by the arm. It was old Tucker Dunn, a good fighter who had shown me how to put a man’s eye out by raising your middle lower knuckle. ‘Don’t go down there tonight, Bartley,’ he whispered. ‘They have got yoggers.’ Guns.
I took heed. ‘We are not going down tonight,’ I said. ‘We’ll go in the morning.’
We stayed on a camp and they kept me up all night. At four o’clock the next morning, I dressed in a blue and red tracksuit over a hooded sweatshirt, pulled on my white boxing boots, and climbed into the front seat of Michael’s white minibus with John Fury. I didn’t even know where we were going.
After twenty minutes or so, we pulled onto what looked like a piece of common ground and cut the engine. Gypsy trailers were parked haphazardly and between them were Shoguns and Mercedes with shattered windscreens and headlamps – the cars that the Dochertys had attacked. I walked onto the ground with the others behind me, my face hidden by the hood, like a phantom. All the curtains were drawn and nothing stirred but gamecocks and a few greyhound dogs, some with the mange, sloping about like jackals. There were discarded water cans among the smashed-up vehicles. I could see death here. I had at least fifteen men with me but there were about 100 on this ground.
‘Bartley Gorman has arrived,’ I shouted. ‘Where is the man with the tattoo?’
No-one came out. I could see curtains opening a little, then closing. A couple of men climbed out the back of their trailers. There was more than one on the site with a tattoo and they thought I was after them. One man shouted, ‘Jel, jel,’ – which means ‘go’ – jumped out of a trailer window, ran into barbed wire and ripped off one of his testicles. They tell me his wife is after me to this day.
‘Let’s get this thing on,’ I yelled.
After ten minutes, with the sun beginning to rise, I decided he wasn’t coming out and went back to the van. The Furys and Mitchell Barney were walking slowly around (the Barneys are a dangerous fighting breed from Southampton). I took off the tracksuit top and pulled down my hood.
All of a sudden, one shouted, ‘He’s here, he’s ready for you!’ and a man appeared, stripped, with six or seven others around him. This was a very dangerous situation. I just wanted to be a clever, scientific fighter, like Jack Johnson: I didn’t want him to be here. But there was no turning back. ‘Take me over, Mike,’ I said. Michael Fury started the engine and I hung from the side of the Transit as he drove. We passed a young girl running, holding a small child. ‘No need to run, we don’t hurt children,’ I shouted, but it sickened me that we should even be here, frightening youngsters in the early hours.
Price was there, fists clenched and ready. He was about forty-two, and I was now fifty. Michael gunned the engine, then threw the van into a spin. As it turned side-on towards Price and his men, I jumped straight off, ploughed through his guard and started throwing bombs at his head. No-one said ‘title’; we just fought it out. He was stocky, about 5ft 10in and 14st 8lbs, and he was hard. I battered and smashed and battered and smashed, knocking him backwards.
‘Go on Bugsy,’ shouted one of his men. ‘Cor him.’
‘Carib,’ shouted our lot.
He was a tough nut to crack; these gypsies have been there before. He had a good style and caught me with a right hand flush in the mouth. I stood back with my hands down, spat blood, then bulldozed him to the floor. While he was down, some relation of his started rowing with Mitchell Barney and Mitchell ran him into a trailer.
As I stood over Price, who was out, his wife ran out with a twelve-bore gun and pointed it straight at me. She was a beautiful gypsy woman. She screamed, ‘I’ll kill you, you bastard,’ and pulled the trigger … but nothing happened. The safety catch was on.
I quickly grabbed the barrel in my hand to point it away from me. ‘Let go, love, let me see if there’s anything in it,’ I said soothingly. She wouldn’t let go; her knuckles were white. To my great regret, one of the men with me hit her and knocked her to the floor. I got the gun in my hand and it had two cartridges in it. I said, ‘Let’s go,’ because there were now more men running towards us with weapons. I backed over to the motor, we got in and Michael drove off. Price and his wife were left lying there.
I showed them the cartridges in the van. ‘Look, I have had enough,’ I said. ‘I don’t want this any more.’ I was determined that this would be my swansong. I smashed up the gun and threw it in a canal five miles up the road. It turned my stomach. All because someone wanted to fight me.
Yet not long after, Michael Fury rang me one lunchtime. ‘I’m coming to see you. I’m with John, Pete, Hughie, Craig, Russell, Mitch Barney, Poppy, Podge and some others. I’ll be over by five o’clock.’ That was all he said. I knew something was up.
The minute they arrived, Big John walked in and said, ‘There a juck that wants a carib with you, but if you don’t want to fight him, I’ll fight him for you.’
I was forlorn; I thought I had finished with all this. ‘No, no, I’ll fight him,’ I said. ‘Who is this man?’
‘Ogie Burton.’
Ogie was the nephew of Big Just and the brother of Wick-Wack Burton, one of the men who had tried to slaughter me at Doncaster. Wick-Wack was the one I had flattened and Ogie, I later found out, had wanted to fight me for years because of the stitches I had put in his brother’s eye.
Well, when they want to fight you, you have to fight, in ‘town, field, fair or market’, as they say. We went over to a very rich camp at Hopton, near Stafford. This was another situation where anything could happen. There were some tough men stopping there: Billy Thompson, who is known as ‘the Iceman’, and Bill Fuller, a Londoner who has never been beaten. It was just getting dark when we arrived.
‘There is his trailer, Bartley.’
‘You go over,’ I said to Hughie Fury.
I stood in the shadows wearing my Charles Bronson cap. Hughie knocked on the door and said, ‘Are you in, chap?’
Ogie Burton appeared in the doorway, holding a kettle iron. ‘What’s the matter, like?’
‘Do you want to fight Bartley Gorman?’
Burton immediately uttered a disgusting insult about my mother, which does not bear repeating. This is a man I had never met.
I walked out of the shadows. ‘Are you talking about me?’
‘Are you Bartley Gorman?’
‘No, I’m Bartholomew Gorman.’
He said the insult again. So I cursed him. This had gone personal; it was out of hand. He went to swing the kettle iron at me and I hit him with one of the hardest right hands I have ever thrown. It sent him into his trailer, where he smashed into the pots and pans and lay among them. That was the end of my title fight with Ogie Burton.
Then John Fury went berserk. He ran at a trailer and nearly turned it over, then challenged out the entire ground, 150 travelling men. Top fighters were on that ground but none would take him on. Someone must have rung the police, because dozens of them arrived and surrounded the camp. Our work was over, but before we left I said to Burton, ‘I want you out of Staffordshire within twenty-four hours.’ And he was.
About two years later, a rich gypsy called Reilly Smith had some bother with Ogie Burton and had 100,000 leaflets printed up saying that, having beaten Ogie with one punch, Bartley Gorman now wanted to meet him again, face-to-face. It had nothing to do with me but Reilly went up in a helicopter at Epsom and dropped them over the racecourse and also put 10,000 out at Appleby.