by Jack Tunney
Sam Samson only had one opponent, since he was a big man, probably a good fifteen pounds heavier than me. He was not fast, but he could defend reasonably well and he methodically took a big backstreet brawler apart, knocking him out in the third round.
None of the contenders left with five pounds in their pockets.
All in all, the boxing booth was a neat little business, although they were clearly stretched and could have done with more people to help out. There was something unprofessional about the boxers having to act as seconds. It all lacked a certain sparkle. I had no doubt that sparkle would have been supplied by Jack Brodie, had he still been alive.
When the session was over Jenny invited me over to a caravan that served as the boxing booth’s office and lounge area. There she brewed up tea on a gas ring and I was introduced to the staff of the booth.
The redhead’s name was Carol Parker and she was Henry’s girlfriend. Together they made a handsome couple. Sam Samson, which was actually his real name had worked with the booth for ten years and before that had been a blacksmith, then a circus strongman. Sandy Carmichael had worked for five years and Rodney Sullivan had joined them just at the start of the season.
I explained my connection with Jack, which they all seemed to know about already and then once everyone was seated and had been served a mug of tea I listened eagerly as Jenny Brodie recounted Jack’s death.
“It was about eleven months ago at Scarborough Fair. Scarborough is a seaside town over on the east coast of Yorkshire. Jack had come back from the war and thrown himself into getting the booth back on its feet. My husband Fred, that’s Jack and Henry’s dad, he was a Lonsdale Belt holder and British Middleweight Champion in 1928.”
“Jack told me all about him. You must all have been proud of him.”
“We were,” Jenny went on. “Especially Jack. He was determined to emulate him and win the British Heavyweight title. But above all, he wanted to have a Lonsdale Belt.”
“And he would have done,” Henry said. “He was a classy boxer, for such a big guy.”
“I’ll agree with that,” I added. “I was on the end of a few of his punches.”
“Aye, and so have I been,” said Sam. “We’ve had enough gee fights over the years.”
“Gee fights?” I queried.
“If we don’t get a challenger then sometimes one of the boys will pretend to be one of the crowd and they’ll put on a show,” Jenny explained. “Although, now that we only have four boxers we can’t do that. And we’re taking a chance with Henry here as it is.”
“Why so?”
“I’m a licensed professional and the British Boxing Board of Control have decreed that we’re not supposed to box in booths anymore.”
Carol spoke up for the first time as she put her arm through Henry’s. “And hopefully it won’t be long before you can get a shot at the British title and have a Lonsdale Belt of your own.”
Henry gave a self-deprecating smile. “I’m not ready for a title shot yet, Carol. I reckon I still have some learning to do.”
I didn’t say anything, but while I thought the kid had class, yet he didn’t quite have his brother Jack’s poise and balance.
“So what happened to Jack?” I asked.
Jenny gave a little shudder. “Like I said, we were at the Scarborough Fair. We’d had a good week; Jack had been training hard and fighting in the booth. He planned to get a professional license soon so that he could have a go at scaling the heights to have a shot as a contender for the British title. He went for a walk along the cliffs and… and it had been raining hard. He must have lost his balance and slipped over the edge. Some fishermen found his body on the rocks below the next morning.”
“He slipped?” I asked, incredulously. I could hardly believe it. I had fought with the man and I had never seen anyone of his size with such balance. He was like a cat.
“That was the coroner’s verdict after the inquest,” Jenny replied.
“We… we were distraught,” said Carol, clutching Henry’s arm tightly and burying her face on his shoulder. “I don’t know how I would have gotten through if it hadn’t been for Henry.”
Henry patted her on the back and kissed her hair.
“Jack and Carol were going out at the time,” Jenny explained.
I tried to keep any evidence of surprise from showing on my face. But I was suddenly aware of an atmosphere in the caravan. There was an awkward silence, which was broken by Rodney Sullivan, who stood and stretched.
“Well, I think I’ll go and have a walk round the fair and maybe have a look at the coconut shy over the way.”
“You mean, you’re going to try and chat up Dick Gillespie’s daughter, who takes the money,” jibed Sandy. He stood up as well. “I may just join you, my old son. A bit of friendly rivalry, that’s what you need.”
“Rodney, you just make sure you keep Sandy away from the one-armed bandit fruit machines,” Jenny said in a motherly fashion.
The two boxers both shrugged their shoulders and gave mock scowls. Rodney’s face implied that he did not feel that he should be Sandy’s keeper. And Sandy’s expression implied that he did not like her interference as if he was a naughty schoolboy.
From that I deduced that Sandy could have a gambling problem.
They left noisily and the caravan door swung closed behind them.
“So what are your plans, Oscar?” Sam asked.
“I have none now. My plan was to see Jack and thank him for saving my life.”
Henry gasped. “He saved your life? He never told us that.”
I recounted all that I had been told. “So I guess the next best thing I can do is head off and pay my respects at his grave. Where is he buried?”
“In the cemetery at Whitby Abbey, along with his grandparents and his father,” Jenny replied. “But if you are not in a hurry, why not come with us?”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Well, Oscar, I’m sure you’ve seen how tight we are here. We could do with another boxer really, or at least another pair of hands.”
