Henry Cooper

by Robert Edwards

  A pleased J.T Hulls re-established contact with Wicks, who happily agreed to see the hopeful pair. He willingly assented to be the twins’ manager of record under BBBC rules, but he made no grand financial gestures, it was simply not his policy – he did, though, see the novelty value of managing a pair of identical twins who, he knew, under Board of Control rules, would never be allowed to fight each other. It would be very good for business. He arranged for the contract to be signed on live television, the BBC’s Sportsview programme, followed by a little light sparring. It may have seemed to be an omen when the hastily built ring fell over, but if anyone thought it was, then no one said anything.

  Wicks had every reason to be pleased; he currently had no rated heavyweights under his care (they had all been snapped up) but now no fewer than two of them had fallen into his lap, one immensely powerful right-handed puncher, George, the other, Henry, possessed of a rapidly burgeoning left, which rather suggested that he could expand his activities somewhat. As Henry ruefully comments:

  George was always a heavier puncher than me; he stopped more boys with his right than I ever did with my left …’ a lot of his fights never got beyond the first round. He also suffered from cut eyes more than me. His eyebrows were more prominent. But he lost a year’s boxing through scarlet fever and in one of his last amateur fights he hit someone so hard that he broke his thumb in two places. It didn’t heal properly, had to be reset and I don’t think he never really punched so hard again.

  Naturally, both twins were very familiar with the likely opposition. Joe Erskine, Brian London, Dick Richardson, Peter Bates and Joe Bygraves were the main British or Empire heavyweight prospects at the time; they were all reckoned to be fairly evenly matched and were all roughly the same age. The late 1950s would be rather defined by the six, together with Henry, as they fought time and again to establish the pecking order in the domestic division. By 1959 it would be sorted out for the next ten years. Being (unseasoned) professionals aside, little changed for the Cooper twins. They still shared a room at home, and carried on working for Reg Reynolds, learning their trade. Reynolds was quite content to allow them a certain flexibility as to their hours so that they could train; as a keen amateur himself, he was well aware of the demands and necessities of proper training and could see that they were extremely keen at both plastering and boxing and also very good at both. Further, with a potentially uncertain future, they calculated it was prudent to have a fallback, as it was now a very different world into which they contemplated stepping.

  PART TWO

  THE PROFESSIONAL CAREER OF HENRY COOPER

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘TALES OF ’OFFMAN’

  Something may come of this. I hope it mayn’t be human gore.’

  CHARLES DICKENS, Barnaby Rudge, (1841).

  It was suddenly an extraordinarily interesting time for the Cooper brothers in a world that was clearly familiar to their new avuncular mentor. They also learned quickly that ‘Mr. Wicks’, as they were deferentially to call him for the first two years of their acquaintance, had a wide, varied and fascinating circle of friends. The centre of the London professional boxing world was Soho, just as it had been two centuries earlier, in the days of James Figg and Jack Broughton. Their establishments were long gone, of course, but some of their spirit clearly remained; indeed, much of the milieu of boxing, despite the rule changes and its current legality, was still fixed firmly in the past.

  But Jim Wicks himself was headquartered to the South, at the Thomas à Becket, a tied public house on the Old Kent Road. He leased the first-floor function room from the brewery, Courage, whose pub it was, and converted it into a boxing gym, with a partitioned and rather ratty little office for himself. It served as a useful booster for the landlord’s business, as the pub became a secondary focal point, a mecca for boxing south of the river.

  The collective noun for boxers is ‘a stable’, and Wicks’s stable of fighters was a formidable one. As well as the Cooper twins, he managed the fierce little Zulu fighter from Natal, Jake Tuli, who was the British and Empire bantamweight champion, as well as Alex Buxton, the British light heavyweight champion, and Joe Lucy, British lightweight champion. Also on the team was Brian Anders, who, while he may never have shone as a pro in the same way, was both wily and experienced. As a sparring partner and mentor, he was to prove invaluable. Wicks’s senior trainer was Danny Holland, who was a master at dealing with cuts and would refine that art to new heights; sadly, he would need to.

