IN NOVEMBER 1997, the Daily Mail ran a long feature about my life under the headline ‘FINAL BELL FOR THE GYPSY KING’. One of their writers spent a day with me at Fort Woodfield. He described me as having ‘beaten-down eyes, a Joe Bloggs T-shirt and an unshiftable aura of melancholy.’ As descriptions go, it was pretty accurate.
Bareknuckle fighting might seem glamorous. Champions are lionised by their followers, feted by their community and are a magnet for women. But the life brings with it too much pain. And in the world of the gypsy prize-fighter there is no such thing as retirement; they won’t allow it. My grandfather still fought in his sixties and so did Big Just. Atom Bomb Tom Lee was attacked by a mob and never recovered. A band of tinkers ambushed John-John Stanley and shoved two pool cues through his arms.
I remember in the Nineties watching a Clint Eastwood film called Unforgiven, which showed the old Wild West gunslingers as they really were: not sharply dressed and heroic but scruffy, mean, drunken men who couldn’t shoot straight. Prize-fighting was the same: not the vision you see in old prints of two trained athletes with their fists aloft, squaring up in a neatly pegged-out ring with seconds and an orderly crowd of toffs, but often little more than vicious brawling.
One who did manage to turn his back on fighting was Dan Rooney, who became a born-again Christian, hung up his gloves and now preaches God wherever he goes. Though I had never met him, he rang me one day and said he was coming to see me. He arrived with two Irish travellers, both as big as him. These men were saying, ‘Bartley, you were a legend,’ and all this, and I felt a bit sorry for Dan, because he was supposed to be the man at that time. I told him, ‘I said some things to your brothers about you Dan, because they mentioned your name to me. But whatever I said, I am sorry now because it was in the heat of the moment.’
He shook my hand and said, ‘Thank you, Bartley.’
Though he had rejected his former life, I did give him one word of warning: ‘If ever you fight Henry Francis on a field on your own and you can’t beat him, he will kill you. He’s a psychopath.’
Dan wanted me to become born-again, something that has become very popular among travellers. He took me to a big Christian convention in Staffordshire. Everyone was looking at us, the two great fighters; there must have been twenty video cameras on us. Dan did not need to convert me; I have been a practising Catholic all of my life and the older I have got, the stronger my faith has become.
Instead of fighting, I was putting my energy into things I felt strongly about. I stood for election to Uttoxeter Council under the slogan: ‘Be independent! Vote Gorman.’ I wasn’t elected but I did pretty well. Through my friend Marcko Small in South Devon, I also got involved in a dispute with the Archdeacon of Exeter. They wanted to build an extension on a beautiful little church in Bishopsteignton which would have meant digging up forty graves, including those of gypsies. Marcko and I said we would bring gypsies from all over the country to blockade the village, the villagers all gave us their backing and the Church backed down. I regret it now because Christ once said, ‘Let the dead bury the dead.’ I should have let the extension go on, for the living.
One of my dreams is to put up a memorial to the gypsies who died in the Holocaust. The genocide against travellers has received little recognition. I also campaigned to get more legal sites for travellers, as there is still a shortage of official places. Gypsy people are at the end of their tether. Many would welcome the chance to buy or rent their own sites and manage them properly under licence, but district councils are not prepared to meet their responsibilities and find suitable sites. Travellers are being forced onto the road where they come up against prejudice and new laws aimed at stopping ‘travellers’.
Early in 1998 I even started to campaign for the release of Reggie Kray, the gangster. I had never mixed with London villains, never cared for them or their world, but one day out of the blue Reg sent a letter to the Black Country Bugle to be passed on to me. The Bugle had run a series of stories about my fighting past and someone had forwarded copies to Reg in prison. His letter was addressed to ‘Bartley Gorman, King of the Gypsies’ and arrived from HMP Maidstone in Kent. His spidery handwriting was almost impossible to decipher but the picture at the top of the letter – of twins in boxing gear – was unmistakeable:
Be Strong. Peace.
Bartley
I read of your career in the Bugle and I’ve heard your name in the recent past. I admire all you stand for and I admire you as a man.
I have something in common. I used to fight as amateur and pro and I also have gypsy blood in my veins which I am proud of. My late brother would have been pleased I have written to you. Hope you don’t mind me calling you by your first name.
