Bartley Gorman died in the early evening of Friday, January 18, 2002, at a hospice in Derby. He was fifty-seven. He had fought a short but typically heroic battle against cancer and was surrounded to the last by close friends and family, and much love. Many hundreds of people, gypsies and non-gypsies, attended his funeral a week later in Uttoxeter, his adopted hometown, and his burial at a small cemetery in nearby Rocester. It was a bleak, wet day, and a sad one for those who knew this remarkable man.
This book has concentrated on Bartley Gorman the bareknuckle prize-fighter, for it is that which made him famous. But there was much more to him. He kept largely silent about the family that he loved, in order to protect their privacy. He never mentioned how he would suddenly appear at early morning Mass on a midweek day in some small country church, or his uncountable small acts of kindness and charity, or his long conversations with friends about religion, philosophy and life. He had many facets, some of them more important to him than the fighting which made him a legend. As his cousin Malcolm Wilson told his funeral congregation, ‘We all knew he was a great fighter but he was also funny and he was clever. He could argue. He was kind and, above all, he was loving.’
I learned that in the all-too-brief eighteen months I knew him. He was a unique man, a one-off. I shall miss his late night phone calls, the photographs and newspaper cuttings that would suddenly arrive in the post, the long conversations over endless mugs of milky tea in his trailer, the shared meals in the Little Chef at Uttoxeter or at various pubs and the regular tussle to stop him picking up the bill.
Everyone who knew him will remember different things about him: his stubbornness on points of principle; his playfully wicked sense of humour; his quick wit; his love of argument and debate; his veneration for anything old and for nature; his constant gift-giving; his love of small children, whom he would shower with treats and sweets and who brought out the barely disguised child in him.
Shortly before he died, he told me he wanted to make one thing clear. ‘The people in my life that ever did anything against me, even the men that attacked me at Doncaster, I forgive them all. Every one. Because if I can’t forgive, then I’m not worth anything.’
Bartley need have no worries on that score. Goodbye, my friend.
Peter Walsh, February 2002