  At the time, the world heavyweight champion was the merciless and apparently unbeatable American, Rocco Marchegiano, who was a singularly hard act to follow. He would retire undefeated the next year. Rocky Marciano, as he was known, had the perfect statistical record of 49 fights with no defeats – none. He was no role model inside the ring, being both a crude and rather dirty fighter, but he had put the fear of God into a generation of others.

  But the world title in 1954 was rather a remote thing. So, even, was a Lonsdale belt. The purpose of boxing for Henry was, in the early days, to learn the professional game and merely to ‘earn a few bob’ to help out at Bellingham. He knew he was good – nobody wins two ABA light heavyweight championships in succession against that quality of opposition without some merit, but he was uncertain, and his first fights were to be his professional education. Meanwhile, he watched bemusedly as his new manager went to work.

  Wicks himself was a master of the telephone; he played it like a Stradivarius, which would offer some difficulties for the Cooper twins, as there was no phone at Farmstead road. Professionally, the twins did not really need one; it was always Jim Wicks who did most of the talking anyway and they met more or less every day at the gym above the Becket.

  A particular crony of Wicks’s was Albert Dimes, whose principal place of business (he had many and varied other interests, few of them legal) was a bookmaking office in central Soho. Dimes was an extraordinary character who was related to the Russian nobility. His sister’s husband, known as ‘Russian Bill’, was a member of the Romanov family, whose collection of Fabergé Easter eggs Henry recalls admiring. Henry himself would, of course, become familiar with a very different Fabergé later on in his career…

  But one of the best fights to take place in the 1950s was not in the ring at all; it was between Albert Dimes and the famous hoodlum Jack Comer, better known to his fascinated public as ‘Jack Spot’. The issue was a simple turf war. One of Spot’s protégés had been Billy Hill, a vicious loser whom Spot had employed, upon Hill’s release from prison just after the war, as a strong-arm man and general factotum. Hill had prospered as a result. When Hill, who was a close associate of Dimes, had made his intentions clear, that he was going to take over Soho and manoeuvre Spot out of business (his core business was protection racketeering, spiced with the occasional robbery), it was Albert Dimes who sent the message out and an enraged Jack Spot came looking for him.

  Spot found Dimes at around noon on 11 August 1955 and by three minutes past twelve, it was over. This incident, later dubbed ‘the fight that never happened’, rather caught the imagination of the general public, if only because Spot, who had also been the first employer of the Krays, was a celebrated gangster of the time who seemed to be fireproof by virtue of the fact that he was a major contributor to the private pension plans of many, many policemen – it was a habit the Krays had learned from him. But by 1955 the Krays had switched their allegiance to Billy Hill. Unfortunately for Spot, he did not know this.

  Albert Dimes was taking his ease, chatting on the pavement in Frith Street when Spot approached him. According to one witness, Spot pulled a knife; according to another, he punched Dimes and knocked him down before setting about him with a razor. It was a blur of confusion. What all agreed on – perhaps a hundred people, including Henry, saw it – was that Dimes managed to make it as far as a grocery at the junction of Frith Street and Old Compton Street, The Continental Fruit Store, from where he obtained a paring knife and proceeded to mete out some po
etic justice. Spot, like Hill, was well known as a ‘striper’; he would use a taped razor – a chiv – to leave his calling card on his victims’ faces, but what Dimes did to him was rather more comprehensive than that.

  Aside from the punctured lung and perforated stomach, Dimes managed to sever the cheek muscles in Spot’s face, which caused his jaw to hang open. He was unable to shut it again until a surgeon at the Charing Cross Hospital sewed him back together. Dimes himself was badly hurt with a stomach wound. He managed to stagger to a taxi, which removed him to the Middlesex hospital.

  The collective amnesia suffered by those who witnessed the fight, coupled with some blatant witness tampering, ensured that while both men were charged with grievous bodily harm they were both acquitted. The episode marked the end of Jack Spot’s ascendancy in Soho and from then on it was the territory of Billy Hill, who, happily for Dimes, was a close associate. Shortly after the acquittal, Spot was again assaulted on Hill’s orders, one of the team involved being the now famous ‘Mad Frankie’ Fraser.

