ON these pages I have mentioned seeing Jackie Turpin at work at Britain’s last boxing stall in 1977. I consider myself very lucky to have stepped into the boxing booth to see it live. some boxing, because it was part of the game, so important in its day, is gone forever.
The pavilion belonged to Ron Taylor, a Welshman born in 1910 who spent his working life crisscrossing the country’s motorways and side roads with his pavilion, setting up in the villages, towns and cities from Penzance to Scotland, with a small group of boxers ready to challenge anyone for a few pounds a week.
Luckily, my good friend John Jarrett was there that same year, and he interviewed Ron for a magazine article. BN on July 8, 1977. Ron told him that “The stalls have been in my family since 1880, but I will be the last. You can’t get guys today, and it gets harder every year. But I’ll keep trying for as long as I can, it’s already in my blood.” Ron fought for another 20 years and he finally died in the late 90s in 2006.
Of course, the heyday of pavilions was before the war. Men like Jimmy Wilde, Freddie Mills, Benny Lynch and Tommy Farr learned their craft on them, and there have been more than 50 stalls traveling the country in that time. After the war, everything changed. In 1947, the Board of Supervisors decided to ban licensed boxers from participating in stall fights. This resolution proved unpopular, especially with the editor of BN, who remarked that “For many years it was generally recognized that the boxing booth was the cradle of British boxing and the means convenient for beginners to get their first experience. Mature boxer with intensive training for major competitions. Now that the authority has officially cleared this supply, we want to ask what it has to offer in its place. One can imagine that in the future the pavilion will have to find its own young people and it will become the last hope of the good that ‘already existed’, which is a pity.”
The board felt that the booths were in direct competition with licensed advertisers, using the same boxers, and that this was unfair to their licensees. The stall never fully recovered from this setback and men like Ron Taylor became rare. Jackie Turpin was unlicensed at the time that John and I met him in 1977 when he entered his last professional competition in 1975. He was one of those “who used to be” but BN the editor was talking about 30 years ago.
In the accompanying photo, of Sam McKeown’s pavilion in the late 1920s, one can get a sense of how popular these attractions were. McKeown, a former boxer himself, has traded around the fairgrounds of the Southwest and of the four boxers on display, I’m pretty sure it’s Dixie Brown on the left. I don’t know who the other three are, but they will be the top experts in the area. Dixie fought in the ring from 1914 to 1944, winning 44 of his 103 contests, and he’s typical of the kind of guy you can go up against if you imagine the chances of surviving three rounds. 90 seconds on the booth. Dixie probably faces around 10 or 15 local ‘hards’ each week, and very few of them see the ‘riders’ they are trying to win by extending the course. In Dixie’s view, his aggregate sum from about 15 contests a year could be boosted by spending four months in the summer traveling around the area with Mr. He will have many adventures on the open road, many memories and many difficult pieces with the local tough people. The happy days!
