Henry Cooper

by Robert Edwards

  To some less engaged observers, the feud between Levene and Solomons was merely a curiosity, just a spat between two outsiders, each of whom was probably quite as distasteful as the other, but in truth the conflict was to play a decisive role in the post-war development of British boxing later. The fact that Jim Wicks’s own son Jackie worked for Levene (performing the tasks of at least four people) did not stop Wicks himself from dealing quite contentedly with Solomons; in fact Henry would not fight commercially in a Levene promotion until 1958, which was four years after he turned pro, and two years after Levene re-opened the Wembley Pool arena venue. Wicks’s policy with the two promoters was that of a controlled, calmly orchestrated wind-up. There would be a price to pay for this strategy, and it would be a big one, but not for some time.

  But, unlike many other managers, Wicks actually knew both men very well, although in fairness he knew Solomons rather better. Given that the two men refused to speak to each other except through intermediaries, Wicks could play a useful role in disseminating information (and disinformation) through the agents and bagmen whom both promoters used to gather intelligence on each other. Later, after Levene had announced openly that he intended to supplant Solomons, this would be important. The period of greatest rivalry would be between 1956 and 1966, after which jolly Jack would go into a fairly rapid decline.

  The two promoters also had rather different styles of business. Whereas Levene was a straightforward but very hard market trader, Solomons’ style was more that of the wheedling rug merchant, always trying to renegotiate, pleading poverty, dwindling ticket sales, ailing relatives, a poor press, heart disease, or whatever else might work to drag the purse lower. Wicks, typically, would be flintily unmoved. ‘’E’s spinnin’ ’is tales of ’Offman again,’ he’d beam grandly, while negotiating himself outside a giant bowl of spaghetti alla vongole at Peter Mario’s bistro in Gerrard Street.

  But both promoters invariably paid up, and promptly, however they had arrived at a contract, as Henry remembers: ‘Levene might have been a hard man, but he’d never grumble. If he’d guaranteed £20,000 for a fight and only 12 people turned up, you’d still get paid.’ With characters like Albert Dimes about, who indeed can be surprised?

  James Wicks, aka ‘Jim the Bishop’, as he had been christened by the journalist George Whiting, had five passions in life: the turf, the ring, gambling, dog racing and food, in no particular order. He was, overall, probably the most senior figure in British boxing by the time the Cooper twins signed up with him, the grand old man of the business of the ring. He had even fought – only once – as a professional boxer himself. In 1915 he had participated in a prizefight at an unrecalled location, possibly the Blackfriars ring, and fought his bout, but discovered to his chagrin that the fly-by-night promoter responsible for the match had simply departed with the gate money before the fight had even started. Wicks was a quick learner. It was an experience that had rather guided his philosophy towards the fiscal aspects of the fistic sport since then. Although born in Bermondsey, he had Irish roots (which had led others to refer to him as ‘Seamus’) and after a period running a small string of pubs and co-managing the Blackfriars ring with another extraordinary character, Dan Sullivan, he had achieved something of a reputation as a tough independent.

  A keystone to at least part of this reputation was a discovery he had made. Dan Sullivan (actually an Italian who changed his name by deed poll) managed Len Harvey, the well-known British heavyweight, and it was at a training camp near Windsor that Wicks had the bright idea of hiring four sparring partners for Harvey from the nearby barracks, which housed the Irish Guards. When one of the guardsmen – ‘a nice-looking boy’ – knocked Harvey down and, groggily, Harvey recommended that the boy be taken on, Wicks and Sullivan contributed £2 10/- each to buy Jack Doyle out of the Army. A fiver. They had grand plans for him, some of which came about after Doyle became a serious contender after only seven fights, but the pair were able to take a decent turn out of the transaction and put Doyle back in the care of the military by selling their management contract with him for £5,000 to a General Critchley, who was president of the Greyhound Association, in 1934, the year of Henry Cooper’s birth. Clearly, global depression or not, there was no shortage of money in the fight game.