I explained again that I could never box again on account of the shrapnel lodged in my cerebellum. “My balance is a bit dodgy. But I could certainly help out as a second or a cutman. Or I could even help with coaching.”
“That would be brilliant,” Henry said enthusiastically. “Jack told us how good you were. He reckoned you could be a champion one day.”
I gave a rueful smile. “I was not that good, but I did have some great training in my time. I’d be happy to help.”
“And we can all do with extra company,” added Carol with a friendly smile.
“None of us ever know it all about boxing, mate,” said Sam. “We’d be happy to have some help.”
“Would you be prepared to help set the booth up, put up the ring and the marquee and all the other things we do.” Jenny asked.
“Of course. I’d like to help out.”
“Oh, we’ll pay you, of course,” Jenny went on, with the slightest of smiles. “We’ll be making our way there, via a couple of other fairs, so I’d be happy to show you our plot in the cemetery when we get to Scarborough Fair.”
And that was it. I was suddenly a member of the Battling Brodie’s Boxing Booth.
As we shook on it I had a strange cold feeling come over me. I knew that it was a feeling of doubt.
I just couldn’t believe that Bombardier Jack Brodie could have just slipped off a cliff top.
***
I enjoyed the next couple of weeks as I settled into the life of a travelling boxing booth. I learned that these had been part of British fairground life for the past two hundred years, from the days of the bareknuckle champions, like Jem Mace, the great bareknuckle heavyweight champion of the world, Guss Platts, Ted Kid Lewis and scores of others.
I enjoyed the smell of the ring again and of being part of setting it up, seeing to the contenders and giving them impromptu tips and pieces of advice to help them prevent going home with worse
injuries than they needed.
I also took over time-keeping from Carol from time to time and I relieved Jenny of her refereeing duties. What I didn’t do was try to take on her spieler role. That was a skill that I did not have.
It was a tough life for the boxers, of course, since the way that they fought, coaxing most of the contestants along to let them save face meant that they had to let themselves be hit. That was part of the job, but it meant that they earned the meagre wages that the booth could support. Of course, they also supplemented their money with nobbings, the coins of assorted denomination that satisfied onlookers tossed onto the ring at the end of a session. These were collected together, the pennies, three-penny bits, sixpences and shillings, and then dutifully divided among them.
There was camaraderie that I had long been without, since my days in Korea, for although my long period of convalescence had meant that I formed bonds with other patients, yet I had missed the shared experience of working for a common cause.
And there was my work in the ring with the boxers. It was good to put on gloves and give them the benefit of my trained eye. I could show them where they had weaknesses and where they could improve. I helped Sandy improve his power and hitting by developing his hinge. I got Rodney to up his guard and then showed Sam where a bit more work on his rear uppercut could help him to maximize his great height.
As for Henry, I was able to help him most of all in the area that he most needed it, up top in his mind.
“You don’t really believe in yourself, do you, Henry?”
“How do you know that, Oscar?”
‘It’s in your approach, Henry. You’re good, you have all the punches, but you’re too defensive. I don’t think you believe you are as good as Jack was.”
He bent his head and looked at the canvas. “You’re right, and I don’t. I know how good he was. He was always the blue-eyed boy with granddad and dad.”
“Was that because he was better than you or because he was your big brother?”
“A bit of everything. Granddad and dad had been champions. Dad was British Middleweight Champion and had a Lonsdale Belt, for pity’s sake. Yet because Jack was a heavyweight I think they laid all of their attention on him. They wanted him to go on and take the British Heavyweight title, get a Lonsdale Belt and then go further. Get a European title, an Empire title and maybe even a crack at the world title. Imagine that! Heavyweight Champion of the World. The very best of the very best.” His eyes fell again. “And I was only ever going to be a middleweight. I could only ever be second to him.”
“Yet you’ve got a shot at the title for the North of England championship next week. If you win that I understand you would probably only be a couple of bouts off a shot at the British title.”
“That’s true, Oscar, but I don’t know if I’m up to it.”
“You bloody well are, Henry and I’m going to see that you are. I’ll come along as your cutman, if you’ll have me. And between then and now you can start realizing how good you are. Tomorrow, for example, in your session, make sure that not a single challenger makes it past the first round.”
And so it was. I worked on him, boosting his confidence, urging him to attack, to use his ability and get ready for the big match. The other boxers wondered what had happened and started to get a bit irritated by him. After all, with him going through his bouts like a tornado while they kept coaxing their fights out, as Jenny insisted, it made them look less able. But I insisted, if they wanted another Lonsdale champion, he had to behave like one and that meant that he couldn’t afford to soft peddle any more.
When his Northern Counties Championship title fight came, he was ready. He was so full of self-belief that I was actually a bit worried in case I had overdone it. After all, an overconfident boxer can let his guard slip, may take on a combo or two that gives his opponent a look in. Underestimating an opponent can be the undoing of a boxer.
