Yesterday’s Heroes: The twenties and thirties were great productive decades in British boxing
Miles Templeton writes: So many fights were held in the 20’s and 30’s that even BN couldn’t keep up.
WHAT I found so fascinating about boxing in the 1920s and 1930s, the period in which I was most interested, was the sheer variety of venues and halls of professional boxing.
Compared to today, when boxing is still extremely popular in the country, no matter where you live, it is still possible to come and watch the sport not too far from your doorstep. On top of that, the number of competitions that the top fighters enter and the number of quality fighters around, in every weight class, is astounding. As a result, many handsome men have not won any British titles, despite having 100 or more competitions.
There are a large number of contests that are not reported in BN, either because there is no space to report them all, or because the results were not reported to them in the first place. This makes profiling boxers during this period a very precise, yet extremely rewarding task. Some of these records, even for the most famous of them all, will never be truly complete. For example, last month I found new, never-before-seen results for Tommy Milligan and Bandsman Blake, both British champions.
For example, take the case of Jack Forster of Norwich. Actively active between 1927 and 1938, Jack won 93 of his 140 competitions and, although he won the Eastern Counties middleweight title in 1934, he He’s never been good enough to be considered by C’s BBB for an exclusion, never mind a bout title. Jack has boxed all over East Anglia in places that haven’t seen boxing for over eighty years, including Cromer, Beccles and Downham Market, where he won his title.
At the time, professional boxing was being held in many small towns and villages across Norfolk and Suffolk, including Diss, Dereham and Bungay, where any local athletes filled the bills. normally. Norwich, Ipswich, Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth are major crowd draws and one can watch boxing almost weekly at these locations.
Corn Hall at Norwich is where Jack does most of his boxing. Eighty-six of his competitions have taken place there, and he’s also boxed at four different locations in the city, including The Nest, where the soccer team played before they moved to Carrow Road, and at Speedway Stadium, where he topped the bill in outdoor tourneys during the summer of 1932 and 1933.
He’s so much-loved at Corn Hall that he regularly tops the bill week after week. In 1934, for example, he topped five weekly shows on water well, winning every contest, winning twelve rounds each. He then had a week off before returning to lose to Welsh middleweight and lightweight champion Glen Moody in another twelfth round on 15 February 1934. In these six rounds, he also hit the box elsewhere five times, winning three and losing two. One of them was a stunning win over Canadian, Fred Blocksidge, at the Ring, Blackfriars, which hosts Britain’s premier small hall. As a result, he set a record of 8-3 within the first six weeks of the year. I can’t imagine ever being able to complete Jack’s record, but it won’t be for someone who wants to try.
When he won his regional title in 1934, at Downham Market, he beat Fred Clements of Ely, another brilliant campaigner, by 12 rounds. This match was not reported in BN and I found reference to it in Eastern Daily Newspapers. The report said the place was packed and the decision for Jack was unpopular. Incredibly, he had boxed another 12 innings just two days earlier.
Boxers like Jack are now completely forgotten, but their feats and the times they fought are still fascinating.
