Henry Cooper

by Robert Edwards

  But a high public profile is no guarantee of popularity, as generations of third-rate comedians and politicians can testify; the public saw (and see) in Henry something rather different from other, rather run-of-the-mill manufactured celebrities. They see a fundamental decency – ‘a kindness’, as Albina calls it – about him, which they find irresistibly attractive, whatever they may think about boxing – assuming even that they have an opinion on it at all, for many are completely agnostic about the subject now. To a British public his appeal is, in my view at least, very much a nineteenth-century one, as if the public can make a direct connection with the prizefighters of the past, Caunt, Cribb and all the others. If he stood for parliament like John Gully had he would probably win, for example, although it must be said that Gully, who was not the gentle giant portrayed by Henry in Royal Flash, simply bought his seat according to the custom of the day.

  But it is for his charitable activities, many of them invisible, that he received his OBE, and a later, perhaps even more singular honour, which, while it means relatively little outside the Catholic Church, was nonetheless important. In June 1978 he was awarded the Papal Knighthood of St Gregory, which was bestowed upon him by the late, great Cardinal, Basil Hume. It must have given Hume a particular pleasure, as he was a keen follower of the fistic sport, another apparent inconsistency in what we must really start to regard as the mystery of boxing.

  If any proof were needed that boxing’s hasty exit, pursued by the law, into the music halls all those years before, an event which probably ensured its survival, then Henry’s role in the Variety Club of Great Britain offers it. He has been involved with it for nearly 30 years, and the now established charity golf tournaments to which he puts his name (he chairs the Variety Club Golfing committee) have raised millions, both for the Variety Club itself as well as other charities. His devotion to this cause is total. Every boxer must imagine what it must be like to be handicapped, and many of them, including Henry, know exactly what it is like to be poor. Despite his rather survivalist take on life, his efforts on behalf of the underprivileged are legendary and he remains a stalwart of many other charities. In short, he has put back into life far more than he has taken out of it. ‘When you’ve got healthy kids of your own, and you see all those physically and mentally handicapped children at a Sunshine coach presentation, well, I just knew I had to get involved,’ he said in 2000.

  And get involved he certainly did. He offers a living link between boxing, which is the most violent sport on the planet, show business, and one of the best-hearted and hardworking charity networks there is. Neither he nor anyone else sees any particular inconsistency in that; he draws the line at pantomime, though. Boxing and show business may be intimately connected, but there are limits, and he found them quite easily. Henry Cooper may be many things but he was never going to be a pantomime dame.

  In between our chats, I notice two still-life paintings, which are more than competent, hanging on his kitchen wall. They are signed ‘HC’ and I asked him whether he had painted them. ‘Well, I was a bit idle for a while,’ he says, ‘so I just bought a book, you know, How to Paint, or something, and knocked them out. They’re not very good.’

  Well, there is one of a trout, which does look rather surprised, but I have to say that I have seen much worse. But he doesn’t paint any more; there is perhaps something of the ‘been there, done that’ attitude of a man who seeks an experience but feels, internally, that he knows his limitations, even has a slight sense of insecurity. He took some serious risks in the ring, and is not averse to taking some now, but is swift to call a halt if the process seems to lead nowhere, rather like the Wembley grocery enterprise.

  Weather and reptiles permitting, golf is still his main hobby. ‘I like golf a lot, because you can happily play at your level for as long as you like,’ he says. ‘There aren’t many sports which let you do that.’

  A quite remarkable aspect of the Cooper phenomenon is the way he unconsciously engages people’s attention. Quite simply, total strangers think they know him. I recall, as this book was in the early stages of preparation, we were walking together down Shaftesbury Avenue; I was startled at the number of people who simply and cheerfully greeted him, ‘Morning, Henry’. I had never seen this before – dozens of, I am sure, perfectly intelligent people who had convinced themselves that this was quite normal behaviour. Whether they were surprised when he calmly greeted them back, treating this as an everyday occurrence, which it clearly is, I cannot tell, but I imagine they were not. It is as if he physically exudes an aura of accessible amiability, very similar to that perceived to radiate from the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, who was apparently an avid Henry Cooper fan.

