Young Winstone

by Ray Winstone

  Luckily for me, Battleman was up in the heavier weights (he was more of an Austin Maxi than an Austin Allegro), so there was no danger of me having to fight him. And obviously they don’t just put the gloves on you and throw you out there the moment you arrive. They have a look at you first to see how you shape up, and then you’re in the ring, sparring. That’s the moment when you find out the difference between messing about with your dad’s mates down the market and doing it for real.

  Jeff Coward, the first kid I ever properly sparred with, is one of the many people I met through boxing who I still see today (when he comes back from Cyprus, where he lives now). His granddad, who my granddad knew, was Charlie Coward, a very brave man who was famous for having smuggled prisoners out of Auschwitz in the war and was later played by Dirk Bogarde in the film The Password is Courage. Not living down to their surname seemed to be a family tradition, as Jeff was as game as a bagel too.

  Charlie Woods was the first person I had to have an actual formal boxing match with. It was only an exhibition bout, which means there’s no decision at the end. That was probably good news for me, as I don’t think I did too well. Number one, Charlie was still probably a better fighter than me at that point. Number two, he was my mate and I felt a bit weird about giving him a clump. It’s a strange thing about the friendliness of the boxing world, that all the real camaraderie you share – and it’s more real than any I’ve come across in any other walk of life, with the possible exception of the armed forces – is based on having to hit people who haven’t actually done you any wrong.

  Charlie was a lovely bubbly kid, and I was really sad a few years later when I heard he’d committed suicide. Another tragic young life gone, just like that lovely babysitter Sylvie. His body was discovered in a shed, where he’d covered himself with hay because he didn’t want to be found. It was heroin that did it, and this would be the first time – but sadly not the last – I’d see what the effects of hard drugs can be. We’d kind of lost touch with one another by this time because he was in the drugs world and I wasn’t. Obviously, people have to choose their own route through life, but there are some roads you really don’t want to go down.

  After I’d been going to the New Enterprise for about a year, I switched to a club in Enfield because it was nearer home. There was another kid from my school who went there who turned out to be a terrific fighter. His name was Chris Hall and he ended up as an ABA champion before becoming a trainer, which I think he still does today.

  If you’d met this kid, you’d never have thought he was a boxing champion in the making. Not only was he very tall and gangly, but he was also quite a loner and had a tendency to hoard things. I remember him opening my ears to all these different kinds of music, though. It was bands like Yes and Genesis and Jethro Tull that he was into, and I remember thinking, ‘Fucking hell, what is all this hippie shit?’

  We’d never have listened to that kind of thing at school. It would’ve been considered more as music for posh people: ‘We don’t touch that. It’s not for us, it’s for kids who are going to university.’ The funny thing is, now it only seems to be people who’ve gone to college who tend to progress in the music business, but in those days that was more of a stigma to be overcome. Maybe Chris was ahead of his time in that regard, but he was a really game fighter either way. Bam! Bam! Bam! He’d just march forward, and he was very hard to stop.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE REPTON BOXING CLUB

  A couple of years of training and fighting at gyms in Tottenham and Enfield probably did help cure me of some of my inverted snobbery about North London, but it couldn’t stop me yearning to be back in the East End. I was thinking of switching to West Ham boxing club for a while, as that had a good reputation and it was on my old plot, but it would’ve been a big journey to do to get over there three times a week.

  It was probably my dad who said, ‘If you’re going to box, you might as well do it at the Repton’, which was much closer and easier to get to. Going there was the best decision I’ve ever made. Not only did it give me the chance to mix with champions on a regular basis, it also gave me a base back in the area I still thought of as home.

  No disrespect to Enfield, but I always felt like a fish out of water there. The Jesuits do say, ‘Give me a boy until he is seven years old and I will give you the man’, and I’d lived in Plaistow till I was a year older than that, so it was no wonder I thought of myself as an East Londoner through and through. Obviously I live in Essex these days, but there are probably more East Enders of my age in that county than there are left in London. Everyone I knew when I was young seems to have moved out, and maybe once you realise that, you start to see it ain’t the places you love so much as the people.

  Moving from one boxing club to another is not like a transfer in football – no actual money changes hands – but you do have to sign forms and all that kind of stuff. The Repton was (and still is) definitely somewhere near the top of the premiership in boxing terms, so places there were quite sought after. I think you have to go through a three-week trial period before you can join now, but in those days the fact that I’d won a few fights in Enfield by that time probably got me in.

  The Repton moved premises not long after I stopped boxing. It’s now in the Gary Barker gymnasium in the old bathhouse on Cheshire Street, just east of Brick Lane. Darren Barker was a world champion whose brother, also a great fighter, was sadly killed in a car crash, so they named the new gym after him. The old place I used to go to was in Pollards Row, in the basement under the Bethnal Green Working Men’s club. It’s just a few hundred yards away. Go up Vallance Road – past the new house built on top of where the Kray brothers used to live at number 178 – do a right, then a left and you’re there. Someone told me there’s a vandalised Banksy on the wall outside now.

