Henry Cooper

by Norman Giller

  Henry arrived twenty minutes before his brother and weighed in at 6lb 4oz, two pounds lighter than George, who remained slightly heavier throughout their lives. As they grew up, the only way that people – other than their mum and dad and older brother Bernard – could tell them apart was that George was right-handed, Henry left-handed. They were mirror twins. There were times when even their father, Henry Senior – himself once a handy fighter – got muddled up and paddled the arse of Henry Junior for something George had done, or vice versa.

  It came as quite a shock to Mum when we were born because she was expecting one baby and she was going to call us Walter. A nurse looked at us and said, ‘They seem like a right Henry and George to me.’ So that’s what we became rather than Walter.

  Our first home was at Camberwell Green, which adjoins Lambeth, but we always think of ourselves as Bellingham boys from Lewisham in South-East London. We grew up on the council estate there and it was at Bellingham Boxing Club where we first started taking the old fight game seriously. We were what was called, back in those days, ruffians, but we respected our teachers and lived in fear of Dad’s slaps if we back-chatted him or failed to do whatever Mum wanted. Dad used the same discipline on us as his dad used on him. Granddad George was a notorious cobbles fighter, who used to scrap for pennies round the Elephant and Castle area, and Dad would cop a right hander from him if he misbehaved. In our time it was all right to whack your kids and teachers would cane you or slap your arse with a slipper. Somewhere between the way they disciplined us then and the namby-pamby way they treat children today would be about right. You have to teach them respect. My boys, Henry Marco and John Pietro, have had quite a few hand whacks on the bum when they’ve got up to mischief. Nothing heavy, but enough to show them the difference between right and wrong.

  George and me grew up when there were a lot of villains around, blokes who would use violence to get what they wanted. But that was never our game. The only real naughties we got up to was nicking balls from the local golf course, mostly from the lake, and then we’d sell them to club members for half-a-crown. Golf was then a rich man’s sport. Little did I know that it would become my passion, slicing plenty of balls into lakes but with no urchins to sell them back to me for half a dollar.

  We had loads of energy to burn, and boxing proved the ideal outlet and kept us on the straight and narrow. I suppose we might have run with the hounds but for boxing. We grew up in the Teddy Boy days when there used to be gang fights, with knuckledusters, bicycle chains, razors and flick knives. But me and George kept out of all that, thanks to boxing. Anyhow, neither of us had the hair for that thick, greased look with the combed duck’s arse at the back.

  A quick way to aggravate Henry was to call him an East Ender. I’m a Stepney boy, born in Cable Street, a quarter of a mile from Tower Bridge on the north side of the Thames. That is at the heart of the East End. Cross the Bridge into Bermondsey and you are into the Cooper territory of South-East London. The real East End takes in just Stepney, including Aldgate, Mile End, Whitechapel and Wapping, Bethnal Green, Bow, a bit of Hackney and Poplar. East of that, you’re an East Londoner. My generation of East Enders will tell you there is a geographical difference. ‘You’re riff-raff,’ Henry used to tease. And I wasn’t going to argue with him. ‘We South Londoners are posh compared with you lot,’ he’d say, possibly even meaning it.

  Even in his beautifully delivered eulogy at Henry’s funeral, Jimmy Tarbuck called him the pride of the East End. But why should Scouser Jimmy know any better? Perhaps I should explain to him that it’s like calling an Evertonian a Liverpudlian.

  What I always found disconcerting about being in the company of the Cooper twins and manager Jim Wicks is that they always talked in the third person, using the Royal ‘we’. It was ‘we’ did this, ‘we’ are going to do that, ‘we’ will take care of it, he didn’t hurt ‘us’, he’s never met anybody who hits as hard as ‘we’ do. Henry and George really were as one at times. You would find them continually finishing each other’s sentences, ordering the same food from the menu at the same time, saying things in unison, and laughing or protesting at identical moments.

  I had enormous respect for George, who never once moaned or groaned about having to live in his more famous brother’s shadow. Back in their amateur days, many good judges rated George the better prospect. He had a booming right hand that was even more potent than Enery’s famed and feared left hook, the ’Ammer.