  It is a matter of record that once he retired from the prize ring the audience figures for British boxing simply fell off the edge of a cliff. He still gets fan mail from fightgoers who gave up on the sport when he did and who have never returned to it; his presence had been the only reason for their being there, or even watching it on television. A similar phenomenon applied to Stirling Moss when he had retired nine years before Henry, but Stirling’s following was mainly among motor racing fans and was based much more on vast respect for his phenomenal talents than anything else; they did not feel as if they really knew Stirling, whereas they just knew that they knew Henry, and they knew they also liked him. It was another example of British enthusiasts not necessarily demanding world championship status for their idols – British champion is quite enough, thank you; this also enables us to hang on to our heroes and not have to share them with the rest of the world.

  Very few men, and certainly very few boxers, accomplish this; the public does not appreciate the obsessive/compulsive disorder symptoms frequently exhibited by sports personalities, nor do they particularly like braggarts. In a sense, there is an innate disdain for the ethos of professional sport, which is why the only three men who spring to mind who might fit into the same category as Henry are Mike Hawthorn, who died in 1959, Denis Compton, who passed away in 1997 and Bobby Charlton, who is happily still with us. George Best we all like, particularly if we ever saw him play, but while we are distressed over his state of health, we tut-tut at his lack of discipline. We want it all.

  Sports stars make it look easy and in doing so they unconsciously remind us of our own shortcomings. When we discover, however, that what can make them outstanding competitors can also flaw them as men, we turn away. We are cruel to our heroes in many ways; we seek a perfection that cannot exist, an ideal that is both impractical and ephemeral. Actually, we might be said to prefer them to be dead so that the myths we weave around them can remain unchallenged by their subject. When it was realized that Nigel Mansell was a whinger, or that Jackie Stewart had his left jacket cuff made shorter than his right, in order to show off his Rolex, a company of which he is a (tax-exiled) director, or even that Lester Piggott had been economical with matters fiscal, we pause. Any single element, even unconnected with what they did for a living, can serve to make us forget those sublime moments those men offered up to us; the sheer balls-out courage of Mansell against Senna, or the sheer artistry with which Stewart triumphed, or Piggott’s astonishing record of over 4,500 wins. Really, we don’t deserve these people.

  Henry, of course never made it look easy, but the gory sight he frequently presented was quickly offset by his unfeigned chirpiness only a few days after one gruelling encounter or another. In defeat he was gracious and in victory, modest, and invariably generous to his opponent.We like that, if only because that is almost certainly not how we would ourselves behave in the same circumstances.

  So, Henry Cooper, who had won his audience and following the hardest way, now found himself attracting a bigger one than he had enjoyed in the ring, for despite the fact that boxing has always been a minority sport when compared to football or motor racing, Henry’s appeal has always been wider than the orbit of his occupation, and all agree that he is very good indeed at simply being Henry Cooper.


  It is a full-time job, and he is seldom at a loose end, but there is one sport that he is pleased he took up; if there is one activity apart from boxing about which he is passionate it is the ancient one of golf. ‘I think that without golf, Henry wouldn’t be the man he is today,’ says Albina. ‘It really gave him a new lease of life.’

  But the combination of golf and his happy-go-lucky, optimistic attitude was nearly the undoing of him three years ago. He was playing golf in Buckinghamshire in the late spring. While looking for someone else’s lost ball (‘of course’, sighs Albina), he failed to observe an aggressive and healthy specimen of Vipera beris lurking in the rough and the adder bit him on the ankle.

  Jim Wicks had been the man who had taken care so effectively of most of the multifarious other reptiles to have crossed Henry’s path in his previous career, so perhaps his reaction was both understandable and forgivable, if perhaps, in the light of hindsight, a little bit unwise. Typically, he made little of it and simply carried on playing, slapped a Band-Aid on the oozing puncture in the clubhouse and drove himself home. He explained that he had been scratched by a thorn when Albina asked him about the plaster. ‘Well, I didn’t want to worry anyone,’ he says now. ‘Everybody knows they can’t kill you.’

