Henry Cooper

by Robert Edwards

  So, when healthy twin boys arrived on 3 May 1934, no one was more surprised than Lily. Any dismay she may have felt at the prospect of another mouth to feed (she was always, with good reason, a worrier) was quickly offset as she held the two new arrivals for the first time. The first baby out weighed in at 61bs, the second, born 20 minutes later, was a little more hefty, a difference that would in fact persist.

  As for naming these two, Lily recalled later that it was a maternity nurse, or perhaps a midwife who, as a matter of complete coincidence, thought of Henry and George, in that order. Both were Cooper family names, and they seemed appropriate, so Henry and George they became – neither was given a middle name.

  Daneville Road was clearly going to become quite crowded, the proud parents realized, but not perhaps immediately. Much would depend on how fast these new arrivals started growing. Another nurse had noted that they looked to be likely lads. ‘You mark my words,’ she said, ‘these two will be six-footers.’ As things transpired, this was clearly the voice of experience.

  * What the song does not say, of course, is what happened to brave Daniel Donnelly. Despite all the glory (as well as a knighthood), he died in 1820, a hapless drunk with not a penny to his name. But the story of Donnelly would fire little George Cooper’s imagination before long.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A WARTIME CHILDHOOD

  ‘The childhood shows the man, as morning shows the day.’

  JOHN MILTON, Paradise Regained, (1671).

  The Cooper family was as dislocated by the war as anyone could be. Almost as soon as their council house on the Bellingham Estate at 120 Farmstead Road was ready for them, they moved in and the order came that all three children were to be evacuated.

  This was a depressingly common transaction during the war and entirely as a result of the pessimism which governed policy concerning the likely outcome of a war with Germany. Estimates concerning the probable level of casualties had resulted in some fairly dismal arithmetic. Gloomily, the Committee of Imperial Defence had predicted, in September 1939, that the first German air attacks would last 60 days and result in 600,000 casualties. An appropriate number of papier mâché coffins had been prepared and stacked ready, a million burial forms had been printed and issued and plans had been made, upon the outbreak of war, to simply evacuate more than one and a quarter million women and children from the major inner cities into rural or suburban areas before the Luftwaffe did to London, Liverpool and Glasgow what it had done to Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. The evacuation policy had some interesting outcomes, in fact, as the two economic nations really met each other for the first time. For the Cooper twins, aged six, it was to prove a bruising encounter.

  The attitude of many households, almost invariably better off than their unwilling guests, was frankly hostile in many cases. Stories had begun circulating at the end of 1939, of unspeakable, unwashed children, both verminous and feral, pouring out of the inner cities, completely unfamiliar with such social imperatives as flushing loos or even underwear. One Glasgow mother was reputed to have scolded her six-year-old when it chose to relieve itself in someone else’s home: ‘You dirty thing, messing up the lady’s carpet; go and do it in the corner.’

  Given that the Cooper family was scooped up and redistributed rather late in the overall process, Bernard, Henry and George (who were most certainly not in that category, as Lily had worked as hard as she could to ensure that her sons were a credit to her) were on the receiving end of a certain inbuilt prejudice when they arrived in Lancing on the Sussex coast in early 1940. Bernard went to one house, the twins to another. It was the England of Dad’s Army, even down to the location, but sadly devoid of humour.

  The twins’ new landlady, a Mrs Holland, seemed to take the view that if their presence was an inconvenience, then it was probably their fault rather than Adolf Hitler’s. She had up to six other guests at times, including, inexplicably, a three-month-old baby. As custodian of the collective ration cards she could be expected to feed the children quite decently.

  But, alas, not as well as Lily had. A seemingly endless diet of jam sandwiches was the usual fare, and while all three boys attended the local school, the only other attraction of a seaside town, the beach, was strictly off-limits, being both mined and festooned with barbed wire. Should a German invasion arrive, the Cooper boys, along with the rest of the population of Lancing, would have a ringside seat.

