Although a number of fighting styles are particular to the UK, the early days of what became British professional wrestling has some parallels to its American counterpart. Before the turn of the 20th century, a Michigan-born wrestler named Jack Carkeek traveled to England, issuing challenges to anyone there who wished to engage in a shoot — not unlike the carnival wrestlers who barnstormed the U.S. heartland. Carkeek’s parents were British, and he’d been trained in Cornish wrestling, in which competitors gripped onto each other’s jackets in order to gain an advantage. But he also was proficient at catch, a British discipline that was modified in America as “catch-as-catch-can.”
In 1903, “The Russian Lion” George Hackenschmidt arrived in London after winning championships in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vienna and Paris. In addition to being a strongman, Hackenschmidt was a fitness author, philosopher and public speaker proficient in seven languages. In the UK, he was regarded as a celebrity, but his fame extended to the United States, particularly after he pinned American champion Tom Jenkins in two straight falls during a 1905 Greco-Roman rules bout at Royal Albert Hall. Before Hackenschmidt dropped his title to Frank Gotch in Chicago, Theodore Roosevelt commented, “If I wasn’t president of the United States, I would like to be George Hackenschmidt.”
As wrestlers traveled back and forth over the Atlantic Ocean, the influence spread in both directions. By 1930, though, the styles started to diverge. English wrestlers combined the rules of a number of wrestling forms, including catch and Greco-Roman, to create what was called “all-in” (given the historical knowledge of its organizers, it’s hardly a coincidence that this became the name of the pay-per-view that helped trigger the indie revolution). In 1930, the British Wrestling Association (BWA) was founded by Henry Irslinger and Sir Atholl Oakeley, who somehow managed to win the group’s national championship. If that wasn’t suspicious enough, a number of other incidents occurred that suggested that the BWA was not presenting legitimate contests. Women appeared on shows, more to titillate the men in the crowd than display athleticism, and competitors resorted to badgering foes with chairs and other weapons. Even so, by the onset of World War II, fans had largely lost interest, and wrestling was relegated to the backrooms of pubs.
In 1947, troubled by reports that professional wrestling had become “fake,” a committee headed by Antarctic explorer Admiral-Lord Mountevans created a set of rules that was supposed to restore the sport’s integrity. Women were no longer permitted to participate — leading to the elimination of mud matches and other related attractions — weight classes were defined and matches divided into six five-minute rounds with 30-second breaks in between. Victory could be achieved via two pinfalls, two submissions, or one of each, as well as a knockout.
As a result of these rule changes, the city of London, along with other jurisdictions, lifted its ban on professional wrestling.
More than 95 percent of the promoters in the UK agreed to adhere to Mountevans’ “modern freestyle wrestling” boundaries. But the truth was that British wrestling was still primarily a work. That didn’t mean that wrestlers didn’t take the art seriously. Karl Gotch, Bert Assirati, John Foley, Billy Robinson and the Dynamite Kid were among the treacherous “hookers” — guys who could hook your body into crippling holds you’d never see in an amateur match — who passed through Billy Riley’s Snake Pit gym, located in the Lancashire mining town of Wigan. Although doing business constrained them from maiming most rivals with less daunting credentials, the threat was always there.
Generally, the average British wrestling promoter presented shows with “blue eyes,” or babyfaces, “baddies” and theatrical storylines. By and large, everyone cooperated. Hence, the inspiration for the title of Jackie “Mr. TV” Pallo’s 1985 tell-all, You Grunt, I’ll Groan.
As with the NWA, a syndicate of British promoters banded together in 1952, forming Joint Promotions, consisting of operations based in London, Yorkshire, Manchester, Liverpool and Scotland. Their efforts were aided by the introduction of Joint Promotions’ segments on ITV’s World of Sport series, starting in 1964, adding names like Pallo, Mick McManus, Tony St. Clair, Big Daddy, Giant Haystacks, Les Kellett, Jim Breaks, Johnny Saint, Marty Jones and Mark “Rollerball” Rocco into the British cultural vernacular.
The system worked for a long time. As the years passed, though, the group was criticized for its reliance on older wrestlers whose matches had become routine, notably Big Daddy, whose brother, Max Crabtree, happened to head Joint Promotions. In 1980, British World Heavyweight champion “Mighty” John Quinn, a Canadian who’d appeared in the WWWF as the Kentucky Butcher, left for rival All Star Wrestling (ASW), taking the belt with him. Quinn’s chief adversary, Wayne Bridges, eventually joined him in ASW to continue the feud.