  Albert Dimes was not new to violence in Frith Street. In 1941 he had been lucky to escape with a caution for unlawful wounding after the gruesome death of a criminal named Harry Distleman, who had been stabbed to death by a psychopath named ‘Babe’ Mancini, a particular chum (then) of Dimes, who was himself at the time on the run after deserting from the Royal Air Force.

  Dimes has been written up by several boxing characters as a ‘colourful character’ of 1950s and ’60s Soho. It is clear, though, that while he could be a truly dreadful enemy, he was also capable of a fair measure of loyalty.

  Of course, boxers, as generally quiet men capable of extreme violence, were always quite near the top of this grisly but interesting food chain, simply by virtue of what they did for a living, which may have conditioned their attitudes to events such as befell Spot, but in terms of the sport itself, never mind the ancillary amusements, the big predators were the promoters. There were two senior ones: Jack Solomons and Harry Levene. Conveniently for a tactician like Wicks, they roundly detested each other.

  By far the most powerful promoter was ‘Jolly’ Jack Solomons, as he rather liked people to call him. His base of operations was in Great Windmill Street, and his most often used venue was the Harringay Arena in north London. As well as promoting fights in his own name, he allowed others to front for him, particularly Freddie Mills; this allowed the illusion to persist that he did not exercise a monopoly. Having been a matchmaker before the war for the London promoter Sydney Hulls, from whom he had ‘inherited’ Harringay, he had had a good apprenticeship in the business aspects of boxing, as well as a controlling interest in the Devonshire Club, which was one of many similar institutions that served to both develop and exploit young fighters. His family business though, was originally wholesale wet fish.

  The rise of Jack Solomons had been an extraordinary mixture of luck and opportunism. When Sydney Hulls had fallen out with the Board of Control in 1939, and effectively retired from promoting, Solomons was swift to fill the vacuum that he had left behind him. He promoted boxing all through the war years – it was inordinately popular – and at the end of hostilities he embarked on a whirlwind tour, by any means possible, of a war-ravaged Europe, which would create for him the loose associations necessary if he was going to play a dominant role in European boxing post-war. Solomons to that extent reminds us of no one so much as Robert Maxwell, who was, at about the same time playing a similar game with publishing.

  Jack Solomons was committed to a vision of boxing that would recapture some (but only some) of the spirit of the National Sporting Club, which had – reluctantly – given way to the British Boxing Board of Control in 1935 as the regulator of boxing in Britain. As newsreel coverage, which was to give way to television, Solomons managed to achieve a certain classy intimacy to his promotions, insisting, for example, that the first six rows from the ringside should be dressed in dinner jackets, or should at least pretend to be, by wearing bow ties.

  But boxing needs its promoters in the way that a car needs an engine. While they were not considered – quite – to be a necessary evil, all in the sport realized that in order to pursue a career then they had to be kept happy, for if they started to throw their weight about, a boxer would simply not work. And Solomons certainly did throw his weight about. He was intensely jealous of his turf, and while later on he would make the mistake of confusing the event itself with his own presence at it as being the prime attraction (he really did think he was wonderful box office), by the time the twins started their careers, he was merely nervous at the undercurrents he was detecting in the small world of professional boxing. He was suspicious about the motivations and actions of Harry Levene as early as 1953 and Jim Wicks did a fine job of fuelling his paranoia, while outwardly showing solidarity with him. Dark talk of sinister, organized syndicates moving in on the sport started to appear in the press, to which a chortling Wicks was quite happy to put his name.

  In building his business base in the late 1940s Solomons had made some dreadful mismatches, particularly for Freddie Mills and Bruce Woodcock in 1946, both of whom were battered badly by American fighters hastily brought in to generate some fast cash flow. Joe Baksi, for example, beat the promising Woodcock so badly that he was nearly blinded by splinters of bone that were hammered north from his comprehensively broken jaw. Freddie Mills, also thrashed by Baksi, fared only slightly better against Gus Lesnevitch, but he freely confessed later that he could not remember anything after the second round, but sadly for Mills the fight had lasted for ten.

