Unsurprisingly, the club was healthily oversubscribed; the generation of youths who had observed the war but who were too young to have taken part in it was to be an aggressive one, so there was a small delay before both the twins were able to attend, which caused some anxiety in the Cooper household. There were other clubs, of course – every neighbourhood had one – but the twins were inseparable and emotionally, if not physically, joined at the hip.
The purpose of the boxing club was primarily to teach the youngsters three things: training, the atmosphere of the gym and the rudiments of the ring. The object was not to make the boys aggressive (teenage boys are aggressive enough without that), rather it was to give them the discipline to carry on, as the attrition rate in amateur boxing is notoriously high.
The training rotation was relatively strict, even for young teenagers – running, skipping, bag work and the speedball – and the methods of training had been handed down in the oral tradition, for there were few textbooks. The issue of diet was not a matter of particular scientific interest, particularly straight after the war and anyway, food rationing, in force until 1951, ensured that there were few unsuitably tempting items on offer to distract the ambitious athlete. Decent food could only really be discussed in the abstract.
Of course, at the most junior level, there was hardly any actual fighting done at all; Henry and George did not actually hit anyone seriously for some time, but they found the very fact of being fully fit satisfying enough to justify carrying on. They saw in boxing what Robert Hill had hoped they would and the Bellingham trainer, Matt Wells, had, in his time been British lightweight champion, so they were in good hands. It was not all harmony at Bellingham, though; early on in their time there, one of the junior trainers was asked to leave, for a reason which Henry blandly described to me as being the usual thing’.
At 15, as soon as they left school, the twins joined the Eltham and District Amateur Boxing Club and were thus now in the care of head trainer George Page, who would act as both their trainer and mentor for the remainder of their civilian amateur careers. If anything, according to Henry, the casualty rate at Eltham was even higher:
In the early days I was about eight or nine stone, and I was in against this kid of seven and a half stone. He was no, thicker than my little finger and I thought: ‘He’ll do, lovely.’ I went in like a bull in a china shop, but this kid was a schoolboy champion and I had more left hands in my face than I ever thought possible…’ I never landed a glove on him. But George and me were keen and we went back the next week.
What the amateur ring really taught was an inner core of discipline, the ability to successfully manage anger, a thing that generations of adolescents, then as now, have usually found quite difficult to do. ‘It’s good to have a training routine which provides a discipline quite aside from the obvious physical improvements,’ says Henry. ‘But where boxing is chiefly character building is in the ring, where no kid can afford to lose his temper. If he does, nine times out of ten he’ll be punished more. You go berserk and bonk! – your opponent is just picking you off.’
The difference between youthful anger and controlled aggression is very large indeed. The discipline needed to bang a left jab into another boy’s face is not the same emotion as wishing to knock him over in the street. The narrow focus of the ring – that was a good punch, that was not – served to bring on a vast respect for the technical aspects of boxing itself, as opposed to a dislike or disrespect for the opponent, and success or failure would stem from there. Indeed, part of the ‘psyching out’ procedures of the professional ring really revolved about making the opponent angry as well as scared.
Henry enjoyed Eltham; both he and George were working hard at physically arduous jobs and the demands of regular training were even harder, so logically they were supremely fit, but Henry needed an indication of whether he was really temperamentally suited to boxing as a potential living; in 1951 he got it when he beat a PC Trevillion, then the national police champion at his weight (light heavy) in a four-round contest. He won the fight with his left jab, as he would so many, and the audience was appreciative.
These amateur fights carried prizes with them but, of course, no money. The prizes were typically things of some domestic utility: canteens of cutlery, toasters, coffee percolators and so forth. This was useful as Christmas approached, as the extended family was invited round to share the fruits of the twins’ labours.
This was fine, but they had to work, too. They had left school in 1949 with a joint sigh of relief in order to earn a living and make a useful contribution to the household economy. Their choice of work was governed by a simple imperative: money. Neither had any particular ambition, save to earn as much as possible in order to make life easier for Lily as well as carry on their boxing – these two targets rather defined them. Initially they found that they could earn 9d (about 4p) an hour as labourers, stacking sheet metal for a firm called Burnham’s in nearby Sydenham – not very good for the hands.
Research revealed that the wages at Sydenham Gasworks, from where they had carried sacks of coal to Bellingham during the war, the wages were a halfpenny an hour better, and so they promptly tried that. But even higher wages were available quite locally, on Bellingham Estate itself, where a builder was allegedly paying 10½d (just under 5p) an hour. It was dangerous roofing work, 60 feet up, with no harness. It was during this time at Bellingham that Henry had a nasty accident, which would revisit him in later life. While attempting to ride a bicycle with a chimney pot under his arm, he fell off and broke his left elbow. It was, of course, extraordinarily painful, but he needed to work. Unfortunately, there was a three-month waiting list at the local hospital, so the elbow was simply bandaged and he merely rested it a little, until the pain receded, but it later transpired that a chip of bone had been knocked off it and worked its way into the joint. It would stay there as well, slowly being ground down to a fine powder, both by the heavy manual labour he was doing as well as the increasingly arduous work in the gym.