Then, in 1986, ITV cancelled World of Sport. For a few more years, wrestling remained on British television but with no consistent time slot. Having lost its exclusive with ITV, Joint Promotions tapes were rotated with those of ASW and the World Wrestling Federation. Finally, in 1988, the same year Ted Turner was forced to step in and bail out what remained of the old NWA, ITV cancelled wrestling for good.
Before folding in 1995, Joint Promotions became little more than a touring vehicle for Big Daddy and later, British Bulldog Davey Boy Smith, during a period when he was estranged from the WWF. By contrast, ASW — started in 1970 by Brian Dixon, who’d first become acquainted with the business as president of the Jim Breaks Fan Club — used the cliffhangers from the cancelled wrestling broadcasts to continue plotlines at live events, developing stories from show to show.
ASW also thrived in the summer, touring holiday camps, collections of bungalows, chalets and campers in country settings where families vacationed. “Hundreds of people would come to the holiday camp shows,” said Will Cooling, a writer for Fighting Spirit Magazine, a highly respected British wrestling and MMA publication that closed in 2019. “Even if they didn’t see it on TV, fans still needed that wrestling fix.”
For those unfamiliar with current storylines, and for those who’d never watched at all, an announcer would describe the details of the various feuds on the public address system. “He’d say, ‘Look what this awful guy is doing,’ letting you know who to cheer and who to boo,” Cooling said. “That way, everyone could enjoy themselves. The holiday camps are one part of the British wrestling industry that gets no coverage. You’d do these shows once a year — no more. And then, people would come back the next year.”
For a period, ASW formed an alliance with the UK Hammerlock promotion, founded in Kent in 1993 by Andre “Sledgehammer” Baker. “Hammerlock was taken very seriously,” said former Fighting Spirit editor Brian Elliott.” Andre Baker insisted that his students knew mat wrestling. You had to know how to shoot before you took your first bump class. It wasn’t like today, when people go to a wrestling school as a hobby. There were only guys who really wanted to be wrestlers. You started out by putting up and taking down the ring. It might be months before they’d let you in the ring to train.”
Eventually, the group split with ASW, becoming a member of the NWA. Perhaps the biggest event in the history of the renamed NWA UK Hammerlock occurred in 1999, when the promotion’s top star, submission specialist Gary Steele, won the NWA Heavyweight Championship from Naoya Ogawa in a three-way match with Brian Anthony in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Steele had become the first Brit to hold the crown, but ASW seemed to barely notice. While running a wrestling school in Birkenhead, Merseyside, the company was busy, developing relationships with promoters in Canada, France, Germany and Japan and even sending wrestlers Robbie Dynamite, Frankie Sloan, James Mason and Dean Allmark, Brian Dixon’s son-in-law, to TNA as Team UK in 2004.
By then, though, ASW had created bad feelings among some followers. They presented what became known as “WWE tribute shows,” advertising characters like a “UK Undertaker” and “British Doink.” In at least one instance, a poster hyping the appearance of the “Big Red Machine” included a promotional photo of WWE’s Kane. After 580-pound, former WWF World Heavyweight champion Yokozuna died of pulmonary edema in his Liverpool hotel room before a 2000 show, ASW is said to have continued to use his image to publicize upcoming events.
“You’d see posters with all the WWE guys,” said Dann Read, cofounder of Pro-Wrestling: EVE, “then, you’d go to the show and The Rock would have a Welsh accent. I remember my friend telling me, ‘We’re going to see WWE in Colchester” — in Essex, about 90 minutes from London — “and I’d think, ‘If WWE is coming to England, they’re not going to an 1,100-capacity building in Colchester.’ That really killed a lot of towns.”
In 2002, Scott Conway, a disaffected member of the ASW roster, cut his ties with the Dixon family and started The Wrestling Alliance (TWA). Doing away with the British system of breaking a wrestling match into rounds, Conway was still enough of a traditionalist to present many of the company’s bouts as two out of three falls. But with no exclusive contracts, TWA’s wrestlers often worked for ASW on off days. Said Read, “You could work every day of the week, mainly outside of London. London wasn’t a thing. But the Corn Exchange in Ipswich could draw 1,000 fans on a Tuesday night. There were shows in town halls. And both groups had different holiday camps.”