I would like to see you for a visit in the near future if you could. No offence taken if you are reluctant. You can phone or visit any time.
God Bless
Friend
Reg Kray
Reg had been sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie in 1969, with a recommendation he serve thirty years, and was coming to the end of his tariff. I visited him and found him a nice man. Although he had no remorse for the crime he’d been convicted of, he was reformed and certainly no threat to anyone. You could tell he was a fighter; he wasn’t big but he was fit and he had that look about him. Once or twice I caught him weighing me up. He also put his hands on my shoulders to test me and said, ‘You could have beat Roy Shaw, couldn’t you?’
I just smiled and said to him, ‘You’ve got the hands of a prize-fighter.’
I met him four or five times altogether after he moved to Wayland Prison in Norfolk. He kept up lots of correspondence with people outside and had a proposition for me: he wanted to fix up a bareknuckle fight with Earnie Shavers, the former heavyweight challenger from America who was once voted ‘Puncher of the Century’. Shavers – who despite his ferocious reputation is said to be a very nice man and a Christian – had ended up working as a doorman in Liverpool and speaking on the after-dinner circuit. He had been approached and apparently expressed some interest. I said I would do it. Even though my heart was no longer in fighting, I could never resist a big challenge. I like history: leave your mark. That’s why I would have fought Shavers, but it never came off. I don’t think Earnie was really keen. I was, however, presented with something called the Ronnie and Reggie Kray Twins Fighting Trophy. A fellow prisoner had made it specially for Reg and I went down to a function at the Princess Alice pub in the East End of London to collect it from his wife Roberta.
When Reg’s thirty years were up and he had still not been let out, I wrote to the Queen saying, in part, that ‘the penalty meted out to Reg Kray was extremely severe, to say the least, and calculated by a formula which no longer applies in an era when justice tempered with mercy appears to be ten years (inside) for sadistic child killers …’ I was referring to the well-publicised case of a paedophile gang who had killed children and yet were out within a far shorter time than Reg. I received a reply from the senior officer at the HM Prison Service Lifer Review Unit, explaining that the judge had made a recommendation of a minimum term and that at the end of that it was up to the Home Secretary, under the advice of the Parole Board. ‘Moreover, as part of the process of reintegration into society, mandatory life sentence prisoners are normally required to undergo a lengthy period of testing in an open prison before they are released on life licence.’ Anyway, they didn’t let him out.
Reg’s brother Charlie died in the spring of 2000 and he phoned and asked if I would go to the funeral in London that April. He was brought there in a convict-carrier and when he stepped out of it I was the first man to greet him. He was not well himself and six months later I was attending his own funeral. Half of the East End turned out for it and most of the country’s media. Reg was buried next to his twin Ronnie. I was standing there with people all around, looked down at Ron’s grave and saw a hand on the gravestone. I looked up and it was Roy Shaw. We had never met before. I tapped him on the shoulder and he gave me a handshake and then a handclasp. He looked very fit and left in a £180,000 Bentley. As I say, I don’t mix in gangster circles but I also met Dave Courtney, who said, ‘Hello champ.’ I later thanked him for calling me that and he said, ‘Bartley, I never say something unless I mean it.’
There has been a resurgence of interest in the underground fighting scene, with books by Lennie McLean, Roy Shaw and others, television documentaries and even Hollywood films. I get no end of requests to appear on TV programmes, most of which I turn down. Rarely, however, do any of these programmes touch on the top gypsy men, who are still very secretive. So, for the first time ever in print, here are some of the best today.
JOHN FURY
Big John is the most respected fighter among all travellers, a handsome, black-headed giant, six foot four and touching twenty stone when not trained down. He is married to a daughter of Oathy Burton, Hughie’s older brother. John has avoided the bareknuckle scene to concentrate on his boxing career. His brothers and cousins are fighters too.
I went to see him boxing at Cat’s Whiskers in Burnley in 1987 and had a dispute with the promoter over my ringside seat. He tried to make me move, embarrassing me in front of a lot of travellers. I told him I would fight six of his bouncers in the ring. Big John got involved and announced from the ring with a voice as loud as thunder that he would fight any man in the arena for a packet of cigarettes. Needless to say, no-one took him up.