When the twins discovered that the 10½d an hour was actually a fiction (it turned out to be 10d), they left in high dudgeon. Ultimately, their search for useful employment came as a direct result of their membership of the Eltham club; George Page had a good friend called Reg Reynolds, who ran a successful plastering contractor’s business. It is a trade that George would never leave; better still, much later on, Reynolds would become his father-in-law. So, finally they had found a business that they could learn, and that would actually start to financially support them. Settled at last, they concentrated on their boxing to the exclusion of almost everything else.
The trade was quite good for them; Henry plastered with his left hand, George with his right and the effort required to mix a fair-sized load was considerable. Even the arm movements developed the right muscles so, coupled with the gym work, both boys quickly became extraordinarily fit.
But there was some debate as to whether he could go to Helsinki for the 1952 Olympics, to represent Britain at light heavyweight division; he was the Amateur Boxing Association (ABA) champion and had been since April, when he had outpointed Joe MacLean in the final, but the six weeks loss of earnings, perhaps £25, which would be the result, was economically important to the Cooper household at Farmstead Road. If Henry didn’t go, then there were plenty of boxers who could. In the end Lily simply increased her work rate and, by dint of even more charlady work, financed the gap.
The Helsinki Olympics had originally been scheduled to take place in the late summer of 1940, while Henry and George were still living in Lancing, and the Olympic village really dated from then. The British boxing team had high expectations, in fact, and had every reason to be optimistic, but the boxing was to be dominated by America.
The 1952 Olympics were extremely political, taking place as they did on the borders of the Soviet Union; not only was the Korean War in full swing, there was a particular local issue. Twelve years before, the Red Army had invaded Finland without declar
ing war, and the memories of that action were still fresh in the minds of the locals. As a result, security for the USSR contingent was strict, on the Soviet side to prevent defections and on the Finnish side to protect the athletes from being attacked, as the Finns had no reason to love its huge Eastern neighbour. It made for a rather tense Games. Henry’s first bout was scratched, propelling him forward, but in the second round he came up against the Russian Anatoli Perov, who, of course, he had never met, for security reasons, and who beat him on a 2:1 split decision. Two out of the three judges were from Warsaw Pact countries, one from France.
Henry’s defeat gave him plenty of time to watch the Games and even though he had no spending money to speak of he managed to enjoy himself and consider the prospect of his upcoming National Service as well as a rather bigger decision: the idea of turning professional.
He witnessed two future opponents, and the contrast between them was huge and certainly did not suggest to Henry that he would ever meet either of them, let alone that they would meet each other. The first was Floyd Patterson, at 17 one of the youngest competitors at the entire Games, fighting at middleweight. He won the gold medal and turned professional upon his return to New York. The second was a large and ungainly Swede, Ingemar Johansson, who put up such a lacklustre performance in the heavyweight division that he was thrown out of the competition for not trying. Given the large numbers of Swedes in the audience, this was embarrassing, to say the least, however much it may have amused the Finns. Patterson, fast and flashy, had impressed, but Johansson had definitely not.
Before the Games Henry had had an interesting encounter with J.T. Hulls, the journalist who covered amateur boxing for the Evening News. It was Hulls’s habit to visit the Cooper household for a general natter every Sunday and inevitably the subject of turning professional would arise. Hulls’s advice was simple and sage: ‘There is only one man to manage you – Jim Wicks.’
Hulls knew his business; he was one of the most knowledgeable of writers and, as Henry would find out, extremely well connected. Neither Henry nor George knew Wicks, who actually lived in Eltham – if he had ever been to the club they had not seen him. He hadn’t, in fact, as it was Wicks’s general expectation that people would come to him. He was right: they did.
The business of turning professional can be a tricky one. BBBC rules mandated that a fighter had to have a manager of record, but it was well known that these men varied widely in terms of their professionalism and honesty. A poor choice of manager can shorten a boxer’s career just as surely as a detached retina, as many have discovered. The twins and George Page accordingly made their way to Footscray Road, Eltham, where this apparent paragon of virtue lived. Hulls had arranged the meeting. They were initially rather surprised. ‘…we didn’t know quite what to expect,’ says Henry. ‘I suppose we had visions of a boxing manager looking something like Noel Coward, with a cigarette holder and a silk dressing gown. But the Wickses seemed such a homely pair…’
Of particular concern to the twins was timing, for both Henry and George were scheduled to join the Ordnance Corps for their spell in uniform in the late summer of 1952, straight after Helsinki. Should they turn pro before or after National Service? Wicks’s counsel was straightforward, Henry remembers: ‘“If you go into the Army as professionals, you won’t get any concessions,” he told us. “If you box for them as amateurs, you’ll go here, there and everywhere. As a pro you wouldn’t be allowed to box for them”.’
It was good advice, as things transpired. Accordingly, Henry and George both stayed amateur and reported for duty at Royal Army Ordnance Corps (RAOC) depot at Blackdown Barracks outside Aldershot within a few days of Henry’s return from Helsinki.