  They can, actually; an adder bite is no small thing, depending on the time of year. Unhappily, he was bitten in May, during the nesting season, when adders are at their most defensive and aggressive. Even when the bite refused to heal he was not overly concerned, and only seven months later, when a lump of medically interesting and clearly mortified tissue the size of a small walnut simply dropped out of his ankle, did he realize that something was seriously amiss, and he reluctantly revealed the truth, caught in the harmless fib. Albina resignedly sums it up: ‘There you are, that’s my Henry. I asked him if he’d killed it – “No,” he said. “She ran away…”’

  So, that rather says it all: Henry Cooper, one time British, Empire and European heavyweight champion, the destroyer of Erskine, London, Richardson and Tomasoni, the owner and deliverer of perhaps the finest punch – God-given – ever to grace the British ring, couldn’t even bring himself to kill the snake that bit him. There is, I maintain, a great symbolic truth in this little anecdote.

  Although he will still be the first man to volunteer to find a lost golf ball, he does so rather more carefully now, particularly because the Kent countryside where he lives is fairly liberally stocked with ‘narrow strangers’ as Emily Dickinson memorably christened them.

  At this stage I am trying to work out if there is anything that will actually make him cross, apart from his professional disdain for awkward southpaws, particularly those who attempt to rearrange his dangly bits. I am certainly very clear now how hard his team must have had to work to bring him to the appropriate emotional match fitness, but what actually enrages him?

  Others, with much more reason to be confused about this than I am, have, over the years, asked the same question. In October 1958, Max Baer, world heavyweight champion for a year less a day after he demolished Primo Camera in June 1934, was visiting London as a guest of Jack Solomons at the Harringay Arena. Jolly Jack had been told that the owners of the arena saw a greater future for the site as a warehouse and he therefore knew that the game would shortly be up. It was a gathering of the great and the good, all in black tie, and given that it was also the occasion of Henry’s celebrated defeat of Zora Folley Baer was rather interested to meet him. Danny Cornell introduced them and Henry was his usual sunny self. As Henry wandered off, Cornell takes up the tale:

  ‘Tell me,’ demanded Max Baer, staring morosely at the departing back of Henry Cooper, ‘doesn’t that guy ever get mean?’ I wagged my head in a negative sort of way.

  ‘Well, you can get just so far by being a nice guy,’ continued Mr. Baer, ‘but no further. To go all the way to the top in this game, you need to be a nasty egotistical character like me. Don’t you agree?’

  It was actually quite difficult for Cornell to give a useful answer, as you might imagine. But Max Baer, the Clown Prince of Boxing, as he was known, was himself something of a comedian, but clearly grasped, as his remarks reveal, that there must be an element of schizophrenia in every boxer. Marciano had it, for example, and so did Joe Louis; that the memory of their actions in the ring are a blur when compared to anything else that they do. Marciano could never believe his aggression in the ring, when watching film of himself, but he apparently accepted the contradiction willingly. So, to rephrase Baer’s question – What makes him mean? Albina tells me: ‘We were watching the news; an old lady had been beaten up by some thugs and they showed her picture on the TV I glanced over at him; his face had suddenly gone quite grey. He said, “If I could get hold of them, I’d feed them some of their own medicine.”’

  Well, Lloyd’s riled him, too. He had been an underwriting member since his retirement, introduced to it by his friend Charles St George. Lloyd’s was perceived to be the ideal business for anyone affluent enough who was too busy to manage their own affairs. The principle is simple enough: ‘names’, as the underwriting members are known, sign a commitment of unlimited liability and put up their wealth as collateral in exchange for joining syndicates, which receive insurance premiums. Their share of those premiums constitutes their income. Over time, Lloyd’s had become known as a profitable but undemanding way of achieving respectably high returns; it had paid the school fees of several generations of that section of Britain that has always had assets but not necessarily any cash.