  For Wicks, this financial triumph was followed by a period managing Wandsworth greyhound track, a connection that we need not belabour, where he also promoted fights, and earned the colossal sum of £500 a week in the teeth of the depression. However, he spent much of this on legal fees; the constant incursions of gangsters, notably three particularly irritating Maltese brothers, required him to make certain ‘arrangements’ to see them off, and quite often this muscle needed defending in court. Whatever his benign public face, the classic diamond geezer image, Jim Wicks came up the hard way and, crucially, everybody in boxing knew it. If there were bodies buried, Wicks knew exactly where they all were.

  After a stint as a street (illegal) bookie, he found himself running a starting price office in Panton Street, quite near the Union Arms tavern that Tom Cribb had run after his retirement from boxing in 1822. Wicks was in partnership with a rather wet-behind-the-ears Jack Solomons. The pair prospered for a while, but Wicks’s sense of independence led him to part company – more or less amicably – just before the war, as Solomons started to move other partners in. Wicks was a ferocious gambler and while he had the skill, luck and wit to generate truly vast amounts of money, he frequently saw it slip back through his fingers, but with no particular regret. ‘The game, son, must be played,’ he’d explain to Henry over a bottle or two of Krug and an extravagantly dressed Dover sole at Sheekey’s restaurant. This was not merely a motto for Wicks, it was more of a mission statement. Jim Wicks was a sportsman in the same sense that Lord Palmerston had been a sportsman, but by the 1950s he was working hard to maintain traditions that had in reality been long dead before he himself had been born. He was something of a throwback, clearly in this for the fun of it as much as anything else, but the experience he had learned (and earned) was to stand Henry in good stead. For a start, Henry never gambled.

  And Wicks never gambled with Henry’s money, either. For a while he even charged his fighters zero commission on their earnings. It was his habit; it served to build up a mutual trust and, judging by the results, it worked. Given the time that his other interests already absorbed, he was quite relaxed about leaving his share of the twins’ earnings on the table for them to pick up. He knew full well, because he knew boxers and he knew men, that their motivations for boxing were simple. Although primarily competitive, the Cooper brothers’ agenda was also economic, and not immediately for their own benefit. All their lives they had witnessed at first hand how hard Henry senior and Lily had had to work. At the time of their professional boxing debut – pleasingly on the same card – Henry senior, with ten years’ military service, a crushed hand, which still gave him trouble, and no particular thanks from the nation, was, at well past 50, still working hard, labouring at Deptford power station, where he scaled out hot furnaces for £11 a week. He was doing basically the same job that his grandfather William had done. It was a situation that the twins were anxious to change.

  Wicks, having made no up-front ‘investment’ for his fighters, was quite relaxed about taking the long view. Further, he may have felt that to take 25 per cent of £25 – a typical entry-level purse, even for an ABA champion – was quite beneath his sense of dignity as a proper professional punter who regularly placed bets of an eye-wateringly high and sometimes plainly reckless value. ‘Managers were entitled to 25 per cent of a purse after expenses,’ says Henry. ‘All through those early fights, until we were earning, say, four or five hundred quid or so for a fight, Jim Wicks, bless his heart, didn’t take a penny off us; we kept it all.’

  In fact, the twins were still working hard as plasterers, which was really their main source of income for some time. They were registered as professional boxers but had yet to spend all their time o
n it. The man they worked for, Reg Reynolds, was quite happy to accommodate their inevitable training schedules and because they were earning a modest living from this there was even less pressure to fight purely for the money, which suited Wicks perfectly. With no financial pressures upon him to recoup any investment, and his two heavyweights already gainfully employed, he could deal with matters of business with the bland confidence that made him such a canny negotiator.

  The nature of the training for the professional ring was a process of total immersion; it was Wicks’s habit to rent a riverside house near Windsor, not far from the site of his pre-war coup with Danny Sullivan over Jack Doyle, where the training camp would be established. Of course, Lily came, too, to offer her culinary support. She had proved during the war that she was a more than adequate cook, but the luxury of the ingredients now available, courtesy of Wicks, was a great freedom for her.

