Foreigners (14 page)

Turpin did make one investment with his money, but it
was hardly one which made George Middleton feel any
sense of comfort. In the autumn of 1952, Turpin went into
partnership with Leslie Salts, and the two men paid £7,500
each and together purchased a nine-bedroom hotel set on
fifteen acres of land situated on a windswept, and somewhat
isolated, headland just outside of the town of
Llandudno in North Wales. Originally constructed as the
Telegraph Inn, from where messages were relayed to
Holyhead and Liverpool announcing the impending arrival
of ships, it had later been rebuilt as the Summit Hotel and
had served as the bar for those who used the Great Orme
Golf Club. The golf course had closed in 1939 and become
a sheep farm, while the hotel had been allowed to languish
and fall into disrepair. The two men had the idea of transforming
the hotel, which during the war had been requisitioned
by the RAF and utilised as a temporary radar station,
into an international sporting centre and tourist attraction
and cashing in on the seaside trade. Neither man could
have been thinking too clearly, for not only was there little
in the way of public transport to the venue, known locally
as the Great Orme complex, there was just one, woefully
inadequate, telephone line. The view from the summit was
undoubtedly panoramic, and the steep slopes flowed down
from the hotel on all sides like an attractive green cape.
But, in truth, the place offered the visitor little more than
a laborious climb on foot, or an ascent in a lumbering tram,
to the view. The hotel still sprouted a dense forest of aerials
and antennas from its signalling days, and the building
appeared to be permanently in transition. Visitors quickly
surveyed the rolling hills, wide open sea, and the sumptuous
scenery, before realising that it was time to return to
Llandudno and, of course, the only way to leave the Great
Orme was to descend on foot or by the same inelegant
tram. George Middleton had little faith in Turpin's investment,
and he had, by this time, conducted a private investigation
into Leslie Salts and his business practices, and
uncovered a whole series of wrongdoings. Once again he
had made clear his reservations to Turpin, but Turpin's
mind was made up.

The Great Orme complex opened on Easter Monday
1953 in a blaze of publicity, with telegrams of good luck
and congratulations from British sporting heroes such as
Dennis Compton and the boxer Freddie Mills; even Sugar
Ray Robinson sent a telegram to his old adversary. Turpin's
sister Joan and her bricklayer husband, John Beston, were
put in charge of the complex, but they had no experience
of running such an enterprise and the place was soon
leaking money. The situation was not helped by Turpin's
habit of turning up with friends from London or the
Midlands and insisting that nobody should pay any bills.
The Welsh boxing champion Jimmy Wilde, who between
1916 and 1923 held the world flyweight title, and who was
popularly known as 'the ghost with a hammer in his hand',
opened Randy's Bar at the centre. However, despite Turpin
announcing that he would be spending a good deal of his
time at the centre training for his next fight, in the hope
that the fee-paying British public might therefore be
persuaded to put their hands into their pockets and pay
to see him going through his paces, money continued to
flow out of, as opposed to into, the venture. An advertisement
for the Great Orme Holiday Centre in a 1953
programme for one of Turpin's fights suggests the scale
of Salts' and Turpin's ambition. 'Visit Randy's Bar. Fully
Licensed. The most unusual bar in Britain! Snack bar,
Music, Sports, Exhibitions, Miniature Railway, Little
Theatre. See the British Crown Jewels in replica.' The
bottom of the advertisement proudly reads 'Owned by
Leslie T. Salts and Randolph Turpin (the famous boxer)',
and just in case one is still unsure, there are two large
headshots of both men smiling intently. However, Turpin
was soon asking George Middleton for a loan, and then
he turned to Jack Solomons, and although both men were
alarmed by Turpin's spending they agreed to help him out
knowing full well that there was little point in talking
further to the boxer about his cavalier attitude to money.