  These ill-considered mismatches rather served to characterize the world of British boxing as controlled by Jack Solomons in those early post-war years, and it contrasted somewhat with the same period across the Atlantic. If one was searching for a golden age of boxing, it would be America in the late 1940s, whereas many a British hope was simply served up by Solomons to a series of American boxers who were not only simply better nourished but also clearly far better trained. There was, it seemed, a savage aggression about American boxing that was somehow lacking in Britain, and a succession of unwary British fighters, whose managers were in thrall to Solomons, paid the price.

  That Jolly Jack did not particularly care about the controversy created by this policy was quite clear; to Solomons, a boxer was perhaps rather like a light bulb, to be replaced when broken, or even like a piece of fresh cod, to be simply re-ordered once it had been devoured. What was more important to Solomons was the rush for cash; a bewildering array of bouts, some arranged literally at the last minute, served, by the time Henry turned professional, to have propelled Solomons to the top of the heap and master of all he surveyed. In many ways, it was probably the closeness that Jim Wicks enjoyed, if that is the word, with Solomons that had led J.T Hulls to recommend him to the twins as a manager in the first place. Certainly it was clear that any manager who did not have a useful working relationship with this uniquely dodgy character who single-handedly ran British boxing, then neither he nor his fighters would prosper. But Solomons, had he but known it, would be on the way out, and quite soon. The reason lay just around the corner.

  Harry Levene, headquartered in nearby Wardour Street, had made a good business out of managing boxers who were generally considered to be over the hill. He had started out after the Great War as an adolescent and had made a consistently good living out of it, evidenced by the grand manner in which he lived – mohair suits, Park Lane apartment and all the trimmimgs. When Henry and George had visualized the boxing manager, as they had done, ‘with a cigarette holder and a silk dressing gown’, they could have been describing Levene perfectly, apart from the fact that he smoked cigars.

  Levene also had, like most managers and promoters, several sidelines, but in 1956 he would declare his objectives by re-opening the Empire Pool, Wembley as a boxing venue; it had, unlike Harringay Arena, where jolly Jack had prospered during the war, been closed down throughout the hostilities. Levene’s reinvention of this venue, wh
ere Arthur Elvin had operated so many fights in the 1930s, rivalling Sydney Hulls, coupled with the advent of the widespread rise of tele vision coverage with attendant intellectual rights, the potential of which he spotted immediately, would ultimately allow Levene to supplant Solomons as the UK’s biggest promoter, a move that would do little for their already difficult relationship. As Henry recalls:

  Funnily enough, all that was originally nothing at all to do with boxing. Levene had a club with a restaurant, and Solomons’ family business was wet fish; he used to supply Levene, and of course they were always breaking the rationing rules. One day, after a delivery, Levene got raided and fined and he always swore blind that Solomons had shopped him. He hadn’t, actually, but he’d never believe that. After a while, they couldn’t bear to be in the same room as one another – if one walked in, the other would walk out. They just never spoke.

  For Wicks, and therefore for his fighters, this unarmed standoff would be handy, to say the least, particularly as Levene started to build his business with the aid of his later associate, Jarvis Astaire of Viewsport. The pathological rivalry between the two promoters was to allow the Wicks stable to step neatly into the no-man’s land that would open up between them. Not so other, less wily managers, who frequently joined either one camp or the other. Just as frequently, they often failed to read the small print, as Henry remembers:

  If a manager had bought a fighter – paid him money to turn pro, then obviously the first thing he’s going to do is get his cash back, so if a promoter offers him, say £120, for his boy to fight so-and-so, as opposed to £100, then he’ll just look at the big number – and this was quite a lot of money then. Jim Wicks wouldn’t do that – he’d go through the whole thing – how much are you getting for radio, TV and so on – all that – and set a price that way.