  The first bouts the twins would fight were novice six-rounders, so it was understood that these intermediary bouts between amateur and full professional status were as much to get Henry and George used to the idea of professional fighting as anything else. The training was hard but not as hard as it would become.

  The first fruit of that training, for Henry, came on 14 September 1954; it was a six-round Jack Solomons promoted supporting fight at the Harringay Arena, Solomons’ favoured locale. His opponent was to be the bulky Harry Painter. There was no pressure, no pep talking for his tense fighters, as Henry remembers: ‘Jim just said, “Take it easy and relax, don’t try to over-impress.”’

  It obviously worked. Henry hit Painter with a left to the chin and dropped him, before knocking him out properly, all in the first round. George, who always fought professionally as ‘Jim’ Cooper, due to the presence on the circuit of another George Cooper, had a harder fight, going the full distance with Dick Richardson (never an easy task) to win on points. Henry recalls how they spent their prize money: ‘I think we had about £100 between us, so off we went out and bought Mum and Dad a television set. I think we were the last people in Farmstead Road to have one.’

  Quickly, the twins learned that the professional game bore only a superficial resemblance to the amateur one. A professional fighter, particularly a heavyweight, is training for a fight that, after the initial novice events of up to six rounds, will extend to ten rounds as a seasoned fighter and 15 for a championship. The training pattern would be in three-minute bursts of skipping, or speedball punching, or heavy bag work, punctuated by intervals that would start at a minute and shrink to 30 seconds. In this way, by compressing the intervals, a trainer could calculate the exact level of readiness of his fighter. Wicks had another trick as well: instead of eggs and sherry (the universal remedy for unmotivated horses), which had been the staple booster for Henry in his amateur days, he had invented a revolting cocktail, particularly confusing when taken on an empty stomach – a double port blended in with a pint of Guinness,* which, he calculated, would provide both energy and extended stamina. The training was thus proportionally much harder, not that either minded that, but the fighting itself was of a totally different order, and the refereeing of the fights reflected that. Actions that would automatically disqualify a fighter in a three-round boys’ club event, or even an ABA championship bout, were tolerated, even encouraged in the professional ring. Harry Gibbs, of whom much more later, recorded in his memoirs the episode when Brian London complained of an opponent: ‘He’s butting me, Harry!’ Gibbs’s response was typical: ‘Well, son, butt him back.’

  The main purpose of ‘careless use of the head’, as it was somewhat primly defined, was to create a cut, any cut, but preferably above the eye on which the attacking boxer could then work, using jabs, to force the retirement of his opponent. It was purely a matter of vision, not pain. If a fighter loses the stereoscopic vision necessary to judge distance then he will eventually simply lose the fight, barring a lucky punch, but boxers learned very early on that luck was not something on which they could afford to depend. Damaging a nicked eyebrow with a series of twisting jabs, each of which land with an impact pressure of tons per square inch, is child’s play, for even a boxer of modest talent, particularly because the opponent, operating at a heightened metabolic rate during a fight, his pulse running at 120 and with commensurately elevated blood pressure, will bleed copiously, and the Cooper twins, as many were quick to point out, had very prominent eyebrows.

  Also, professionals, being more mature, were stronger and simply able to inflict more damage. They trained for body punching and the extra length of a professional fight allowed the boxer more time to wear down an opponent with blows to the heart and liver that would weaken him very fast. Henry knew this:

  I used to throw a nice little left hook to the liver. I’ve had guys literally scream out at that. They used to go down paralysed. I won a good many fights that way. I remember a Spanish boxer employed by Jim as a sparring partner. In the first round I noticed that every time we came away from a clinch he’d drop his hands. I told Bobby Diamond, the Spaniard’s agent, to get him to keep his hands up or I’d catch him on the chin. So, next round he comes out with his hands up, exposing all his stomach. I gave him a hell of a left hook to the liver and he literally screamed and fell on the floor.

  So, the boys’ club mores of the amateur ring were clearly now a thing of the past. Obeying the spirit of the rules rather than the letter of them was the order of the day, as Henry recalls: A good trainer would massage the horsehair stuffing in the six-ounce gloves back and work it away from the knuckle, so you could land a hard punch more cleanly.’