  But, of course, nothing is for nothing. It was also known, in the City at least, that while there was clearly no great trick to this, Lloyd’s was not an institution that was necessarily blessed by a high frequency of PhDs among its workers. Nice people, some of them, but not necessarily la crème de la crème in the IQ department. It was held that it was the employer of last resort for someone who desired a career ‘in the City’. The last examination that many of them had passed, the standard joke went as I recall, was probably the cycling proficiency test. On a re-take. As an institution, it was also astonishingly lax, a fact well hidden behind a resolutely stuffy facade. Small minds and loose fiscal morals are dangerous, particularly in a place that works on the basis of unlimited liability and is – ahem – self-regulated. When one observer opined that the new stainless-steel building rather resembled a huge dairy, one who overheard drawled elegantly: ‘Yes, it does; those ****s inside it have been milking it for years.’

  The punters were not to know that all was not well, of course, because no one told them; informed insiders (very few of whom actually suffered any serious financial loss) knew, however, that they were riding the tiger. Legions of glib salesmen were dispatched to the shires, with a simple purpose: to tap in to the emerging housing boom in order to top up the dwindling internal reserves of cash and assets that were being destroyed by a succession of disasters, particularly from America, as a series of class actions on behalf of victims of asbestosis started to have their impact. Lloyd’s was, in the parlance of the industry, ‘under-reserved’ – functionally broke, in fact.

  The recruitment drive had started in the middle of the 1970s as the potential horror of the asbestosis crisis made itself clear. There was no public discussion of the matter; it simply became a tightly guarded secret, the One Big Thing which was fully understood by the uniquely under-qualified stewards of this looming disaster. The level of liability as defined by the ever-generous American courts was astonishing; clearly something had to be done. When Henry joined Lloyd’s the organization had around 6,000 members; it had been growing modestly at around 200 or so per year since the war. From 1975, though, the rate of growth was startling, culminating in a peak membership of 32,400 in 1988. That arithmetic is self-explanatory. In truth, though, there was no big secret about asbestos, as the following anecdote suggests.

  One friend of mine, an engineer by profession (we shall call him Brian, as that is his name) and a man a little older than Henry, returned from his National Serv
ice in the Royal Air Force in 1949. He went to work as an apprentice in the family firm and, full of enthusiasm, threw himself into a relatively simple task, the re-commissioning of an ancient asbestos-lined crucible. As he started to take it apart, the foreman, aged circa three score years and five, rapped sternly: ‘Don’t you touch that, Master Brian, that ****er will kill ’e.’

  Brian queried, not the (permissible) over-familiarity, but the simple accuracy of the statement: ‘That there is asbestos, young Brian; it’s ****ing deadly.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ replied my friend.

  ‘My grandfather,’ replied the old sage shortly, suggesting that this intelligence had originated at around the time of the Great War (if not before), when the majority of these financially deadly (and perpetual) policies were being written.*

  So, there was no great secret about asbestos; it was a matter of shop-floor, if not public record.

  It was held, as uncertainty grew, that these vast claims would dwindle eventually and the new money coming in would balance the overcooked books. In short, Lloyd’s of London became a giant Ponzi scheme, a task made easier by the fact that it had been permitted, ten years into its secret crisis, to remain self-regulating in the wake of ‘Big Bang’. Henry recalls, slightly agitated now: ‘As soon as those people signed on the dotted line, they were all completely broke, but they just didn’t know it; all their money was gone – all of it – before they even walked out of the door. It was outrageous.’

  It certainly was. As the claims multiplied, the syndicate salesmen worked even harder, and with some success, as upwardly mobile punters, completely sold on the sheer respectability, the grandness of the place, were sucked in, and indeed persuaded their friends to join. As the crisis deepened and the news started to leak, the scandal finally broke, with expected results. A whole swathe of the population were financially wiped out as their assets were put under the hammer in an already uncertain economy battered by the delayed action effects of the 1987 stock market crash. The liquidation of so much real estate certainly contributed to the collapse of the housing market. Some investors were so badly clobbered that they were unable even to buy newspapers.