  They would certainly witness the aftermath of Dunkirk as well as have a grandstand view of the Battle of Britain, but Henry’s recollections are mainly concerned with the sheer misery of it. ‘We all had to sleep across the same bed; this little baby would wake us up at some ungodly hour and I’ll never forget the smell of that stuff they bring up – it would throw up all over the sheet, and she’d just wipe it down and turn the sheet over! I can still smell it now,’ he related to me, with some disgust.

  Henry senior and Lily, for economic reasons, were unable to see their children more than once or twice, which was torture for all concerned, albeit probably just as well for the fastidious Lily. There was worse to come, though, as Farmstead Road was also an early casualty of German night bombing and suddenly became clearly uninhabitable. The house was hit by a German parachute mine on a Saturday night while Henry senior was working a late shift on his tram, and it was only by pure luck that Lily was not inside either. When the house was hit, she was visiting a near neighbour and nattering with her in her Anderson shelter. Altogether, 25 people were killed in that raid, and it took four days’ work to find them all, or what was left of them. Effectively now the Cooper family was homeless, and given that the house would clearly not be repaired for at least 18 months, they were rather stuck.

  A dubious and rather speculative solution arrived in the form of a colleague of Henry’s who had relatives near Stroud in Gloucestershire. There was both work and accommodation – of a kind – available there. They chose to evacuate there.

  When they saw the accommodation, it must have crossed their minds that Farmstead Road might after all have done for them very well, with or without its roof. Their new home was in fact a derelict and abandoned venison abattoir that was technically condemned. They were able to find work nearby, though, Henry William at an asbestos plant, Lily at a shadow factory making aeroplane parts. For the hard-working and house-proud Lily, this ordeal must have been terrible, even if drawing water from a well might have been a novelty. The couple, even further away from their sons than before, were well and truly miserable with this medieval existence.

  This state was further compounded when Henry senior crushed three of his fingers in a rolling mill. Unable to work, but having to watch his wife work, was a further ordeal for him. He received £2 a week sick pay, and eventually some modest compensation. The pair’s first thought was to liberate their children back into their own care, which they promptly did.

  For the Cooper boys, anything would have been better than Lancing, and at least living in a semi-derelict country wreck was an adventure. Naturally, being so close to the shadow factory made it a restricted area, so for the brief time that they were there, they had to play hide and seek with the security services, which certainly added to the novelty, whatever it did to Lily’s nerves. A great treat, though, was the vast pile of discarded deer antlers with which the ground floor of this dismal establishment was liberally scattered; the children had never seen such things before and they made fine toys.

  Finally, Farmstead Road was ready for re-occupation in the late autumn of 1941 and a relieved family returned to it, after a brief stay in a requisitioned flat. Most of their possessions had been destroyed or stolen (looting, sadly seems to have been rife during the Blitz) and although there was a small amount of financial compensation for the loss of their home, they were forced to lead a rather basic life, but one which was tolerable now that the family was finally reunited. That state, however, would not persist for long.

  It is a characteristic of the ill luck of the Cooper family
that they always seemed to get caught out by changes in regulation. Henry senior, with six years of service behind him already, qualified for call-up only by virtue of a matter of days. He was called up in 1942, at 41 years of age, right on the limit of the age restriction after it was modified; despite his previous service in the Royal Horse Artillery and his clear knowledge of both guns and stroppy quadrupeds, he was rather illogically drafted into the Royal Army Medical Corps and, after initial preliminary training in Edinburgh, was dispatched as an orderly to the XIV Army in Calcutta from where he would join the rest of the forgotten army in Burma. His family would not see him for nearly three years.

  At Farmstead Road, life went on, after a fashion. The weekly rent was a guinea, let alone household utilities, and Lily’s income, including government supplementary payments to compensate for Henry senior’s absence was only £3.10s. A scandalised correspondent reported to The Times in early 1940 that there were newly created single mothers whose husbands were serving with the forces, with two children to raise, who were being asked to live on less than £1 a week.