He was pitted against Johnnie Warboys, a longshoreman, or a stevedore as the Brits say, from the Newcastle docks. He was a couple of pounds heavier than Henry, but had huge upper body muscle development. His right arm in particular was heavily muscled from lugging chests and all sorts of ship cargo around. This was his first defense of his title and he was intending to use it to give himself a chance at edging up the list to have a shot at the British title.
All of the boxing booth gang was there in the Newcastle City Hall, ready to cheer him on. Carol and Jenny both looked nervous, but the guys were there ready to root him on.
The first round was the inevitable equal pointer. They set about jabbing, exploring and testing each other. Looking for weak spots or potential unguarded moments.
Henry came to his corner and needed nothing but a bit of sponging and some pep talk.
As for Warboys, I noted that he had obviously had some good training in some of the less savory tactics of the ring. He was happy to go for clinches and had a facility for maneuvering his opponent round to give some well-chosen, discrete low and late punches.
So be it, Henry could deal with that. In the booth you came across backstreet fighters who had never even heard of the Marquis of Queensbury rules, had never pulled gloves on before and who had no scruples about hitting low or from behind.
More alarmingly, the stevedore had developed his corkscrew straights into a fine art. I warned Henry about that and told him to prevent them landing, for they were designed with the purpose of cutting. I had known lots of boxers who used them to good effect. It was done by firing a jab or a cross as usual, but at the moment of impact the fist was twisted through 180 degrees to rip the skin. To give extra cutting power the expert made sure that the twist came from the shoulder and not just from the elbow or wrist. Warboys was trying to do that quite a lot.
Unfortunately, he was successful in the third round and opened up a cut above Henry’s right eye. It bled profusely and it was a relief when the bell went and I could get to work on it. I used cold sponge and an iced endswell on it, squeezing the swelling down and then applied a swab with a formulation of my own with petroleum jelly and a little styptic
“Remember, Henry, block!”
“Seconds away!”
And they were at it again. And predictably, Warboys was intent on opening up the cut again.
Which he did. That corkscrew action of his, presumably so natural to him after years of applying his stevedore’s hook to grab and unload cargo was playing havoc with Henry’s eye. It was bleeding and obscuring his vision. The referee halted the fight once to check it, but allowed them to box on.
I heard the lads cheering and urging Henry on, shouting encouragement and advising him to knock his opponent’s lights out.
Yet despite all this, Henry was still fighting confidently. Apart from the cut eye, Warboys had not really scored all that well. Henry, on the other hand, had continued to strike repeatedly. And he was using combinations that we had run through before. I had, just as Father Tim had with me and the other lads at the St Vincent’s Asylum, advised him not to lose his temper and try to punch his opponent to the canvas. What he had to do was to keep striking and wearing his opponent down.
So he was going for body points that would weaken his opponent. The false ribs, the solar plexus, the heart. And it worked well.
He softened Warboys up, got in close then worked a classic jab, straight right and left hook to the side of his head. That did it. Warboys crumpled and crashed to the canvas.
Moments later the referee was raising Henry’s hand aloft and he was the new Northern Counties Middleweight Champion.
I was immediately through the ropes, throwing an arm about his shoulder to congratulate him.
I glanced triumphantly at the boxing booth gang and for a moment felt a wave of dizziness that made my vision go blurred. But in that instant I saw looks on some of the faces that I had not expected. There was something there that made me wonder.
I saw expressions that I could not readily identify, but which could have been anger, jealousy
or downright malice.
I wondered if they would have been reacting the same way if it had been Henry’s elder brother Jack who had just taken a title.
But in any case, it had been enough to arouse my suspicions again
***
It took a couple of days for everyone’s euphoria to settle so that some normality could descend on the booth. Henry had been excused from some of the heavier work involved in loading up the two vans and the caravan as we set off for Scarborough Fair. His cut eye needed to settle and his bruises were more extensive than anything he had ever acquired at the boxing booth.
“It’s a pity that we can’t use Henry’s title in our adverts, just in case we get visited by the British Boxing Board of Control, “ Jenny said to me as she drove the large Trojan van along the country lanes at the head of our little convoy. “They’d take a dim view of a Northern Counties Middleweight champion fighting in a booth.”
We passed a pub where people were sitting outside enjoying pints of bitter. Upon seeing the vans emblazoned with Battling Brodie’s Boxing Booth and a large painted picture of Fred Brodie posing with his Lonsdale Belt, they cheered and raised their glasses to us.
“Yup, I can see how it would help. So does he plan to stay with the booth?”
“For the time being, anyway. If he went, it would leave us in the lurch.” She bit her lip. “Especially if he and Carol both went. It’s been good having you to help, and we’ll always be grateful for how you helped Henry get that title, but you can see how we struggle with all the tasks.”
There was a lot to think of and it was obvious that she was a worried lady.
“And I don’t know if I am looking forward to Scarborough Fair,” she went on. “It’s almost the anniversary of Jack’s accident.”
I nodded.
If accident it was, I thought.
“Tomorrow I’ll drive you to Whitby and we can pay our respects at Jack’s grave.”