Then, in 2004, Conway left the UK and moved to Thailand, with hopes of setting up a wrestling league — a decision, incidentally, that didn’t go very well. “It opened the door to other promoters,” Read said. “Dixon never gave a shit. He was too focused on his own stuff to try to block someone else from getting started. That’s when the British wrestling model started to change. Instead of bringing in old WWF guys like Greg Valentine or Earthquake or the Honky Tonk Man, promoters were looking at wrestlers who’d been in ECW or Ring of Honor, more indie-type wrestlers.”
Among the new English promotions were Kent’s International Pro Wrestling: United Kingdom (IPW: UK) and Manchester’s FutureShock, formed in 2004; Newcastle’s Main Event Wrestling (MEW) and London’s Lucha Britannia, formed in 2006; Hull’s New Generation Wrestling (NGW), created in 2008; and Wolverhampton’s Fight Club: Pro, launched in 2009. In Scotland, the Scottish Wrestling Alliance (SWA) started in 2002, while Insane Championship Wrestling (ICW) began two years later. Many of the wrestlers working for these groups also appeared on cards promoted by Irish Whip Wrestling (IWW), founded in 2002 — one of its biggest stars, two-time champ Sheamus O’Shaunnessy, would dispense with the last name when he joined WWE’s main roster in 2009 — and Northern Ireland’s Pro Wrestling Ulster, which held its first event in 2007.
In 2003, Dann Read began working with the Frontier Wrestling Alliance (FWA), originally named the Fratton Wrestling Association when it was created by wrestler Mark Sloan 10 years earlier. Like NWA UK Hammerlock, FWA was gravely earnest about the sport of wrestling. The piledriver was banned because, in a real fight, a person would likely be paralyzed if his neck were driven into a hard surface. As in professional soccer, a penalty card system was implemented, with a yellow serving as a warning and a red as a disqualification.
“I didn’t want to be involved with these old school shows anymore because, by the 2000s, that’s not what the audience was wanting,” Read said. “We began using wrestlers like Robbie Brookside, Jody Fleisch and Alex Shane.” These were modern athletes who fans believed could handle themselves in an actual shoot. At the FWA Academy in Sloan’s hometown of Portsmouth, he trained a number of performers who’d later appear in WWE, including Paul and Katie Lea Burchill and Drew McIntyre.
The group gained an international reputation after Americans Sabu and Dan Severn appeared on FWA shows and Christopher Daniels defended the promotion’s British Heavyweight Championship in Ring of Honor.
“You’d get indie bookings because you were an FWA student,” Read said. “I think one of the reasons Mark shut down the academy was because people would come in, do one session and then contact promoters and say, ‘Oh, I’m an FWA trainee.’”
In Leicester, though, Brookside was in the process of opening his own school. Brookside was unique in British wrestling because he managed to span several eras. He first received national exposure by appearing on ITV during the period when it televised ASW; although Robbie’s real surname was Brooks, Brian Dixon thought a moniker inspired by the British soap opera Brookside would be more memorable. In ASW, Brookside formed a team with Steve Regal — later William Regal in WWE. During a broadcast in 1988, Brookside unmasked Kendo Nagasaki — the real-life Peter Thornley from Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, not Kazuo Sakurada, who played the character in Japan and North America. In retribution, Nagasaki hypnotized Brookside into turning on the other blue eyes, an angle that continued after ASW was no longer televised.
Even after winning FWA’s version of the world championship, Brookside remained an ASW wrestler, making appearances in both promotions. But his scope extended well beyond the British Isles. He performed in Germany and Austria, particularly for Otto Wanz’s Catch Wrestling Association (CWA), and for WCW and WWE. Nearly 30 years after his career started, he was working as a WWE talent scout and, later, an NXT coach.
But while Brookside was able to transition from one league to another, pro wrestling’s limited UK exposure caused British performers to struggle. At one point, Doug Williams, one of the country’s most respected grafters, as the Brits called their workers, relocated to Florida to become a regular in TNA, whose UK broadcasts led to sold-out tours.
With American companies commanding the curiosity of casual fans, wrestlers like Jonny Storm, Martin Kirby and Kris Travis kept their dedicated supporters interested. Still, the opportunities outside of Great Britain seemed limited. “El Ligero probably wrestled more dates over the period of two years than anyone on the planet,” said Elliott. “Twelve to 14 matches a week. Very rarely injured. An excellent worker, entirely proficient, knew how to time his spots, not do too much in one match. But his gimmick was a Mexican luchador. He was really from Leeds and had a heavy accent like the British Bulldogs. I remember he had a really excellent match against Akira Tozawa in Preston City Wrestling (PCW) in 2012. I mentioned it to Konnan [then an international liaison for AAA], and he said, ‘There’s nothing you can do with the guy because he’s a British wrestler with a Mexican gimmick, and the Mexicans would never believe in him.’ Of course, when WWE signed him [in 2018], everything changed.”