He had a fistfight with one gypsy fighter and put him in hospital. When my cousin Booty Kelly criticised him for it, John beat Booty so badly that he lost control of his bowels. All in all, not a man to mess with.
HENRY FRANCIS
Henry may be the most feared gypsy alive. A fighter to his bootstraps, he is touching forty now but has his own gym and is naturally fit. He was once blasted with a shotgun and still carries 38 pellets embedded in his neck and back. He was also badly stabbed in a black club in Nottingham but fought his way out. Most recently he had a couple of savage fights with a man in the Midlands that left both of them missing parts their ears. Whoever he beats, he really messes up. But he is good friends with most of the other top men and so unlikely to fight them.
In the mid-Nineties he fought a Londoner called Jimmy Stockin at a country and western day in Peterborough and put him in a terrible state. According to Henry, they had a fall-out over a game of pitch and toss and Stockin pushed him, saying, ‘Don’t mess with the best because the best don’t mess.’ It was the wrong thing to say to Henry. They cleared an area and Boxer Tom refereed. The only person there rooting for Henry was an Irish girl, Belsie Docherty, but she shouted up just the same. Henry hit Stockin and stuck the nut in a few times and that was the end of him.
Towards the end of 2001, I became very ill and had to go into hospital. Henry came to see me. ‘B-b-bartley,’ he said, ‘you were the greatest of them all. When I was eighteen you were my hero. I always wanted to be like you, and now I am. You’re still the b-b-best man in the country and I’m the second best.’
At the time, I was too weak even to hold a drink up to my lips, so it was kind of him to say it. He later told a friend of mine, ‘Any man who calls Bartley Gorman, I’ll do him in.’ I wouldn’t ever want him too, but that’s Henry.
LEWIS WELCH
Lewis, who was thirty-two in December 2001, once told me he would fight any man in the British Isles. He was undefeated as a pro boxer but packed it in when he was only twenty-one to go bareknuckle. He is 5ft 11½, built like a tank and has never been beaten. He lives in Darlington, the toughest travelling town in the country, and his family are very influential at Appleby Fair.
Lewis’s dad Billy was a good fighter – he went to Doncaster in 1963 to challenge Hughie Burton but Hughie wasn’t there – as were his uncles. Lewis himself went to Appleby one year with 100 men to fight James MacPhee but the big Scotsman didn’t turn up. There was also talk at one time of him fighting the boxer Henry Wharton but it never happened. Lewis trains seven days a week and his friends say he eats more than three pigs. For all that, he is an absolute gentleman; spend a night in his company and he won’t mention fighting once. I have always been made very welcome by him when I have been up to the north-east.
TERRY WARD
The nephew of old-timers Sam Ward and Jim Crow, Terry is in his mid-forties and is another Darlington man. His hands are greased lightning and he is known as ‘The JCB’ because he hits like an earth-mover. A former light-heavyweight boxer who packed it in to go bareknuckle, he had the muscle in one of his arms virtually chewed off in one fight and still carries the scars.
He had an incredible fight against a giant Rastafarian called Winston Garfield who is 6ft 7in tall and 23 stone and has a 56in chest and a 23in neck. He travelled up from the Midlands to challenge Terry in a money fight. Garfield’s second, who was 6ft 3in himself, went into the Greyhound pub in Darlington to say he had come to fight The JCB. One of Terry’s pals got on the phone and said, ‘There’s a man who’s come to fight you and if he’s anything like the lad he has sent with the message, he’ll take some handling.’
They fought the next morning at the site on Honeypot Lane. They were expecting Terry’s opponent to turn up with a big team but he arrived with just his second, so he was obviously confident. ‘All I can do is put my eggs in one basket,’ said Terry when he saw the size of him. Garfield threw a left hook that would have killed Terry but he ducked under it and unloaded body shots without let-up. His wrists were sinking into the guy’s body and in the end Garfield flopped to the floor and didn’t get up.