In the early summer of 1953, the two biggest British
news stories were the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II,
and the triumphant ascent of Mount Everest by a British
expedition led by a New Zealand mountaineer, Edmund
Hillary, and his Nepalese guide, Sherpa Tensing Norkay.
Most people were also excited because television, or the
'goggle-box', had become the latest status symbol and the
new invention was beginning to change family and social
life. However, the vast majority of the British public still
got their 'visual' news from the cinema, and the third story
that would have gripped British audiences at cinemas up
and down the country during the summer of 1953 was the
news of Randolph Turpin's triumph over the Frenchman
Charles Humez before a sell-out crowd of 54,000 at White
City Stadium, London, in the final elimination bout for
the now vacant world middleweight crown. Despite having
trouble making the weight, Turpin comprehensively
outpointed Humez, but not before disappointing a huge
number of his own fans with his lacklustre performance.
Everybody in Britain knew that Turpin carried a potential
knockout punch in both hands, yet for much of the
fight he had done little more than flick out timid left
jabs, much to the audible dismay of the crowd. Nevertheless,
he had beaten Humez, and Turpin would now be
returning to New York City, this time to fight the Hawaiian
American Carl 'Bobo' Olsen for the undisputed world title
in a bout that most boxing cognoscenti confidently
expected Turpin to win. Two years after his close rematch
with Robinson, Turpin and his party once again found
themselves sailing across the Atlantic Ocean towards a
New York City that Turpin claimed he was eager to revisit.
He told his brothers that he missed the twenty-four-hour
excitement of the city, and the attention that he had been
paid, but he did not confess to them his ambivalence
about having to rekindle his association with Miss Adele
Daniels.

Shortly after Turpin's arrival in New York City in
October 1953, it soon became clear that, unlike his previous
visit in the summer of 1951, when Turpin at least maintained
the appearance of being eager to train for the
Robinson rematch, this time he was preoccupied and disinterested
in applying himself to the task at hand. Frequently
absent from the training camp that George Middleton had
established in the Catskill Mountains, and distant and
sometimes abrasive to those who tried to talk with him,
Turpin alienated the press, his camp, and particularly his
brothers. It was obvious that Turpin had no desire to fight
Carl 'Bobo' Olsen, nor did he wish to be in the United
States and away from 'home', and his sulking and temper
tantrums quickly wore on everybody's nerves. On the night
of the world title fight the inevitable ensued, and what
should have been a night of glory for Randolph Turpin
and British boxing ended ignominiously with a humiliating
defeat at Madison Square Garden. Untrained and out of
condition, Turpin nevertheless began strongly enough,
taking the first three rounds against Olsen, but in the
fourth he suffered a bad cut under his eye. For the remainder
of the fight he was off-balance and he constantly soaked
up punishment, and in both the ninth and tenth rounds
an ordinary-looking Olsen pummelled him to the canvas.
Clearly Turpin's mind was elsewhere, and the sell-out crowd
witnessed the British middleweight take a terrible pounding
before losing a unanimous points decision.

So badly was Turpin beaten that, back at his hotel, his
seconds covered him in ice cubes and wrapped him in a
bed sheet in order to reduce the multiple swellings. Turpin
knew that he had let himself and others down, but he was
acting as though he could not care less. 'If I had been in
my natural mental state,' said Turpin, 'I could have stopped
him about the eighth round.' Nobody said anything in reply.
Boxing News
summed up the mood of the times: 'If ever a
fighter went into the ring mentally unprepared it was Turpin.
The undeniable fact is that Turpin has gone back a long
way. He has things on his mind more important than boxing
and when that happens a fighter has "had it", to use a wellunderstood
expression.' Britain's
Daily Sketch
, under a headline
that blared 'He's let us down!', seemed to be clear about
what had gone wrong. 'Now it has been exposed – the
myth of the boxer who can train himself. Randolph Turpin
made a pathetically heroic effort to justify his unorthodoxy
in the Madison Square Garden ring last night.' Turpin's
fans on both sides of the Atlantic were clearly dismayed
by the fighter's behaviour both before, and during, the fight.
But things were about to deteriorate even further.

On the morning of 2 November, 1953, the day before
Turpin was due to board the
Queen Mary
for the return
journey to England, the 'Leamington Licker' was arrested
by New York City police officers in a milk bar opposite
the Hotel Edison on West 47th Street. He was listening
to the jukebox when the police stormed in and handcuffed
him and then took him to the Seventh Precinct for
processing. Shortly thereafter, Turpin appeared at the
Upper Manhattan Magistrates' Court to answer a serious
charge which had been brought against him by a Miss
Adele Daniels, who was described in the court papers as
a 'Negro Clerk in the State Department of Labor'. Miss
Daniels testified that her relationship with Randolph
Turpin had begun two years earlier when the fighter was
in New York for his rematch with Sugar Ray Robinson,
and she insisted that the boxer had promised to marry her.
In the two-year interim she asserted that the couple had
exchanged many love letters and were planning a shared
future, and that when Turpin had recently returned to
New York for the fight with Olsen their relationship had
picked up again from where it had left off. However, she
claimed that Turpin had changed, and that even before the
fight, when he should have been in the Catskill Mountains
at his training camp, this newly 'troubled' Turpin was
spending time with her at her apartment on Riverside Drive
at 125th Street in Harlem, but she grew to be frightened
of him. She alleged that Turpin had assaulted her on a
number of occasions, kicking her and striking her around
the face. In fact, after the Olsen contest, in which the
British fighter had been badly beaten and was in need of
attention, Miss Daniels claimed to have 'loyally nursed
him' and in return for her troubles she was again beaten
and kicked by this 'maniacal and dangerous person', so
much so that for a short while the left side of her face
had suffered temporary paralysis. Miss Daniels' lawyer, Mr
J. Roland Sala, wanted Turpin held in custody so that he
might be properly examined, for Sala claimed that Turpin
was 'definitely mentally ill, psychopathologically'. He
continued: 'This man is bestially primitive.'