Originally, when offered a choice of National Service destination, both brothers had opted for the Irish Guards; at 6ft 2in, they were well nigh perfect. And as Henry recalls: ‘Well, we were both tall, and the Irish Guards had never won the Army boxing championship.’
But they were cunningly diverted from their original purpose. At a boxing tournament before the Olympics a Captain Eastlake had introduced himself. Eastlake was basically the talent scout for the 4th Battalion RAOC, a unit that was the main reason why the Irish Guards had done so badly. The 4th was known as the ‘boxers’ battalion’ and with good reason. While it had a serious military function, which included the potential for dangerous overseas service in Korea, it had also established a rather proud tradition of the fistic art. Eastlake persuaded the twins to switch their allegiance – they did not regret it.
After six weeks’ basic training – ‘square bashing’ – at Blackdown, they were dispatched to take a driving course, after which they were inducted into the battalion proper. ‘I did very little soldiering, I must confess,’ says Henry. ‘Every morning after parade it was “boxers – fall out”. Straight to the gym…’
The authorities rather turned a blind eye to the activities of the 4th Battalion. Company Sergeant Major Mick Cavanagh, in charge of the boxers, was a keen amateur himself; he had actually fought Henry just before the Olympic Games and bore him no ill will despite the fact that Henry had knocked him out. While CSM Cavanagh was in charge, he made sure that his boxers were not unnecessarily overburdened with military duties; good soldier though he was, he clearly had his own agenda.
Certain others were less considerate: one excitable officer was alleged to have grabbed the front of Henry’s tunic when trying to make a point – the fact that under military law this was technically an assault had clearly escaped him. There was no need for the MPs, however. Henry simply growled with polite menace: ‘Take your ruddy hands off me – sir.’
Quickly, under this generally benign but rather artificial regime, the twins established a routine. Given the discipline with which they ran their lives anyway, the routines of Army life were actually nothing new, but there was a high boredom factor, which, despite the diversion of boxing, set in quickly. Endless games of cards, particularly against the wily Joe Erskine, whom Henry had beaten in the ABA light heavyweight semi-finals in April 1952, were both tediously repetitive and extremely costly, as Erskine was a less than scrupulous card-player. Henry and Erskine would fight seven more times, in fact.
The twins managed to return to Bellingham for most weekends, and were permitted to fight in London at ABA events during the week, and it was in May 1953 that Henry beat the Australian Tony Madigan to clinch his second ABA light heavyweight championship. ‘He was the best fighter I ever fought as an amateur…’ Henry remembers. ‘He came over here especially to win an ABA title. When I met him in the final, he’d stopped every boy in every round he’d had. He was a hell of a puncher, and tough, and I thought it the best fight I’d won – even if it was on points.’
Jim Wicks was in the audience and it was the first time he had seen Henry fight. ‘He told me later that he thought I had a decent left hand and that I moved well against a two-handed fighter like Madigan,’ says Henry. ‘But I thought he’d forgotten us really.’
Despite the boost of the second ABA light heavyweight championship, Henry had trouble finding his form for the European amateur championships in Warsaw shortly afterwards. He was clobbered by another Russian, Yuri Jegorov, in the first round of the first eliminator. He was not knocked out, but very nearly so, sufficiently groggy that the referee stopped the fight. ‘I never did any good at all in either the Olympics or the European championships,’ he recalls. ‘Looking back, I suppose the atmosphere was different – they were big occasions, and I hadn’t yet learned to relax, to leave the worrying to others.’
Ultimately, he would do that, but it would cause him a crisis of confidence of a fairly high order before he realized that, while boxing is an individual sport, there are divisions of labour within it that serve to define both its evolution and thus its history. To mature enough to fully grasp this would take some time.
All in all, Henry would fight 84 senior amateur bouts and win 73 of them, which was an outstanding record, particularly allowing fo
r the quality of the light heavyweight opposition in those far-off days. Henry senior, who attended as many bouts as he could, had discovered a magic tonic, which famously has worked for horse trainers for centuries: eggs beaten up in amontillado sherry. It is true that it can do wonders for horses and ponies, but its benefits to a prizefighter are dubious. Dutifully, though, Henry drank this unpromising mixture; he was trying to gain weight, an outcome which it would certainly accomplish, but it was about the only alcohol he would consume before turning professional.
Henry fought his last amateur bout in April 1954, four months before the end of National Service, an occasion to which he had looked forward, as the second year with the boxers’ battalion had been rather more military and less fistic than the first. It was with a profound sense of relief that he and George resumed civilian life, although under the law they were bound to be registered for the reserve until 1957.
Unsurprisingly, they had been approached by a series of managers while still in the Army, inviting them to partake of their services as professionals but, having maintained contact with Hulls, they were determined that if they turned professional, they would do so with Wicks, and Wicks only. Sam Burns, who was an old acquaintance of Wicks’s, going back to the days of the Blackfriars ring, had followed Henry and George’s careers so far with interest and even dispatched his new prospect, Albert Finch, to see the twins to tell them what a marvellous manager he clearly was, but to no avail – their minds were made up.
Henry Cooper Page 7