*
THESE ARE FOUR of the best men but there are many other good men. Henry Arab, from Stanley, near Newcastle, has knocked out that many teeth that they call him the ‘Dental Surgeon’. He doesn’t care for man or beast. He fought Bob Gaskin twenty years ago after Gaskin spat in his face in a bar. Arab knocked him out, dragged him across the road to a pump and pumped water onto his face. He also knocked out Johnny Love, said to be the best man in Essex, at Appleby Fair. Ivan Botton, the champion of Nottinghamshire, is also in his forties and recently beat one of the Prices at Newark. One of his sons is a pro boxer. Big Dick Smith from Barnsley is the top boyo over Yorkshire way, and in Lancashire there’s Eric Boswell.
There have also been some very successful gypsy boxers recently: Gary Cooper was British champ in the Eighties and Henry Wharton was British, Commonwealth and European champ in the Nineties. Charlie Moore, from Darlington, won nine amateur titles and was unbeaten as a professional until he packed the game in. He told me, ‘I couldn’t go on boxing because I know how tame it is compared to our bareknuckle fighting.’ There’s Mark Baker from Kent, Henry Brewer from Bradford, whose grandad is a Price, and the flyweight Terrance Gaskin. Trainer Darkie Smith’s lad Stephen recently won a version of a world title. Sam Gorman, my brother Sam’s son, is a top young prospect and was National Schoolboy Champion. My own son Shaun never became a fighter: instead he plays rugby union for Uttoxeter. He’s built like a bull and, believe me, he can look after himself.
Challengers were nowhere to be found when Sam and I were looking for them in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Now they are all fighting men. Yet the last two really big contests in England were between me and John Rooney and me and Henry Francis. John Fury and Henry, who could fill Wembley if they ever fought each other, are friends. Other top men won’t fight each other today: either they are very good friends or they are scared of each other. You don’t get anyone these days saying, ‘I’m the King of the Gypsies.’
*
IRELAND IS ANOTHER matter. There are estimated to be 11,000 travellers in the Republic, where they have been treated as second-class citizens for centuries and even now can be refused a drink in a pub. Lynching still goes on in Ireland: these travellers they occasionally found hanged, ‘suicides’, for interfering with women and suchlike.
They are also terrible for feuding with each other. In July 1994 there was an attack on the house of Joe Joyce, The Hulk, in Athlone by men with guns, allegedly because he wouldn’t fight another man. The McDonaghs and the Wards have also been feuding for most of the 1990s. In June 1996 there was carnage following a funeral at Tuam in County Galway. It started when someone stood on a gravestone to get a better view and was told to get off. A riot erupted and seven people ended up in hospital. The next day a mob went on the warpath in Tuam armed with slash hooks, iron bars and hatchets and smashed up a house and two vans. It led to the trial of thirty-five travellers on charges ranging from assault occasioning actual bodily harm to possessing offensive weapons.
At the sixteen-day trial, it was claimed that Bernie Ward was King of the Travellers. But his lawyer said, ‘Mr Bernie Ward does not claim to be king of the travelling community and he has no interest in being king,’ adding that he was announcing Ward’s abdication for the benefit of anyone who believed he was king. His denial was somewhat undermined when it was revealed in court that a picture of Bernie, stripped to the waist with his fists clenched, was displayed in the window of a shop in Ballinasloe and videos of him fighting were on sale. He had also acted as referee at several bareknuckle fights filmed on video.
In February 1998 the Daily Mirror reported that an illegal bare-knuckle fight was postponed in England following a tip-off to police. ‘Hundreds of Irish tinkers had converged on Manchester for the bout in which two men fight until they drop,’ said the report.
Gypsies had travelled from all parts of Britain and Ireland for the UK title fight. The winner would have collected a purse of £5,000.
Members of the police Tactical Aid Group were called in and a helicopter hovered overhead. Although the bout had started when cops arrived there were no arrests as the fighters melted into the crowd.
One officer said, ‘It was impossible to tell who the contestants were but there was a lot of money around. The road was lined with top-notch cars including Shoguns and Mercedes.’
Illegal bare-knuckle fighting is still popular among travellers and Manchester has traditionally been the venue for many organised fights.