  The first time I went to the Repton, my dad drove me. But given that I was thirteen or fourteen by then, I was soon old enough to get the train down to Bethnal Green from Lower Edmonton on my own. I used to love that journey – it really felt like going back home, and sometimes I’d be counting the hours till the time came to go. Even though it was a bit of a walk down Bethnal Green Road to the gym, through what was a rougher area in the early seventies than it is now, I never felt nervous or ill at ease about it. I didn’t feel like I was entering potentially hostile territory, I felt like I belonged there.

  As a young kid, the thing about Bethnal Green was its synonymousness – is there even such a word as ‘synonymousness’? I’m writing a book now, so I feel I’ve got to stretch myself – with the Kray twins. Detective Superintendent Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read had finally got Ron and Reg banged up for the murders of George Cornell and Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie in 1969, so even though they weren’t physically around any more, the place still kind of smelt of ’em.

  Whether this was right or wrong – after all, a lot of people did get hurt – they still had that aura about them of being Robin Hood characters. Hard evidence of the Krays robbing the rich and giving to the poor might have been hard to come by, but the mythology of ‘nothing bad ever happened when the twins were about’ (except the stuff they did, obviously) was still very powerful.

  Now I’m a bit older and wiser, the idea that nobody ever broke into anybody’s house in Bethnal Green in the sixties because Reg and Ronnie would sort them out is not one I really buy into any longer. But when you’re young it’s easy to get caught up in the romance of that way of thinking, and as far as people in general were concerned, I suppose another side of it was that when there’s a bit of a reign of terror going on, it’s only human nature to try to put a positive spin on it. I bet there are parts of Belfast where they’ll still tell you you could leave all your windows open when the IRA were running things, however ridiculous the evidence of innocent people kidnapped and murdered might make that suggestion look.

  One of the mistakes people often make when they talk about ‘glamorising violence’ is to think that this glamour is something that’s on
ly projected from the outside. It’s on the inside as well. Just as it’d be crazy to assume policemen never watched The Bill or The Wire (which I was going to be in originally, but I couldn’t face the idea of living in Baltimore for six months of the year), so it is easy to under-estimate how much gangsters think about their public image. The traffic between myth and reality is not one way – life copies films almost as much as films copy life. And being a successful gangster is just as much of a performance as making it big in films is.

  When you think about the way their interests overlap, it’s no wonder there’s such a big crossover between showbiz stars and the criminal underworld. Both sides need to get the balance just right between everyone knowing who they are and no one getting up in their face too much. That’s why those relationships which used to shock everybody, say Barbara Windsor and Ronnie Knight or Diana Dors with Alan Lake, always kind of made sense to me.

  The big stars in the sixties would always be in the clubs in the West End, and a lot of those clubs were owned by the Krays and whoever else was about. The glamorous people got looked after – ’cos obviously it’s good business for the management if they’re in your gaff – and all of a sudden they’re in this world of intrigue and it’s very exciting. The gangsters have got some style and they know how to turn on the charm. Plus anyone else gives you a problem and they’re out on their ear sharpish.

  With David Bailey and Diana Dors doing the business for them, the Krays couldn’t have had better PR if they’d employed a firm (rather than simply being The Firm). And all these stories you’d hear about George Raft coming over and being with the boys and them having major connections in the States only kept the pot boiling even more. Obviously the pot was well and truly off the stove by the time I got to the Repton, but the reality that the twins wouldn’t ever be cooking with gas in E2 again took a long time to sink in.

  Luckily, joining the Repton gave me access to a glittering array of more suitable role models. Going down the stairs to the gym I’d look at the pictures on the wall and think, ‘Every one of these boxers is a champion.’ Looking back now, the Repton roll-call was amazing: Maurice Hope – Olympic champion, going to be a world champion; Billy Taylor – what a fighter!; Graham Moughton, captain of the Olympic team; John H. Stracey, another world champion; Johnny Whitehorn; Dave Odwell, another Olympic team captain . . . It was quite daunting to walk into the Repton and see those pictures, especially at first, but once I found my feet I soon realised how lucky I was to be at such a special club, because if you’re training alongside these guys, you can’t help but learn.

  You walk down those stairs for the first time and straight away the place smells of blood, sweat and tears. What I didn’t understand at the time was that a lot of the really important things the Repton was going to teach me wouldn’t be about how to handle myself in the ring, they’d be about ethics – having respect for myself and having respect for humanity. It was only years later that I began to look back and think, ‘Fuck me, I learnt a lot more than boxing.’

  The boxing had to come first, though, and I had some great teachers there. The head coach was a guy called Tony Burns. Burnsy was the Repton, and for me he epitomises what’s good about boys’ club boxing trainers the world over. He never once trained you as a boxer – although he was more than capable of doing that – his greatest gift was as a matchmaker. A lot of them will overmatch you to try to move you up the ranks too fast, but Burnsy would always do his best to make any imbalance in your favour. If he thought there was any chance of you getting hurt, he just wouldn’t put you in there.