  But George was never quite the same force after breaking his right hand in one of his last amateur contests. He was an unlucky fighter, suffering throughout his career with far worse eye cuts than those that handicapped Henry. To try and beat the curse, he had plastic surgery to take the edge off his protruding eyebrows, but he continued to be known in the trade as ‘a bleeder’. He won forty-two out of sixty-four amateur contests, many of the defeats caused by cut eyes; he also had to battle to overcome the rheumatic fever that put him flat on his back in hospital for three months when he was sixteen.

  George was obliged to change his name to Jim Cooper when he turned professional in 1954, because there was already a licence holder from Poplar called George Cooper. Jim/George… identical twin brother Henry… a Dad named Henry… Jim Wicks, who could never get anybody’s name right, referring to himself as ‘we’ as if the twins were triplets. It’s a wonder George/Jim didn’t have an identity crisis.

  There was never a time when George gave me anything less than 100 per cent support. When we were boxing on the same bill, I always used to insist that I went on first because I got too nervous when he was fighting.

  His right hand was the cat’s whiskers. Gawd help anybody who got in its way when it was really travelling. He knew the boxing game inside out and was often in my corner, giving good advice and always keeping a cool head in a crisis.

  We worked at Smithfield meat market for a while, carrying huge slabs of meat about on our shoulders. That was really hard graft, but the early morning shifts fitted in nicely with our training. Then we tried our hand at plastering, and that suited us down to the ground, or perhaps that should be up to the ceiling. I used the trowel with my left hand and George with his right. We would start on opposite sides of a room and meet in the middle of the ceiling. Nobody could finish plastering a ceiling quicker than we Coopers. I reckon that helped build our power. They used to say that between us we had Popeye’s arms, because my left arm and George’s right arm bulged with more muscle than our other arms.

  George was reckoned by everybody who employed him to be a true artist of a plasterer. I used to just bish-bosh it on, but he went in for the fancy stuff – swirls, stipples, fans, that sort of thing – and you could have hung his work in a gallery. He married Barbara, the daughter of Reg Reynolds, who taught us all there is to know about the plastering game. So George did more than all right out of plastering. And before you make any jokes, we never once came home plastered. Throughout our boxing careers George and I rarely touched a drop of alcohol and neither of us went near tobacco until after we’d packed up boxing.

  In fact the only booze we drank was a dreadful cocktail recommended by Jim Wicks. It was a mix of port and Guinness, and Jim used to encourage us to have it occasionally because he reckoned it was good for the constitution. Said he’d learned it from old-time fighters around about the First World War period when he was a good scrapper and had a few fairground bouts. Many years later when I started to suffer from gout I blamed it on that drink of Jim’s! You should have seen the faces George and me pulled when we used to down the drink in one go. The Thomas a Becket pub, over which Jim had his office, was a Courage house and we used to say we needed courage to drink the Wicks cocktail.

  Tell you what, nobody has a better brother than George. He’s always there for me and me for him. I always used to jokingly put him in his place by saying I was the older and wiser one, but in truth we were bang equal in everything. Funny, but I could never really whack hard with my right hand, and George couldn’t br
eak eggs with his left. In fact, I reckon I would have been a southpaw if my early coaches had not insisted on me leading with my left. Now if I’d had George’s right hand to go with my left hook, I think – no, I know – I would have done even better in my career.

  George could whack every bit as hard as me, maybe even harder when that right hand of his was at its most potent. With just a little luck, he might easily have been a world champion. He was that good, but the old mince pies let him down big time.

  The twins had their education interrupted by the war years, during which their council house in Fermstead Road, Bellingham took a hit, but the boys were by then safely evacuated to Lancing in Sussex. They left the local Athelney Road school at fifteen, more Philistines than Einsteins but street smart to degree level. Both Henry and George had got off to a less than distinguished start to their careers when boxing in the vest of the Bellingham Amateur Boxing Club. They each lost their first four schoolboy contests and both showed a worrying weakness against body shots. Bob Hill, a local fire brigade boxing champion who had recommended they take up the sport, was mystified. He then discovered that before each bout, both Henry and George were fed huge bread puddings by their mum, Lily, who thought this was helping them be strong, instead of sluggish and unable to take hard punches to the stomach.

