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’.

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.