  Other dodges, it was suspected, included dusting the tapes around the boxer’s hands with plaster of Paris or alabaster and, once the gloves were on, dribbling water down the fighter’s wrist into the glove. Quite soon, the plaster set hard. It was allegedly this manoeuvre that allowed Jack Dempsey to wreak such destruction on the bones of the hapless Jess Willard’s face in 1919, a beating that was to put Willard out of boxing.

  The referee’s job, then, was not simply to ensure that the fighters adhered to the letter of the law, rather it was to ensure a good fight within rules of safety and fair play that were outlined with a very broad brush indeed. He had in many ways to exercise a constant bilateral interpretation of an unwritten advantage rule and trainers and boxers were quick to exploit any weaknesses they identified in the referee as a man, or in his personal view of the rules, rather as a barrister might approach dealing with a judge. Refereeing, it must be said, was not an easy task.

  Henry and George were not the only ones to take notice of the huge difference between the amateur and the professional game. George Page, who had worked so hard with them at Eltham and had initially accompanied them to work with Danny Holland at the Thomas à Becket, realized quite early on that the professional sport was really not for him. The Corinthian traditions of amateur sport, as praised by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, via Sherlock Holmes, ran through Page as words run through a stick of Brighton rock and he discovered that the slickness and packaging that rather characterized professional boxing even in those far-off days was totally alien to him. He also rather disliked sharing the twins with Holland, having brought them skilfully to this level. Quite soon, he was to go back to purely training amateurs, which was where his heart truly lay.

  Basically, Page disliked the fact that money was involved, any money. In his opinion it wrecked and degraded the game. Perhaps he had a point; after a novice professional fight, the ringside crowd would throw coins – ‘nobbins’ – into the ring in appreciation of a skilful or, more often, a bloody fight. To someone brought up in the rather Calvinist traditions of the amateur ring, such things were anathema, both patronizing and degrading, but all agreed that it was a lot worse when they threw bottles.

  Not only did Henry and George buy their parents a television, but they also bought themselves a car, a perpendicular Ford Prefect, though Henry recalls that it was money earned from plastering that paid for it. Virtually all the cash the
pair earned from fighting was spent either on the unavoidable costs of getting to and from the Thomas à Becket or helping the Cooper household financially. But from this modest beginning Henry was to acquire something of a grand passion for motor cars that has never left him.

  In fact, once the twins had learned the basics of what was required to train, they worked together, which made Holland gradually almost redundant. He was officially their trainer of record, because Wicks was their manager of record, but in reality the discipline of rising at 4.a.m. for their road-work (carried out in Army ammunition boots) was all theirs. As they both remained working as plasterers for some time, it made for a rather long day, with little time available to chase girls. ‘Oh, no, we didn’t do any of that,’ says Henry. ‘Everyone else went off to a dance hall on a Saturday night, but George and me took boxing so seriously that we just trained and trained.’

  But plastering was good training for Henry’s left hand and George’s right, and both brothers started to become observably asymmetric. Because both were completely monodextrous they started to resemble not so much identical twins but more mirror images of each other and naturally enough, any athlete whose sport demands some sort of polarity will start to favour the strong side in preference to the less strong, but Henry took this to unusual levels – he used his left for everything.

  So, gradually, the standard of living at Farmstead Road was raised, to the clear and predictable envy of certain of the neighbours, as the Cooper twins started to achieve some modest fame. Their local celebrity was not long in coming, indeed, they had featured as an interesting curiosity, as twins often do, as far back as the days of the Bellingham club, but if they had thought that that had been fame – and they had – then that was quite inadequate preparation for what Wicks had in mind for them.

  He insisted that they behave in certain ways, and his list of do’s and don’ts was short but absolute. When Henry was invited by a friend to accompany him to one of the perfectly innocent but private drinking clubs with which Soho was liberally dotted, for example, Henry’s response was perhaps curious. ‘No,’ he said, ‘Jim wouldn’t like it…it just wouldn’t look right.’