Three months earlier, Jimmy ‘the Boxer’ McDonagh had beaten Paddy ‘The Lurch’ Joyce near Drogheda, knocking him down five times in ten minutes. A few months later McDonagh, who is 6ft 2in and 15st, won a fight for a £20,000 purse and the title King of the Travellers in a field in County Louth. But in May 1998 he was attacked by five hooded men outside a bar in Dundalk and shot in the back of his leg. He had been due to fight the following month. I don’t know what the shooting was about but one of his relatives told the newspapers, ‘He was only into the bare boxing, and that’s fair. There are no weapons or anything. Ask anybody about Jimmy and they’ll tell you he is a lovely person. Even the guards have loads of time for him.’ By November 2000, Jimmy McDonagh was back in action, beating David Nevin after a very long fight for £30,000 a side.
The video tapes of these fights are big business. Some are shipped out to bars in the holiday resorts of Spain and the Canary Islands, where they advertise them as ‘Irish Travelling Community Bareknuckle Fighting’ to pull in the customers. There is money to be made, but the scene is wild and unpredictable. In 1998 Francis Barrett, who became a national hero when he boxed in the Atlanta Olympics and carried the Irish flag at the opening ceremony, was stabbed for refusing to take part in a bareknuckle fight while visiting his family in Galway.
The gardai in Tuam brokered a peace agreement between the Wards and McDonaghs in September 1998 but the following month the gardai seized a large amount of weapons at a funeral and there were a number of clashes around Ballymote in County Sligo. In May 1999, the feud grew even worse when a man was shot dead and another wounded as a crowd of 200 travellers waited outside a graveyard in Ballymote for a funeral. In July that year, extra gardai had to be drafted in for the funeral of another traveller, Bernard Lawrence, in Kells, County Meath. The police established checkpoints and most of the pubs were closed.
There were other feuds as well. In December 1999 a fight to find the King of the Travellers of the Midlands was arranged for Longford in Ireland but police in riot gear and armoured patrol vans sealed off the town with roadblocks. The two sides had previously agreed a truce but it was understood that had broken down and police had information that guns, machetes and other weapons were going to be brought in. ‘Our information was basically that the King of the Travellers’ dominance was being challenged,’ said a garda. ‘There have been a number of fights around the country in recent months and this was due to sort it out once and for all. Over three hundred people were due to attend the fight in a field just outside Longford town. But our information indicated that the King of the Travellers was actually going to be shot during the fight.’
In May 2000 police seized weapons including slash hooks at yet another family funeral in Kildare. And in July 2001 there was a huge and violent fight between four different factions on a playing field at a council estate in Galway. Only the arrival of dozens of gardai prevented it from being even worse. The gunplay is not unknown in England either. In the summer of 2001 there was a shooting at a travellers’ camp in York after a fight following a wedding.
Who needs that? To me, bareknuckle fighting was an honourable pursuit, as much a gypsy sport as hare coursing, fishing or lock-jumping. I was attracted to the romance of it, not the violence. When it all got too dangerous, I lost interest. ‘Bone, steel or lead’ is how they settle it now. I was once told that a gang of ten men were waiting for me at Stow-on-the-Wold Fair with chainsaws ticking. Where is the honour and glory in such barbarity? I have come to the end of the breed business for good. It leads to too much bad blood.
I was born into a violent inheritance but times have changed. When I was young there was only a murder about twice a year. Now they are common. My grandfather, the best of them all, told me he would never lift his hands to another man if he had his time over again, and I agree. Being a fighter gives you a terrible feeling. You are lonely even in a crowd. I wish I had never had that life.
I have seen a lot of death. It is true what the writer said about me several years ago – I do have an air of melancholy. So many of my old boxers had died: John Peaty, Dave Smith, Alan Wilson (who was murdered in Rhyl), Rodey Shaw, Bowie Barsby, Beaky Smith, Guy Harrison, Gandy Hodgkinson and, of course, our Sam. Others involved who had gone included Mick Mould, Harold Groombridge my co-promoter, referee Percy Slater and my timekeeper Fred Parker. It is unaccountable.
My parents are dead. So are Bob and Will Braddock, Hughie and Oathy Burton, Big Tom Lee and so many others. Nelson Boswell, who refereed my fight for the title, passed away in a chair after asking his mother for a cup of tea. My friend Steve Plant burned to death in his trailer. My good pal Les Oakes died when he was hit by another vehicle while adjusting a load on his van. Les was the king of the antiques dealers, had the largest collection of horse-drawn vehicles in Europe and always had a pound to lend, a pound to spend and a pound to give away.
