Streetfighters: Real Fighting Men Tell Their Stories

by Davies, Julian

  My sister was heavily into the drug scene and I called on her one day to find she’d been robbed. It was unusual how I’d come to visit her, but I was driving in my car and noticed some guy wearing one of my tracksuits that I’d kept at my sister’s house. You may be wondering how I knew it was mine and not just a similar one, well, it had my club badge on it and my name embroidered on it! When I got to her house, she told me that the guy had beaten her up and nicked a load of stuff off her, including her wedding ring. She also told me the name of the guy and said that they’d argued after he’d ripped her off in a drugs deal. When he’d ripped off her wedding ring, he’d made a real mess of her finger and had also taken quite a bit of my stuff. He didn’t know who I was and took the piss out of the owner of the tracksuit, mocking karate chops and kicks.

  I found out fairly easily where he lived and decided to serve him up with one of my favourite ploys – an early morning wake-up call. If I had a particularly nasty situation to clear up, I would often call at 5am, when they were least expecting me. The element of surprise gave me an added advantage over them, plus the psychological effect it had on them was awesome. One rule I had, though, was that I never, ever, paid somebody a home visit if they had a wife or family. Unluckily for this wanker, he had neither.

  A good lesson I had learned when dealing with druggies is that they always make sure they have plenty of locks on their door. Unfortunately the sad bastards are usually too stupid to work out that there is still only one pair of hinges holding the other side of the door, and this is the side I target. A well-aimed kick to the hinged side of the door and it flew off its hinges. I was in. In this type of situation, most druggies are expecting a bust, but this guy did not know what the fuck was going on. He just stood there terrified. I could already see my sister’s wedding ring on his hand and let go with a right hand that connected well. He fell to the floor and now it really was fucking pay-back time. I hit him until he lost consciousness and tried to remove the ring from his finger. It wouldn’t move. Remembering the state of my sister’s hand, I got hold of a large kitchen knife and started to saw at his finger. I was not leaving without the ring and if that meant his finger had to come off, then so be it. The pain must have been so intense that he woke up and saw me cutting away at his hand. He struggled free and I got up with him and again battered him into a near lifeless state, breaking his jaw in two places along the way. I told him why I was there and warned him that if my sister’s stuff was not returned by the end of the day, then worse was to follow – and it would have. I later found out that as well as his broken jaw, he had also lost my sister’s ring, along with his finger. Guess what? The ring was anonymously returned to my sister.

  Over the years, I have received numerous death threats. One of the few times that I have come close to one being carried out came when I was out walking near my sister’s house and I was jumped and dragged into an alley by three guys. The way they set about me told me that they meant me serious harm. One of them had something around my neck trying to strangle me, while another slashed open my arm with a steel comb. All the time the kicks and punches were flying in, and it took all of my survival instincts just to keep conscious. I knew that if I got myself knocked out they would have finished the job. I somehow managed to dislocate one’s knee with a kick, which put him out of action for a while, and repeated elbows into the face of the guy who was strangling me from behind eventually took their toll on him. I felt the ligature loosen enough for me to break free. The odds were now more in my favour and a combination of kicks and punches soon put the last man down. I found out that some guys from a local pub had paid them to do me, and although me and a few mates went to the pub that night, I never found out who or what was behind that one.

  I was becoming increasingly disillusioned with my martial arts training, particularly how it never really prepared you for what can happen on the street. So I decided to open up my own club, which was not attached to any one particular style. This was a new concept and I intended right from the start to make it accessible to anyone who wanted to train there by keeping the costs down to a minimum. I called it the New Breed Academy. This coincided with me starting to write articles for Fighters magazine, and was the beginning of a new phase of my life. The idea of the Academy was not to teach people just martial arts techniques but to teach them in such a way that it prepares them for what can happen on the street, and traditional teaching methods did not take this into account.

  To help bring some money in, I relied more and more on door work, and have, over the years, worked on some of the roughest, toughest doors around London. If I started to tell you about all of the fights that I had working on the doors it would fill a library, let alone a book. You really do see some of the worst kinds of people in this line of work. Don’t get me wrong, the majority of people who go to the clubs are decent and polite, just out for a good time, but there is an element of tossers who get a few beers in them, or who are on the gear, and think they can take on the world. You have to be able to turn a deaf ear to a lot of the abuse and shit that you get when you turn somebody away from a club, but every so often they overstep the mark and you have to take them out. You get threatened almost every night and I’ve lost count of the number of losers who are going to come back and kill me. The trouble is, one day one of them might just try and do that. It helps if you’ve got a good little team working the doors and I’ve worked with some of the best, but there are also some doormen who I’ve worked with that I’d rather forget. When it kicks off they are nowhere to be seen, or they are doing drugs themselves, which means that they’re just not switched on enough to notice the little things that can make a huge difference.

