Annie - the KO Queen

Pictured (1925): Annie poses in the ring with 12-year-old sparring partner Nipper Pat Daly as trainer Professor Newton looks on

Pioneering female boxer Annie Newton is one of the many colourful characters featured in Alex Daley's book, Born to Box: The Extraordinary Story of Nipper Pat Daly (Pitch Publishing)

Today, women’s boxing is thriving. There’s never been a better time for females to take up the noble art. But what if the likes of Nicola Adams and Katie Taylor had been around in the 1920s?

Back then, their hardest fight would have been outside the ring, contending with a largely hostile society. Not only was the idea of women boxing frowned upon, it was deemed an abomination. Even leading boxing figures like the great Jimmy Wilde felt it was freakish and unseemly.

For one female boxer trying to make it in the Roaring Twenties, this ideology proved an unbeatable foe. Her name was Annie Newton and she’d been steeped in boxing from an early age. Born in Highgate, north London in 1893, she was mostly raised by her uncle, ‘Professor’ Andrew Newton, one of Britain’s top boxing trainers of the time.

Digger's Sad Tale

By any standards, his short life was unspeakably hard. The story goes that when George ‘Digger’ Stanley was a boy, his father sold him to a boxing-booth owner for a gold sovereign and a pint of beer. He was aged somewhere between 12 and 15. But no one, not even Digger himself, knew his exact age or for that matter where he was born. His birthplace was sometimes given as Kingston-on-Thames but other times as Norwich, Lincoln or Reading. Stanley was a traveller (or ‘gypsy’) and could not read or write. At the height of his fame, he wore a magnificent gold watch but he had to ask others to tell him the time. His boxing literacy, though, was never in doubt.

He learnt his trade on a travelling boxing booth under Billy Le Neve, the booth owner his father supposedly sold him to. Tackling men of all weights and sizes, Digger not only learnt how to box but how to employ the game’s darker arts. ‘He could break more rules, more artfully, than almost any other boxer of the past few decades,’ said his Boxing News obituary, but he was also ‘a superlatively clever boxer and ring strategist’.

Ali in Ireland

Photo by Ira Rosenberg

Muhammad Ali's lesser-known Irish roots and his fight in the Emerald Isle.

When you think of the great Irish-American fighters, Muhammad Ali probably isn’t the first name that springs to mind. Nevertheless, the Emerald Isle can at least stake a claim to the heavyweight great as one of its own. Ali’s maternal great-grandfather, Abe Grady, was born in County Clare, in the west of Ireland. Later, he moved to America, married an African-American woman and ultimately became a grandfather to Ali’s mother, Odessa Lee Grady.

Despite his one-time connection with black Islamist group the Nation of Islam, Ali did not try to hide his Irish roots. In fact, in 2009, he visited his great-grandfather’s County Clare town of Ennis, meeting distant cousins and becoming the first person in 600 years to be given the freedom of Ennis. But it wasn’t Ali’s first time in Ireland. The by-then frail ex-champ had actually boxed there in 1972.

Forty-five years ago this week, Dublin’s Croke Park was the stage for if not a classic Ali performance, then at least an Ali promotion like no other.

Once Is Not Enough

Remarkable rematches from the boxing annals.

Fastest rematch in history?

Freddie Mills

Today, even the most hotly anticipated rematches require a bit of patience from the fans, typically building anticipation to fever pitch. We waited six months for the Carl Froch–George Groves return and one to three years between each of the Manny Pacquiao–Juan Manuel Marquez fights. But in 1936, fans were less patient.

On 14 October 1936, a 17-year-old middleweight named Freddie Mills stepped into the ring at Bournemouth’s Westover Ice Rink for his seventh pro fight. Later, he would win the world light-heavyweight championship, become a household name and die tragically in mysterious circumstances, aged 46.