Turpin's lawyer, Saul Straus, argued that if Miss Daniels
had received the beatings that she claimed to have done,
then there would be serious marks on her body. In fact,
there were none. George Middleton had already instructed
Turpin's lawyer that the key issue here was to get Turpin
on the boat to England, and so Straus arranged with the
judge for Turpin to be released into his custody with the
payment of a $10,000 bond, and a promise that Turpin
would eventually return to the United States for the full
hearing. In the meantime, Miss Adele Daniels withdrew
the assault charge, insisting that she had not been offered
money to do so, nor had she been threatened. Mr Sala
remained determined, and he made it clear that a civil suit
would soon be launched against Turpin, whom he described
as 'anti-American'. He continued, claiming that Turpin
'should be everlastingly grateful to our American system
of democracy – a system he has maligned and defamed
openly and notoriously'. On the following day, the eight
members of Turpin's party were able to board the ship
and begin their journey back to England.

On his arrival home, Randolph Turpin was greeted by
scores of reporters who wanted to know the full story of
what had transpired but, at least initially, Turpin was reluctant
to speak with them. News had already reached the
pressmen that Turpin had been temporarily banned by the
New York State Athletic Commission from fighting in the
United States, and this seemed to represent a serious professional
blow, but when Turpin eventually spoke he was keen
to play down the gravity of the situation. He confessed
to being shocked by Miss Daniels' charges, for she appeared
to him to be a quiet and friendly girl, but he admitted
that he had met her before the Sugar Ray Robinson fight
in New York, and confirmed that over the past two years
they had written to each other. He went on: 'We certainly
did discuss marriage but when I came out to the United
States the last time I told her it was over. I said, "Forget
about me."' But Turpin could not keep his story straight.
Sometimes he claimed that she had wanted to come back
to England with him, and that's why she brought the charge.
On other occasions he denied ever having spoken to her
about marriage. However, what was undeniable was the
fact that his fractious disputes with Miss Daniels had
contributed to his lamentable mental state and ultimately
to his losing the Carl 'Bobo' Olsen fight so disastrously.
Even more disturbingly, the charges that Adele Daniels had
levelled against him were, to those who knew of Turpin's
past, suspiciously similar to the charges which Mary Stack
had brought.

The
Empire News
was eager to get Adele Daniels' story,
and they ran it soon after Turpin's return. She declared
that she had 'enjoyed the confidence' of all in Turpin's
camp, including his manager and brothers, but it was just
Randy himself who had become difficult, strange and
moody. According to Miss Daniels, Turpin would often
snap at her, and she was continually taken aback by the
severity of his mood swings, but those within his camp
advised her to say nothing and not to challenge him.
Nevertheless, she insisted that she continued to worry about
him. 'I begged them to have him examined by a doctor
because I thought he was a sick man. I still do. After his
fight with Olsen he was worse.' Adele Daniels never
explained exactly what sort of sickness she imagined Turpin
to be suffering from, but she evidently regarded him as
being in the grip of some kind of mental breakdown. She
said that on their shopping trips together she would buy
the items, for Turpin had no idea of how expensive anything
was. On one of these trips, much to her surprise, he
purchased a crossbow. She also claimed that she had previously
sent Turpin a pair of 'I love you' nylons from New
York to England, for he insisted that he had promised his
sister, Joan, a present. Some time later she saw a press
photograph of Turpin leaving for New York and the Olsen
fight, with a girl by his side who was wearing the very
same 'I love you' nylons. When she challenged him as to
the identity of this girl, he maintained that she was nobody
and that things between himself and the girl had finished
a long time ago.