  Another guy I owe a lot to was Billy Howick, who taught me ringcraft, which is basically how to unbalance your opponent while staying within the law, or at least within the law in the referee’s eyes. Billy’s big thing was that if you make your opponent miss you the whole fight but you hit him once, then you’ve won the fight (I suppose he was the Sam Allardyce of his day in that regard). This always seemed pretty logical to me. Also at the Repton I was able to watch a lot of boxers like Dave Odwell and Billy Taylor, who were tremendous counter-punchers, so I styled myself that way too.

  Amateur fights last for three rounds of three minutes each, which might not sound like much, but believe me it’s long enough when someone’s trying to hit you in the face from start to finish. Nowadays they force you to wear head-protectors, but I never did and I still wouldn’t want to if I was starting out now. I think they make boxing more dangerous, rather than less. Head-protectors are there predominantly to stop you getting cuts, but the cuts aren’t really the problem in terms of the long-term damage people sustain from boxing. It’s the shaking of the head and thence the brain which is the worst thing.

  If you haven’t got a head-guard on, you can see everything. The most fundamental technique in boxing as far as I’m concerned is the slip and miss, which is the way you pull your head inside or outside your opponent’s punches. Once you’ve put your head-guard on, you may have covered your brow and your chin, but at the same time you’re a bigger target, so even when you slip, you’re still getting hit. What that does is shake your head, which is the one thing you really don’t want to happen. I’ve thought this for a long time and a lot of people agree with me, but unfortunately not the ones who make the rules. If it was down to me, I wouldn’t even use head-guards for sparring. I think they do more harm than good even then.

  A lot of the boys who started at the Repton around the same time as me I still see to this day. Among my group were: Billy Jobling, a great fighter who came out of the Isle of Dogs; Glenn Murphy, who became an actor on London’s Burning; my mate Tony Yeates, who came over to the Repton from the Fitzroy Lodge club, which is south of the river; and a guy called Tony Marchant, who ended up as a writer. We had some brilliant moments together, and you don’t keep people as friends for forty-odd years unless you have a special bond with them. For me it’s a kind of moral code that they all share – boxing taught them to be old-fashioned gentlemen.

  When the club was originally founded, in 1884, it was more or less a missionary outpost for the Derbyshire public school it was named after. The idea was to come to the East End, which at that point was considered a dangerous slum, and impart Victorian discipline to the lawless inhabitants by teaching them the Marquess of Queensbury’s rules. Obviously there’s a paternalistic element to that, but paternalism is not necessarily a bad thing. Especially when it gives you tools you can use any way you want. It was no coincidence that so many of my mates from the Repton went on to succeed in other fields, because our time there gave us psychological resources we could fall back on for the rest of our lives.

  In a way, the impact the Repton had on us was very similar to the one Anna Scher’s children’s theatre (which she started up the road in Islington in the late sixties) was having at around the same time on another bunch of unruly Londoners – Ray Burdis, Pauline Quirke, Phil Daniels, Perry Benson, Tony London, Kathy Burke – many of whom are still my mates to this day. Anna would take kids who were maybe lacking a direction in life and getting in a little bit of trouble and give them something creative to focus on. The only difference was that she was doing it from a left-wing political perspective, which wouldn’t have got you very far in the fight game.

  Obviously people tend to think of a boxing club as a violent place, and the Repton’s Latin motto, ‘Non Viscera, Non Gloria’ (‘No Guts, No Glory’), would do nothing to change their mind. But the club crest doesn’t have a dove of peace with an olive branch in its mouth by accident, because one of the main things going there taught me was how to mix with a group of people as a unit, even as a community. Those who try to put boxing down as more brutal and less evolved than other pastimes have a hard time explaining away the fact that it was probably the first sport where there was no colour bar.

  That’s not to say Jack Johnson aka ‘the Galveston Giant’ had an easy time of it after becoming the first African-American world heavyweight champion in 1908. Obviously his marrying a white woman
went down like a sack of shit, but no one could take away from him the fact that he had been World Champion. And when I think back to being fourteen years old in London in the early seventies – how things had changed over the course of a decade or so from the first time I saw a black man in the street who wasn’t Kenny Lynch, to maybe a bit of a feeling of ‘them and us’ developing – I know how much I’ve got to thank boxing for. Because once you’re mixing with people on the same wavelength, what used to be ‘them and us’ suddenly just becomes ‘us’.

  Boxing certainly showed football the way in terms of being the first truly integrated sport. In fact I think it’s only just about catching up now. To say West Ham crowds did not always extend the friendliest of welcomes to visiting black players in the seventies would be putting it mildly, but at least we were the first British team ever to field three black players at the same time, when Clyde Best, Clive Charles and Ade Coker all played against Spurs in 1972.

  I was at Upton Park a few years later to see West Brom’s more celebrated black trio – Brendon Batson, Laurie Cunningham and Cyrille Regis – who the Baggies’ then manager Ron Atkinson famously, if perhaps unhelpfully, dubbed ‘The Three Degrees’. That day I saw one of the best examples I’ve ever seen of someone defusing a situation, which is not a skill I’ve always – if ever – had. Brendon Batson was down in the corner at the South Bank end when someone chucked a load of bananas on the pitch. He simply picked one up, peeled it, and ate it, and the whole stand clapped him.