start to finish. Nowadays they force you to wear head-protectors, but I never did and I still wouldn’t want to if I was starting out now. I think they make boxing more dangerous, rather than less. Head-protectors are there predominantly to stop you getting cuts, but the cuts aren’t really the problem in terms of the long-term damage people sustain from boxing. It’s the shaking of the head and thence the brain which is the worst thing.
If you haven’t got a head-guard on, you can see everything. The most fundamental technique in boxing as far as I’m concerned is the slip and miss, which is the way you pull your head inside or outside your opponent’s punches. Once you’ve put your head-guard on, you may have covered your brow and your chin, but at the same time you’re a bigger target, so even when you slip, you’re still getting hit. What that does is shake your head, which is the one thing you really don’t want to happen. I’ve thought this for a long time and a lot of people agree with me, but unfortunately not the ones who make the rules. If it was down to me, I wouldn’t even use head-guards for sparring. I think they do more harm than good even then.
A lot of the boys who started at the Repton around the same time as me I still see to this day. Among my group were: Billy Jobling, a great fighter who came out of the Isle of Dogs; Glenn Murphy,who became an actor on London’s Burning; my mate Tony Yeates, who came over to the Repton from the Fitzroy Lodge club, which is south of the river; and a guy called Tony Marchant, who ended up as a writer. We had some brilliant moments together, and you don’t keep people as friends for forty-odd years unless you have a special bond with them. For me it’s a kind of moral code that they all share – boxing taught them to be old-fashioned gentlemen.
When the club was originally founded, in 1884, it was more or less a missionary outpost for the Derbyshire public school it was named after. The idea was to come to the East End, which at that point was considered a dangerous slum, and impart Victorian discipline to the lawless inhabitants by teaching them the Marquess of Queensbury’s rules. Obviously there’s a paternalistic element to that, but paternalism is not necessarily a bad thing. Especially when it gives you tools you can use any way you want. It was no coincidence that so many of my mates from the Repton went on to succeed in other fields, because our time there gave us psychological resources we could fall back on for the rest of our lives.
In a way, the impact the Repton had on us was very similar to the one Anna Scher’s children’s theatre (which she started up the road in Islington in the late sixties) was having at around the same time on another bunch of unruly Londoners – Ray Burdis, Pauline Quirke, Phil Daniels, Perry Benson, Tony London, Kathy Burke – many of whom are still my mates to this day. Anna would take kids who were maybe lacking a direction in life and getting in a little bit of trouble and give them something creative to focus on. The only difference was that she was doing it from a left-wing political perspective, which wouldn’t have got you very far in the fight game.
Obviously people tend to think of a boxing club as a violent place, and the Repton’s Latin motto, ‘Non Viscera, Non Gloria’ (‘NoGuts, No Glory’), would do nothing to change their mind. But the club crest doesn’t have a dove of peace with an olive branch in its mouth by accident, because one of the main things going there taught me was how to mix with a group of people as a unit, even as a community. Those who try to put boxing down as more brutal and less evolved than other pastimes have a hard time explaining away the fact that it was probably the first sport where there was no colour bar.
That’s not to say Jack Johnson aka ‘the Galveston Giant’ had an easy time of it after becoming the first African-American world heavyweight champion
If you haven’t got a head-guard on, you can see everything. The most fundamental technique in boxing as far as I’m concerned is the slip and miss, which is the way you pull your head inside or outside your opponent’s punches. Once you’ve put your head-guard on, you may have covered your brow and your chin, but at the same time you’re a bigger target, so even when you slip, you’re still getting hit. What that does is shake your head, which is the one thing you really don’t want to happen. I’ve thought this for a long time and a lot of people agree with me, but unfortunately not the ones who make the rules. If it was down to me, I wouldn’t even use head-guards for sparring. I think they do more harm than good even then.
A lot of the boys who started at the Repton around the same time as me I still see to this day. Among my group were: Billy Jobling, a great fighter who came out of the Isle of Dogs; Glenn Murphy,who became an actor on London’s Burning; my mate Tony Yeates, who came over to the Repton from the Fitzroy Lodge club, which is south of the river; and a guy called Tony Marchant, who ended up as a writer. We had some brilliant moments together, and you don’t keep people as friends for forty-odd years unless you have a special bond with them. For me it’s a kind of moral code that they all share – boxing taught them to be old-fashioned gentlemen.
When the club was originally founded, in 1884, it was more or less a missionary outpost for the Derbyshire public school it was named after. The idea was to come to the East End, which at that point was considered a dangerous slum, and impart Victorian discipline to the lawless inhabitants by teaching them the Marquess of Queensbury’s rules. Obviously there’s a paternalistic element to that, but paternalism is not necessarily a bad thing. Especially when it gives you tools you can use any way you want. It was no coincidence that so many of my mates from the Repton went on to succeed in other fields, because our time there gave us psychological resources we could fall back on for the rest of our lives.
In a way, the impact the Repton had on us was very similar to the one Anna Scher’s children’s theatre (which she started up the road in Islington in the late sixties) was having at around the same time on another bunch of unruly Londoners – Ray Burdis, Pauline Quirke, Phil Daniels, Perry Benson, Tony London, Kathy Burke – many of whom are still my mates to this day. Anna would take kids who were maybe lacking a direction in life and getting in a little bit of trouble and give them something creative to focus on. The only difference was that she was doing it from a left-wing political perspective, which wouldn’t have got you very far in the fight game.
Obviously people tend to think of a boxing club as a violent place, and the Repton’s Latin motto, ‘Non Viscera, Non Gloria’ (‘NoGuts, No Glory’), would do nothing to change their mind. But the club crest doesn’t have a dove of peace with an olive branch in its mouth by accident, because one of the main things going there taught me was how to mix with a group of people as a unit, even as a community. Those who try to put boxing down as more brutal and less evolved than other pastimes have a hard time explaining away the fact that it was probably the first sport where there was no colour bar.
That’s not to say Jack Johnson aka ‘the Galveston Giant’ had an easy time of it after becoming the first African-American world heavyweight champion
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