  Once they got their diet sorted out, they began to make their mark as amateurs. The slightly heavier George eventually boxed in the heavyweight division, leaving Henry to boil down to make light-heavyweight, because they had sworn never to fight each other.

  In 1952, aged just seventeen and now boxing for the Eltham and District Amateur Boxing Club, Henry won a coveted ABA title and retained it the following year when he beat the highly acclaimed Australian Tony Madigan, who was later to give one Cassius Marcellus Clay a close call in the 1960 Rome Olympics.

  But while developing into a celebrated amateur boxer on the domestic front, Henry did not travel well, failing to make an impact in his two major international tournaments overseas. Many thought he was robbed in his only contest in the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, when he was adjudged to have been outpointed by Russian Anatoli Perov. The following year he competed in the European championships in Warsaw. By then he was Lance-Corporal Henry Cooper of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, otherwise known as the Boxers’ Battalion. Corporal Cooper came up against a huge Russian bear called Juri Jegorow and suffered a public execution. He was giving away height and reach, and was stopped in the first round, his legs doing an involuntary dance after the Russian had landed a booming right to the jaw. It gave a new meaning to corporal punishment.

  ‘The ref was right to stop it,’ honest Henry acknowledged. ‘I was not in a position to properly defend myself and could have taken a real tanking. I moaned at the time, but that was just me pride talking. Deep down I knew I’d got off lightly.’

  Henry won seventy-three of eighty-four amateur bouts and was a regular in England and Great Britain vests. Among his opponents was his close pal in the Army, Joe Erskine, with whom he was to have one of the most exciting and exacting serials in British boxing history. They met three times as amateurs, Henry winning two-one. It was a friendly yet fierce rivalry that was to spill over into the professional arena with – as you will learn later – a near-disastrous climax to one of their fights.

  We loved our amateur careers. This was in an era when it was every bit as popular as the pro game and we used to get full houses for the top competitions. There was great inter-club rivalry and the highlights were the divisional, London and national championships, and you would get to box at the main venues like the Albert Hall and Wembley Pool, and it was often on the telly. Me and George were local heroes and enjoyed the buzz of it all.

  My only disappointment is that I didn’t cover myself in glory in the two major events. Looking back, I realise I was too young. I was still a baby of eighteen when the Olympics took place in Helsinki in 1952. They were probably the hottest Games ever in boxing and very political because the Iron Curtain was as its most menacing and the Russians – professional in everything but name – refused to live in the Olympic village. My contest with Perov, a big unsmiling geezer who could have haunted houses for a living, was nip and tuck, and I thought I’d nicked it with my left jab that was never out of his wide face. I had two Eastern European judges vote against me and the French judge called me the winner. So out I went, beaten on a split decision by a mature man while I was still just a kid.

  The Americans had a fantastic team, including future world stars of the calibre of Floyd Patterson, Spider Webb and Nate Brooks. The Hungarians had Laszlo Papp, the South Africans the Toweel brothers, and the Swedes Ingemar Johansson, who got himself slung out in the final for allegedly not trying. He later made them eat their words!

  If we could have made a living out of it like the Iron Curtain boys we would have been happy to stay amateur, but you can’t eat cups and medals, so George and me turned pro as soon as we escaped from the Army.

  After their final amateur contests in April 1954, Henry and George honoured their pledge to sign as professionals with Jim Wicks. They had been introduced to him before starting their National Service by London Evening News boxing writer J. T. (Jimmy) Hulls, who liked the Cooper boys and said he wanted them to be in safe hands. Jim Wicks looked after them as carefully and as caringly as if they were precious porcelain china.

  The Bishop already had a star-studded stable featuring such top-of-the-bill fighters as British light-heavyweight champion Alex Buxton, Empire bantamweight title-holder Jake Tuli and British lightweight king Joe Lucy.