  One of the worst situations I found myself in was when a fellow doorman who I had been working with came round my house and ended up trying to bloody shoot me. We initially fell out over his dealing in the club that we were supposed to be minding. It escalated and we arranged a meet where we were going to “sort it out”. I didn’t trust him and was expecting him to turn up mob-handed, so I went tooled up. He turned up alone, saying that he wanted to forget our differences. We went back to my place to talk things through and after a while he pulled out a gun, pointed it directly at me and fired. Whether it was a warning shot, or he just happened to be a shit shot, I don’t know, but the bullet hit the ground beside me. [Jamie didn’t say anything more about this episode, so if you want to know what happened, you’ll have to ask him! – JD]

  I hated the way my lifestyle was heading, with night after night of violence, but I had to keep working to pay the bills. One thing with door work is that your days are free-time and I started to work on a writing project that I’d thought about for a while. I had decided that there was a need for a book dedicated to female self-protection and, after what seemed like ages, I had a complete manuscript which I sent to my great friend Geoff Thompson [well-known martial artist and author – JD] for his opinion on whether or not he thought it was good enough to publish. Luckily he thought it was, and Dogs Don’t Know Kung Fu was released. It turned out to be very successful and the standard reference text for female self-protection in this country, and yet to be equalled. I’ve since written a further five books, including my life story Thugs, Mugs and Violence – The Story So Far. Although my story revolves around violent situations, it’s not the lifestyle I chose, it was thrust upon me.

  My advice to everybody is to avoid getting into any situation that may progress onto the use of physical violence. I hate it if I am forced into a situation where violence needs to be introduced to bring the matter to an end, where all other alternative routes avoiding violence have failed. If I am ever in a confrontational situation, it will never be through personal choice, it will be because I have been forced into this situation and for that, somebody will pay a very high price. That somebody may even be me. Having been stabbed twice, shot and beaten to a pulp, I realise I do not have special superhero powers and that I do bleed and feel pain.

  I wil
l be happy if I never get into another situation involving violence for the rest of my life, because no matter how capable I or the other person may be at looking after ourselves, we will both be in a situation where either one of us may be taking a trip in an ambulance, police car or a hearse, and I don’t want that person to be me. The only time I want my children to have to visit me in hospital, prison or a cemetery is if I have dealt with someone that has hurt one of them.

  When it comes down to the laws of reality, anybody can do anybody – you just have to find a way. If I am capable of taking a life with my bare hands in a matter of seconds, there is no reason at all why somebody else cannot do the same to me. I teach people to protect themselves with their bare hands. Part and parcel of that is showing them how to take another human being to pieces if the need for survival arises. My own knowledge and teaching ability frightens me at times, in case this ability fell into the wrong hands, but if it saves just one young child or female from being sexually assaulted, raped, tortured or killed, then I will carry on transferring my knowledge in the form of my books, courses and personal tuition.

  If I can back off or walk away from a situation and live to see my kids the next day, then I have succeeded. If I risk my life for a worthless incident that lasts for a few seconds and deprive my children and family from ever seeing me again, I will have failed. I do hope that people can see me for the kind, caring person that I really am, rather than the monster that people sometimes portray me to be. If you spill my beer in a pub then I would not see that as something worth fighting for. However, lay a finger on one of my children and I will not hesitate to come tearing through your door at 5am, before you can even wipe the sleep from your eyes, to serve you up. People will only treat you in the way that you allow them to. Unfortunately, though, children cannot do much about it when someone more powerful than them treats them bad or causes them harm. But I can. For most of the time I am the calmest person that you will ever have known in your life. But I will still turn into Hannibal Lecter if the need arises.

  IVOR SMITH

  Newport

  As told by his daughter Paula

  An extraordinary fighting man from yesteryear, the life story of Ivor Smith could easily form the basis of a great film. His rollercoaster life saw changes of fortunes that took him to the highest peaks and lowest depths a man could imagine. Renowned for his huge fists and massive punching power, he was equally at home trading it with travelling men or brawling in the bars of Tiger Bay.

  MY FATHER WAS born in Newport, South Wales, in 1929. He was from a family of seven boys and one girl. His mother died from TB when he was young so he basically brought the family up. To get the kids fed my dad would break into the Army camps at night. He would steal the supplies there, tins of ham, corned beef and the cigarettes. There was a war on so sometimes he would share with the neighbours, a bit of a Robin Hood he was. One night, he got caught in there and they sent him to Borstal for seven years. He moved to a couple of Borstals and in one he was forced to learn Welsh by the violin teacher there. Now my dad was a man’s man who enjoyed a rough and tumble and didn’t want to be listening to some idiot on the violin.

  While in the Borstal kitchens he stole a carrot and one of the screws saw him. The next day, he was sent to have two strokes of the birch. This other boy was there for it as well and my dad let him go in first. Well, he said, “After hearing that twat scream, my arse was going like hell.” It would have been better if he hadn’t known what to expect. They made my dad drop his pants. The bastard who gave it to him ran from one side of the room to the other and really gave it to him. Just for good measure they rubbed salt into the wounds as well.

  When he left Borstal he was enlisted into the Army at 18. After having years of the screws shouting in his face he couldn’t take to the drill sergeant. He was always onto my dad, so my dad gave him a right hiding and was straight off to the glasshouse. After nine months there, he had a dishonourable discharge, which made him happy as Larry. While there he met the Krays and they became good friends. Later in life I had many phone calls from Reg and he became a good friend.