  So, in the tradition of her forebears, Lily worked. At one stage she was holding down up to three jobs and the simple strain of it all, fret ting over the task of feeding her children, not to mention dreading the arrival of the telegram from the War Office, which would be the only way of knowing the state of her husband, wore her down. Never a bulky woman, her weight plummeted as she denied herself food in order to feed her hungry trio. ‘Mum would queue up at the butcher’s and buy a sheep’s head for ten pence, and out of that she could feed us all,’ recalled Henry. ‘It was amazing what she could do with it.’ Clearly, Lily like most women who lived through the war, was an inventive cook. Nothing that could be used was thrown away. Unheard-of dishes today, like brawn and shinbone soup, made from the cheapest cuts of meat, were made to stretch a very long way.

  The wartime diet, with all its rationing restrictions, actually produced an extraordinarily healthy generation of children. Henry and George grew quickly and were clearly two of the largest attendees at Athelney Road School. The fact that they were identical twins was a novelty, but one that also rather served to draw attention to them. They were neither bullied nor did they bully, but they learned quickly that the numerous scraps and incidents in the school playground would often be attributed to them simply because of their very high profiles and they learned very quickly to look after themselves. They were quick to respond.

  Henry achieved his first knockout in the playground at Athelney Road School, during a handball game: ‘Suddenly a little fellow called Bridges jumped on my back and started throwing punches. I got a bit of a temper on and dragged him over to me and punched him in the eye. I knocked him out. Another fellow rushed over but George held him off.’ This would rather serve to define the later relationship between the Cooper twins: absolute and unquestioning loyalty.

  Academically, the only subject that could raise even a twitch of interest from Henry was history, and this mainly by virtue of the imaginative skills of the staff; the experience of role-playing (very contemporary) rather served to bring out something of the actor in him and he discovered that he enjoyed the limelight rather a lot. Neither history nor the limelight is an interest which has ever really left him.

  But school was merely an inconvenience compared to the risks of urban life during the blackout, which covered Britain like a giant wet blanket. During the day the neighbourhood was an extraordinary maelstrom of commercial opportunity and all three Cooper brothers worked, and very hard. Before school would be a paper round, after school would be errand-running and at weekends would be a busy round of collecting for the household commissary, whether liberating scraps of coal and coke from the local power station or joining the ever-longer queues at the various food shops, or collecting the randomly packaged relief parcels from the American Red Cross, or recycling horse manure, of which there was no shortage. Occasionally there was a chance to ‘recycle’ golf balls on the Beckenham course, too; they were free to the finder when picked up, but worth 2/- 6d at the back door of the clubhouse. Value added indeed. It would be a long time before Henry developed an interest in golf, but from that moment he had technically become a professional: he had made money out of it.

  Coping on her own with three growing boys was a gigantic task for Lily; they simply shot up in height, as a natural result of her efforts in the kitchen. The challenge of feeding and clothing her sons was immense, but she proved well up to it. Many others in the same situation were to find themselves in debt by the end of the war, but not so Lily. It was part of her soul to spend only earned money, with the occasional unavoidable assistance of the local Co-op, without which many families would simply have starved, particularly later in the war, as food shortages started to bite.

  The V1 flying bomb, the ‘doodlebug’, which nearly did for Henry, would have taken about 25 minutes from its launch site near Calais to arrive in southeast London. A prototypical cruise missile, powered by a simple pulse rocket motor, it would deliver a half-ton of high explosive warhead sufficient to destroy three or four terraced houses. The advent of these weapons was the early summer of 1944, the ‘doodlebug summer’. Overall, 9,500 would be launched, and they would kill over 7,000 people and injure many more, but crucially, the fear of them would cause the hasty evacuation from London of over a million more.

  The missile’s approach was heralded by a characteristic farting drone, rather like an un-silenced motorcycle engine, which, once it stopped, meant potential trouble for those underneath its path. The V1 was guided only by travel time, it was not capable of manoeuvre: the more fuel, the greater the distance.

