A THEME that I continually parrot is that, again in the Thirties when there have been so {many professional} fighters up and down the nation, just about each city had a steady of fighters, by no means extra so than in the working-class cities and villages throughout industrial Britain. Take Stanley, for instance. Unless you’re aware of the North-East, that is most likely a spot that you’ve got by no means heard of, and but, between 1925 and 1935, it performed host to greater than 400 skilled tournaments, each indoors and outside, in seven totally different venues.
Stanley is located between Durham and Newcastle and was, of course, in the coronary heart of the Durham coalfield. Even as we speak the inhabitants is simply round 30,000, however when it was a boxing hotbed the inhabitants was even smaller, but it produced swathes of good fighters, and just about all of them have been miners.
Fifty hours down the pit each week and then a 10-rounder on a Friday evening was what they endured. They didn’t have time to coach in the similar manner that the lads do as we speak, however life – markedly more durable again then – made them robust and match to battle.
The place had at all times identified hardship, and tragedy. In 1909, it misplaced 160 of its greatest males and boys in a pit catastrophe, and fairly just a few of the professionals that adopted had misplaced fathers and uncles on this catastrophe. Stanley was a close-knit neighborhood, the place all people knew one another, and with any quantity of pits surrounding the city there was nice rivalry when a boxer from one mine boxed a lad from one other.
Inevitably, this led to the ‘Pitman’s Championships’ and Stanley had various of these. My {photograph} reveals Barney Whitney, resplendent in his trilby, and trying each inch the boxing supervisor and promoter, surrounded by his lads, all of whom come from the city. Three of them, Miles Connelly (seated left), Joe Broughy and Teddy Joyce (each standing) claimed the Pitmen’s title of Northumberland and Durham and all of them have been extremely expert ring males with an enormous punch. The different lad, Jimmy Rogers, a flyweight, by no means attained the similar heights as his stablemates, however was one of many comparable lads who made up the Whitney’s frequent payments.
Battling Sullivan, the father of the British middleweight champion of the Fifties, Johnny Sullivan, moved to Stanley in 1931 and ran weekly reveals from his boxing sales space till 1933, and, as he was born in December 1932, I believe it possible that Johnny was really born in the city. Battling Sullivan, initially from Preston and whose actual identify was Hallmark, campaigned as a middleweight and light-heavyweight between 1927 and 1936, assembly males like Reggie Meen, Con O’Kelly, Jack London and Harry Reeve.
While working his sales space he additionally repeatedly boxed himself at the New St James Hall, Newcastle. He usually promoted on a Saturday evening and then topped the invoice at Newcastle the following Monday.
Another ex-fighter, George Harwood of close by Craghead, who I wrote about in a separate article again in 2020, additionally ran a sales space in Stanley. As a consequence of his boxing profession, George had gone blind, and he tried to eke out a dwelling as a promoter between 1932 and 1933 and he discovered it robust. The despair had kicked in by this time, and even when there have been a lot of lads keen to battle for pay, there wasn’t sufficient spare cash in the city to ensure an viewers, particularly with Whitney, Sullivan and others additionally selling at the similar time.
The final present for very a few years occurred in Stanley at the greyhound stadium in 1949 till, 40 years later in June 1989, Glenn McCrory received the vacant IBF cruiserweight title in the city, beating Patrick Lumumba at the Louisa Centre. This venue was constructed on the web site of the Louisa Colliery and subsequently offered a becoming hyperlink between the greatest man to ever have fought in the city and the many younger lads, all coalminers, who preceded him.
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