As the bell clanged, Mills swarmed over his opponent in customary style, pounding out a first-round knockout win over the UK-based American Jack Scott. But Scott had only just failed to beat the count and some in the crowd voiced their disapproval.

When Mills went to pick up his purse money, the promoter Jack Turner told him if he wanted to get paid he would have to fight Scott again – not in a month’s or even a week’s time, but that very night! Quite how Scott felt about meeting fearless Freddie again is unclear, but presumably he was obliged to if he wanted his cash.

Memories of a Fairground Legend

Sam McKeowen in his youth

The McKeowen boxing booth was a familiar sight on British fairgrounds for over 70 years.

Booth owners are among the unsung heroes of British boxing. World champions such as Jimmy Wilde, Benny Lynch, Freddie Mills, Randolph Turpin and Rinty Monaghan plied their trade on the fairground circuit. Yet little has been written of the people who ran the booths: the men — and women — who gave champions-in-the-making their chance to shine.

One name forever entwined with booth fighting is that of Exeter’s Sam McKeowen, who was born Samuel Eli McKeowen in 1889. In 1956, when Sam was in his 50th year with the booths, Boxing News tracked him down for a rare interview.

McKeowen told our reporter how he’d learnt to box as a boy fairground attendant, spending every spare minute outside the booth, catching the gloves the fighters threw to their challengers.  It was a tough education but Sam soon learnt enough for the proprietor to ask him to join his troupe of touring fighters.

The Lesser Known Patterson

The story of world heavyweight champion Floyd's kid brother, Ray Patterson.

Every fight fan of a certain age knows about the 1950s and ’60s world heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, whose bouts with Archie Moore, Ingemar Johansson, Sonny Liston and Muhammad Ali are part of boxing folklore.

But I wonder how many remember Floyd’s younger brother, Ray, a fellow heavyweight who exiled himself from America to fight out of Sweden at a time when pro boxing was illegal there and punishable by prison.

One of 11 siblings, Ray was born in New York in 1942 and took up boxing hoping to emulate his famous brother. After winning two New York Golden Gloves titles, he turned pro in March 1963 with a two-round stoppage win at Madison Square Garden.

Fred's Gym

Remembering Fred Dyer's 1920s boxing gym at the Strand, in London.

There was half-an-hour to kill between train connections at Charing Cross station. It was a sunny September afternoon, so I took a stroll along the Strand. Gazing at the city horizon, my eyes stopped at a tall, imposing building. I’d seen it before but never in living colour. Previously, it had been one dimensional — grey or sepia in the photos I’d seen — but here it was in 3D.

I was staring at the rooftop of Britain’s Zimbabwean Embassy. Not an obvious boxing shrine but nonetheless a building with a rich fistic past. Back in the late 1920s, this grade-II-listed edifice, at 429 Strand, was the HQ of Fred Dyer (real name Frederick O’Dwyer), one of Britain’s top trainers.

The Genius of Jimmy Wilde

Jimmy Wilde

Stylistically unorthodox, the great Welshman was no textbook boxer. So what lay behind Jimmy’s genius?

‘I have nothing to declare but my genius.’ So supposedly said the famous Mr Wilde while passing through New York customs. That’s Oscar Wilde, the famous writer, not Jimmy Wilde, the famous fighter. They were two very different men but here’s one thing they shared. Neither was shy about his brilliance.

Jimmy Wilde passed through New York customs for a US fight tour 37 years after Oscar Wilde, but I doubt Jimmy made any such remark. However, in the late 1950s, several Boxing News readers were aggrieved by a similarly bold statement Jimmy had made in a TV interview. Apparently, he’d been asked to predict the outcome of a fantasy match-up against fellow flyweight legend Benny Lynch, with Wilde declaring that he would have beaten Benny inside a couple of rounds.

Perhaps Jimmy truly believed this, or maybe he said it for a bit of devilment. Either way, you could make a good case for him beating Lynch, although I don’t think such an early demolition would have been likely.