  Once the V1 campaign started, a natural reaction was the disposition of more and more anti-aircraft guns, which were arrayed in order to shoot them down, which made for an even more random process as well as serious danger from falling shell splinters from the guns themselves. Despite the fact that Operation Overlord was under way as of 6 June 1944, the lives of the citizens of the southeast of England, particularly southeast London, were just as perilous as before and would indeed become more so when the V1’s successor arrived.

  Londoners became used to the doodlebugs very quickly. Lily had evolved her own strategy for coping with the impending arrival of these unwelcome guests. In many ways it made sense: run to the flimsy Anderson shelter with a chair cushion wrapped around the head. The cushion was never going to stop splinters, but it might reduce some blast effects.

  For blast, as Henry was to find out at very close quarters, was the main danger of these weapons. On a clear Saturday in the summer of 1944, he and Bernard were selling football pool coupons quite close to home when the now-familiar sound of the V1 motor was heard. As it cut out, the pair dashed for the nearest Anderson shelter, and they very nearly made it. The explosion slammed Henry up against the structure and he was quite knocked out, while Bernard acquired a backside full of glass.

  Such was the frequency of these events that Londoners, particularly children, became used to them very quickly. When the second phase of the V-weapon attack started, though, the difference was immediately clear. The V2, in effect the grandfather of the Saturn rocket, was a truly terrifying weapon, so powerful that it could destroy a city block, and not even hard-bitten and bloody-minded Londoners could think up a nickname for it. Even its inventor, Werner von Braun, was awed by it; he is alleged to have said: ‘The only thing wrong with this is that it is being fired at the wrong planet.’

  For children, providing they survived, the V-weapon raids were something of an adventure, and served very well to harden them up. Those who came through the bombing raids developed a carapace of callousness that was the simple and understandable result of being witness to total war. Henry’s reaction was typical:

  The day we heard Lewisham Woolworth’s had caught it with a V2 rocket we ran all the way there, about three miles. It was one of the worst tragedies of the war. They were bringing out bits of bodies and, as one of the rescue wor
kers came out with a carrier bag, we were told he had a head in it. We’d go back, and play afterwards. You knew it could happen to you, but it didn’t keep you awake at nights, it didn’t seem to penetrate. I suppose we were too young to have any deep feelings about it.

  But by then the end of the war was in sight and the only evidence of enemy activity was the occasional earthquake thump of a V2. All that the Cooper household needed, particularly an exhausted Lily, was the safe return of Henry senior, which happened in late 1944.

  So the family had survived intact, which was much more than could be said for some, including many neighbours and, as the Allies punched towards Germany, the thoughts of the twins developed about some more peaceful activities.

  All three brothers had always been sporty. Bernard, of a lighter build, preferred athletics, whereas the twins both excelled at football and even cricket, but it was boxing that really interested them. They had never seen a match, except in the cinema, but there was definitely something about it that they liked.

  Henry senior had no objection – one of the first things he did when he returned from the war, proudly wearing his XIV Army bush hat, was to spar with his sons on his knees in the family living room. Boxing was as deep-rooted in the culture then as football is now and, having boxed in the Army first time around, he was all for it.

  CHAPTER THREE

  RUMBLINGS

  ‘…Amateur sport, which is the best and soundest thing in England’

  SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, The Return of Sherlock Holmes.

  The Bellingham Boxing Club met weekly in the British Legion Hall and, drawing as it did entirely from the local community, had no shortage of talent spotters. One of these was a neighbour of the Cooper family, a fireman, Robert Hill. He had noticed the nine-year-old twins sparring in the street, football socks wrapped around their fists, and saw something in them that rather interested him; he had himself boxed for the Fire Brigade and therefore knew of what he spoke. He approached Henry senior and asked him if he would be prepared to allow his twins to join the boxing club. He was so convinced that these two were serious prospects that he undertook to pay their subscriptions for the first year.