It was 2010 when Elliott began writing for Fighting Spirit. As a wrestling fan with mainstream tastes, he was more intrigued by WWE, TNA and Ring of Honor than anything distinctly British. But once he started exploring the indies, he realized that the momentum was shifting in the UK.
Within a year, Steven Fludder started PCW in Lancashire, and future WWE United Kingdom champion Pete Dunne and ring announcer Jimmy Lee opened ATTACK! Pro Wrestling in Wales. With a rotating roster that included Mark Andrews and Chris Brookes, ATTACK! resembled CHIKARA in both the intimacy it established with its fans and unorthodox storylines. One show, labeled Press Start, had a video game theme. An affectionate French mouse was called Love Making Demon. Referees and stuffed animals won championships. “They would do Christmas shows where people would dress up outside their gimmick, and the fans would find it hilarious,” Elliott said. “There would be a lot of talking on the shows, not interview segments, but wrestlers shouting out something during their matches to make the crowd laugh. The wrestling itself was very high spot–oriented. Tremendously entertaining, even for someone who wasn’t a fan of that type of wrestling.
“Pete Dunne, who was very young then, had possibly the ugliest ring gear I ever saw. The talent was always there, of course, but in some ways, he was unrecognizable compared to what he became later on.”
Glasgow-based ICW also stood out for presenting an unabashedly Scottish product, with a tartan-sporting YouTuber known as the Wee Man working as a manager and commentator and references to the country’s preferred soft drink, Irn-Bru. “They never made any bones about it,” Elliott said. “Nobody tried to dull their accent. Wrestlers who were dealing with the promoter, Mark Dallas, would joke that they needed a translator. I’m Irish and even I can tell you that a thick Scottish accent is a lot to deal with on occasion.”
By 2012, the promotion started to break out, exporting shows to Newcastle, Leeds, Liverpool, London and other UK cities. But the center point of ICW was Barrowland — officially the Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow, a nightclub where the Clash, U2, Oasis, the Smiths and Foo Fighters had all performed. “This was a big thing for ICW,” Elliott said. “The wrestlers would say, ‘We’re going to Barrowland,’ which was something special. The kind of people who came to see them tended to be goth people or emo people. The fans were integral to the promotion. You know how, in ECW, they had Hat Guy and Sign Guy who all the people knew? There weren’t singular fans like that in ICW but, collectively, they were behind the local talent, and the local talent were busting a gut to do well.
“It was almost like a little club, a little ICW club that you had — a community. If you can create that indie vibe, whether it’s for music or for wrestling, people will gather toward it.”
Much like TNA, Ring of Honor and CHIKARA rose from the aftershocks of WCW and ECW, Revolution Pro Wrestling and PROGRESS, Britain’s two best-known indies, were founded as ICW and other UK companies were creating a scene that had little to do with the World of Sport days.
RevPro, as fans would grow to call it, was the brainchild of Andy Quidlan, the former booker for IPW: UK, who took that group’s British Heavyweight, Tag Team and Cruiserweight titles to the new league. The inaugural show, in August 2012, featured Fergal Devitt (Finn Balor in WWE), Marty Scurll and Zack Sabre Jr. — as well as stalwart American babyface Johnny Gargano. While the groundwork was there, the company’s turning point arguably occurred in 2015 when it formed an allegiance with New Japan, along with the Nipponese organization’s other allies, Ring of Honor and Mexico’s oldest promotion, CMLL.
The union gave RevPro international credibility. In 2015, AJ Styles captured the group’s British Heavyweight crown while he was already the IWGP Heavyweight champion in New Japan. Two years later, the promotion started a British J-Cup tournament, patterned after New Japan’s Super J-Cup competition that drew cruiserweights from all over the world.
As its reputation increased, RevPro came to be associated with York Hall, an edgy, former Turkish bathhouse in London’s Bethnal Green section, catering to Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland until the 1970s. It was later converted into an arena, hosting boxing events and concerts.
Unlike the American promoters who lived and died by television, Quidlan made little effort to secure a deal. “It only takes one person to turn it down and you’re back to square one,” he told SE Scoops. “It’s a very long process and it becomes very time-draining. I remember when I was producing the IPW show, the money we were getting paid wasn’t worth the effort that was going into it because our ticket sales didn’t increase as a result.” In the digital age, he continued, he felt more comfortable offering RevPro shows on YouTube and through On Demand.
