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.