The deaths of friends make you look at yourself. I’m a man born out of time because my values are of bygone years. I can’t get my head around the values of people today. Religion has gone, the people have lost God. How can they win without God? I believe I must go to church to have grace. You can’t see love but it is there and grace is the same, a force like love. If I keep going to church I believe it will give me that little bit more grace to get better.
My fighting days are over and so are my travels. I eventually sold Fort Woodfield and bought several acres with a stream running through them beside the McDonald’s restaurant on the A50 at Uttoxeter. There I planned and built my own house, called ‘Bangalore’. I was also very proud to be honoured by my adopted hometown when in September 2000 they unveiled a large monument in the town square in recognition of prominent Uttoxeter citizens. There, alongside the likes of the Earl of Shrewsbury and Joseph Cyril Bamford of JCB, was the name ‘Bartley Gorman, bareknuckle prize-fighter’. It did make me smile.
I have many blessings, not least my three lovely grandsons: Nathan, Samuel and Bartholomew Gabriel. I hope they will grow up to be healthy, happy and good. I hope that they will know an oak leaf from an ash leaf and not be mesmerised by computer games and other rubbish. And I also hope they will never want to fight.
For what is a so-called hard man? Not the men who think they are, who swagger and bully, that’s for sure. However tough you are, there’s Someone tougher, and fitter, and braver. On every sprawling estate in Britain, from Cardiff to Newcastle and Edinburgh to London, there are real tough men. They probably sit quietly of an evening watching television, dangling their children on their knees, never looking for trouble.
I know gypsies will continue to fight, as boxers, on camps, at weddings and funerals and horse fairs, in pubs and clubs. Any night of the week there’ll be gypsy boys training in makeshift gyms with no electricity or sinks or showers, punching the bag and skipping rope and sparring and dreaming of glory. Many will never make it to the senior ranks or the pros. Instead, they’ll go bareknuckle, as they have done since time immemorial.
I would just remind them that the most important word in the language is not ‘fight’. It’s ‘love’.
*
IN THE AUTUMN of 2001, while in the final stages of finishing this book with my friend Peter Walsh, I was feeling very ill. I thought it was a ’flu virus, but I could not seem to shake it off. After several weeks, it suddenly became much worse. I was admitted to hospital and, after various scans and biopsies, was told I had a serious cancer of the liver. I quickly became so weak I could hardly walk and there were several occasions when I did not think I would survive another night.
Eventually I moved to a specialist unit at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham. They carried out more tests and put me on regular doses of morphine for the pain but after a couple of weeks they made it clear there was little more they could do for me. They suggested that I would be more comfortable at home, with a Macmillan nurse to visit me. I knew what that meant.
So rather than give in, I decided that – with God’s help – I was going to beat this hideous thing that had struck down my father, brother and uncle. My girlfriend Ann – who never left my side night or day – and some close family and friends booked me into a private clinic near Frankfurt, Germany, and I was flown there, accompanied by a male nurse, on the Saturday before Christmas. It was a hellish journey but I felt it was my only hope. The clinic pioneers unorthodox alternative treatments, including injections directly into the tumour. I won’t go into detail: suffice to say that the pain is unimaginable. Anything I suffered in a fight was a picnic by comparison.
I did realise for the first time the friends I had: all of those people that came to visit me. I will not list them all here, as it would be too long, but they know who they are and I thank them all. Even old opponents like John Rooney and Henry Francis have put their arms around me and kissed me and prayed and wept by my bedside. I have discovered how much love I have in me. I don’t want to carry any hate in my body and soul, only love.
I hope that when you read these words, I will also be reading them: sitting up in bed, enjoying my own book and recovering. I have been going through a black desert and I now know the true meaning of the phrase, ‘Deliver us from evil’. I have resolved that if I come through this terrible ordeal – more horrible than I can describe – I will devote the rest of my life to doing good. I hope it is something I can live up to. Since being in hospital I have longed so much for the green fields and hedges and blue skies and God’s earth. I feel weak but at my weakest I am at my strongest, because my strength is in Jesus Christ.
Please God, I will give it my best; for if nothing else, I am a fighter.