  The twins signed just one three-year contract with Wicks, which was never renewed. Both Henry and George were happy to let The Bishop manage them on word of honour only. It was as close to a father and sons’ trust as you could get. Jim did not pay them signing-on money and just supplied them with satin shorts and dressing-gowns adorned with their names on the back. Other boxers accepted upfront money from unscrupulous managers, who would then make matches with a view to getting their money back rather than with the best interests of their boxers at heart. Jim Wicks was crafty but never a crook. The twins could not be in better hands.

  A couple of years before signing the Coopers, Wicks had declined to sign another pair of twins, who were causing something of a stir across the water in the East End. They were Reggie and Ronnie Kray, both of whom had short professional careers before concentrating on using violence outside the ring to make their fortune.

  I asked Henry if he knew them. ‘Of course I did,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t be in the boxing game and not be aware of them. They used to come and watch me train and would sit ringside for my fights. But that was as far as it went, although I did appear at a few charity events for them. Their villainy got all the headlines, but they did put something back into the community. In truth, we wanted nothing to do with them. I remember matchmaker Mickey Duff telling me he had banned them from becoming members of his Anglo-American Sporting Club at the London Hilton and the next week his wife opened a parcel hand-delivered to their door. Inside was a dead rat. Charming people.’

  Henry listened politely to my story about my connection with the Krays, raised just half a mile down the road from me in Bethnal Green. In the 1960s they were looking to improve their public image and put the word around that they wanted a public relations adviser. A bit like Jack the Ripper seeking a media makeover.

  Peter Batt, another Stepney-born sportswriter, and I got on to the shortlist, but were beaten to the job by Fred Dinenage, later of How TV show fame. Afterwards I discovered that I failed the interview because Reggie thought – blush, blush – I was too pretty (it was in my skinny, twenty-something days) and would be a distraction to gay Ronnie, who was having a fling at the time with the bisexual Lord Boothby. It was Fred Dineage who was in charge of the publicity when an infamous Sunday newspaper photograph was published of Boothby with the Krays, causing a political storm.

  When I told all this to Henry he said: ‘Fred Din
enage got the job? How?’

  That was Aitch, always with the witty punchline.

  ROUND 2

  FIRST PROFESSIONAL PUNCHES

  Jim Wicks not only knew his boxers, horses, greyhounds and playing cards, he was also a master of public relations in an era when if you didn’t beat the drum you went unnoticed and unheard, because there were few sports television programmes to carry the message to the masses. ‘It’s no good being a shrinking violation in this game, son,’ he once told me, without any hint that he knew he was mangling a cliché.

  In the 1950s, BBC Television had a flagship midweek show called Sportsview, which was presented by a creative pioneer producer named Peter Dimmock, a wartime RAF pilot who was terribly English and always wore a starched collar, and was immaculately groomed as if he had stepped out of a Savile Row tailor’s shop window.

  It would be difficult to imagine two more contrasting people than Dimmock and The Bishop. This was Mr Pickwick meeting the Artful Dodger. They were separated by a common language, but Jim worked his Cockney charm on the BBC sports boss and persuaded him to feature the Cooper twins signing professional contracts live on air. It could only be ‘live’ in those days because recording facilities were in their infancy. Jim told me years later in his Arfur Daley tones: ‘I just had a word in Mr Dimmock’s shell-like and told him I was about to sign boxing’s equivalent of the Beverley Sisters, who were the biggest act in town at the time.’

  The stunt drew more publicity than even Jim envisioned, when the studio ring in which Henry and George were sparring with each other collapsed. Neither of the twins was hurt and they clambered out of the wreckage to sign British Boxing Board of Control contracts in front of the cameras.

  As the boys switched to the professional ranks, they brought with them their highly rated Eltham ABC trainer Georgie Page, who had been a top-flight amateur boxer before becoming a dedicated coach. The plan was for George to work in harness with Danny Holland on their fitness and tactics. But Page was at heart a diehard, dedicated amateur and the shenanigans of the professional game were against all he stood for; so it was not long before he quit to return to his first love of youth boxing and training the stars of the future.