The same year RevPro held its debut card, PROGRESS presented Chapter 1: In the Beginning in March 2012, an event that showcased Sabre, Scurll and future WWE performers Noam Dar and Zack Gibson.
What made PROGRESS unusual was its origins outside the traditional wrestling universe. Cofounder Jim Smallman was a comedian fixated on Japanese wrestling. Teaming up with his agent Jon Briley, Smallman eventually brought in actor Glen Joseph as another owner. Devoting themselves to creating a punk rock ambiance in a big city setting, the three tried using primarily British wrestlers, rather than relying on fly-ins.
“One of the reasons PROGRESS worked was they ran central London when no one else wanted to take a chance on central London,” said Dann Read. “It was convenient by rail. You didn’t have to drive and sit in massive amounts of traffic, and then get to central London and not be able to park. It helped that the owners were Londoners themselves, and they reaped the rewards.”
Yet, despite their connection to England’s largest city, the trio showed concern for the commuters who came from elsewhere. Shows generally started on Sundays at 4 p.m. and ended by 8 p.m. “That meant that if you were a traveling fan, you could get a train home before all the trains stopped running,” Cooling said. “That’s the difference between Britain and America. Britain is more densely populated and connected by the train lines. I live in Northampton in the East Midlands. It takes me about two hours by train to go to London. I’m literally traveling half the country, but I can do it as a day trip. Most successful British promotions had fans willing to travel three hours to a show.”
Certainly, PROGRESS did. Following 11 consecutive sellouts at The Garage in East London, the company drew 2,400 fans to the Brixton Academy in 2016. Two years later, after branching into Birmingham and Manchester, the group attracted more than 4,700 spectators to its Hello Wembley event at the SSE Arena.
One testament to PROGRESS’ popularity: its ability to sell season ticket packages to its shows at London’s Electric Ballroom.
“We covered them from the very start,” said Elliott. “I know we wrote about their first DVD release because they were quite sensitive about what we said in our review. We gave them a glowing review, but we said that, in front of the hard cam, you could see the computer screens that the guys were working on, and it was distracting. The PROGRESS guys weren’t very happy about that, and I wonder if they noticed the same thing and didn’t want us reminding everyone.”
But there were few criticisms of the actual shows. Jimmy Havoc attributes this to the promotion allowing its performers to fashion their own characters. In his case, “I found elements in my life, my film taste, my music taste that I brought to the person you saw in the ring. All my promos in PROGRESS were my own. My friends helped me shoot and edit my promos [and vignettes]. The storyline was a collaborative effort between me and PROGRESS. When you write and create your own stuff, people can tell. It’s more you.”
When they weren’t working for PROGRESS, many of the same wrestlers could be seen in RevPro. Still, there was virtually no crossover of storylines. “You can’t say they had a fractious relationship,” Elliott said. “It seemed like they didn’t have any kind of relationship. They had different philosophies. RevPro was more traditional wrestling, and PROGRESS was more modern.
“What I will say is that fans of PROGRESS and RevPro didn’t like each other. PROGRESS fans were the sort of fans who’d come up with funny chants. In some ways, it could be that kind of ironic, wink, wink, nudge, nudge wrestling. And RevPro drew an audience that liked British strong style.”
Yet, Quidlan told the British music monthly, VultureHound, that even if the companies didn’t cooperate, there was an effort to coexist. “The basic rule, to borrow from PROGRESS, is don’t be a dick,” he said in 2015. “Don’t tread on anyone’s toes if you can help it, and respect other promoters if you want to be respected yourself. I’m too busy with my own promotion to worry about sabotaging anyone else, and everyone else should be too.”
Where PROGRESS, RevPro and the other British promotions could find common ground was the satisfaction in knowing that the grafters in the UK were no longer going into forced exile to support themselves. Now they could venture to L.A. or Sydney or Nagoya and evangelize on the merits of their homegrown scene not with words, but their exploits between the ropes. “For a long time after the World of Sport era of British wrestling, everything was based on international wrestlers coming in,” Sabre told New Japan’s website in 2017. “Now we’re at a point where the most popular matches feature British wrestlers. [We] want as many British wrestlers traveling around the world as possible. People watch us and then want to watch more British wrestling. So I’m proud to be a part of this generation.”