  He went into the merchant navy and met a girl called Clare when he was 21. He had learned to box in the Army so when he was home he would go to the fairground and fight in the boxing booths. My dad was six foot three and had a tremendous reach, which came in handy. If my dad hit them, they didn’t get up and more often than not they were carted off to hospital. If he weren’t at sea then he’d be fighting in the booths. Fighting came very easy for my dad, he was so tough and could punch so bloody hard.

  Eventually he was fighting in bareknuckle scraps for good money. He did this from the age of 21 right up to the age of 35. My dad was a bugger for the women and Clare couldn’t stick his ways so they got divorced. Once he was in a pub and a girlfriend was there. A Polish man made advances to her. Well, dad told him the score but the geezer made a bit of a stand, like. Dad pops him one and bang, he knocks the guy’s eye out of the socket. You must understand my dad had bloody huge hands with big mangled knuckles and one finger short on one hand that had gone through a mincer while in the ship’s kitchen; he could wrap his hands around a man’s head. Dad didn’t hang around for the police and buggered off to sea again. He was always in big demand on board ship, being a good head chef, and for a bit extra would sort all the trouble out. When he came home the police nabbed him and he was sent down for four years.

  My mother lived next door to my dad’s sister, Grace. When he was inside, the girl who had my oldest brother John gave him to Grace to look after. Now Grace didn’t have a clue with kids so my mum looked after him. Dad was happy knowing my mum was so kind to care for John, so when he came out he spent eleven months chasing after her until they became an item. When my sister and myself were born, my dad had taken over a pub called The Rupella, which was a bit rough, but my dad sorted it out. Dad would lift us onto the bar to sing songs for the customers. I remember on Sundays they would close early and put the barrels out in a circle and they would fight there for money. My dad would fight some of the big Irish boys there and I watched some of his fights. There would be no kicking; it was sort of fair fights really. Some guys could really fight but once he stuck the big one on their chins, down they went.

  One day I saw my old man in The Albert pub and he had an argument with some Arab guys. There were some hookers there and my dad didn’t like that sort of thing. He also couldn’t understand why they had to give these Arabs most of their cash and he told them. One of them pulled a knife on my dad, so Dad proceeded to strangle him. Dad took the knife off him and sliced it across the geezer’s face. He told him, “If you’re going to pull a knife on me, then make sure you use it.” All the time I was watching this and later he told me that this was how life sometimes was, so always beware of twats like those guys.

  To make some cash, my dad would go out collecting scrap metal on the lorry. He would take me to all the gypsy camps as well. He would know all the guys there. They would tell him to come back at night sometimes because they had a fight on. It was like a day’s work for Dad: he’d turn up, fight, then out later to spend the money. Before and after the fight he treated them as good friends and never held a grudge. Some of these travellers were fighting all their lives and were as big as him. He loved these fights because he said they were so hard he felt he had really earned his money.

  He was always coming home with black eyes, cut lips or stabbed up. Sometimes he would come home and stitch himself up or pull out a broken blade from his body. My mum couldn’t bear to watch him, she would be sick every time this happened. When he had been stabbed he would tell Mum to go get the axe because now he had to take a trophy of his own. Many times he stuck an axe in their heads.

  After he earned good cash fighting, he would go out drinking for days. Mam didn’t mind so much but the house was always full of murderers, robbers and all sorts, which she weren’t happy with. I didn’t mind this because this was all I knew, but Mam didn’t like it a
t all. When Mam and Dad were getting on okay, things were great, but when they argued it was mental. She could hit lumps out of him and he would never hit her back. Once she made his dinner and he didn’t turn up, so off she marched all us kids down to the pub. She would bang on the doors and the landlord would let her in and disappear out of her way. She would march up to my dad and put his dinner over his head. She would even grab him by the scruff and pull him out of there. All the time he would be shouting that she was making him look a fool. Sometimes someone would comment that they wouldn’t stand for that and Dad should slap her back. Dad would walk up to them and tell them she was his wife and clout them one.

  When the boys were playing up, Mam would tell Dad to get upstairs and use the belt on us, but he never did. He would strike the bed with the belt and the boys would pretend to scream out. Well one day she caught him doing this so she hit everyone with the belt, even my dad. Sometimes when they argued she would be upstairs and she would call to him. Dad would come to the bottom of the stairs and she would drop a heavy wicker basket on his head. You’d think he would learn but she would catch him every time with that one.

  One day he disappeared for a few days and we couldn’t find him. Mam knew he was out drinking somewhere. It had been snowing real bad and Dad caught a taxi home. His idea was to sneak upstairs when Mam was watching TV. Well, next to the back door we had a big old china sink. Mam climbed up on it and when he was sneaking in banged him over the head with a wooden meat tenderiser. Dad was knocked out and Mam pushed him down three steps out into the snow where he lay. Mam shouted to us to take Dad’s trousers off because that’s where the rent money was. Mam left him there for ages in the snow and the neighbours phoned for the ambulance to take him away. He was in hospital for three days with hypothermia and concussion.