Henry Cooper (6 page)

Such was the frequency of these events that Londoners, particularly children, became used to them very quickly. When the second phase of the V-weapon attack started, though, the difference was immediately clear. The V2, in effect the grandfather of the Saturn rocket, was a truly terrifying weapon, so powerful that it could destroy a city block, and not even hard-bitten and bloody-minded Londoners could think up a nickname for it. Even its inventor, Werner von Braun, was awed by it; he is alleged to have said: ‘The only thing wrong with this is that it is being fired at the wrong planet.’

For children, providing they survived, the V-weapon raids were something of an adventure, and served very well to harden them up. Those who came through the bombing raids developed a carapace of callousness that was the simple and understandable result of being witness to total war. Henry’s reaction was typical:

But by then the end of the war was in sight and the only evidence of enemy activity was the occasional earthquake thump of a V2. All that the Cooper household needed, particularly an exhausted Lily, was the safe return of Henry senior, which happened in late 1944.

So the family had survived intact, which was much more than could be said for some, including many neighbours and, as the Allies punched towards Germany, the thoughts of the twins developed about some more peaceful activities.

All three brothers had always been sporty. Bernard, of a lighter build, preferred athletics, whereas the twins both excelled at football and even cricket, but it was boxing that really interested them. They had never seen a match, except in the cinema, but there was definitely something about it that they liked.

Henry senior had no objection – one of the first things he did when he returned from the war, proudly wearing his XIV Army bush hat, was to spar with his sons on his knees in the family living room. Boxing was as deep-rooted in the culture then as football is now and, having boxed in the Army first time around, he was all for it.

T
he Bellingham Boxing Club met weekly in the British Legion Hall and, drawing as it did entirely from the local community, had no shortage of talent spotters. One of these was a neighbour of the Cooper family, a fireman, Robert Hill. He had noticed the nine-year-old twins sparring in the street, football socks wrapped around their fists, and saw something in them that rather interested him; he had himself boxed for the Fire Brigade and therefore knew of what he spoke. He approached Henry senior and asked him if he would be prepared to allow his twins to join the boxing club. He was so convinced that these two were serious prospects that he undertook to pay their subscriptions for the first year.

Unsurprisingly, the club was healthily oversubscribed; the generation of youths who had observed the war but
who were too young to have taken part in it was to be an aggressive one, so there was a small delay before both the twins were able to attend, which caused some anxiety in the Cooper household. There were other clubs, of course – every neighbourhood had one – but the twins were inseparable and emotionally, if not physically, joined at the hip.

The purpose of the boxing club was primarily to teach the youngsters three things: training, the atmosphere of the gym and the rudiments of the ring. The object was not to make the boys aggressive (teenage boys are aggressive enough without that), rather it was to give them the discipline to carry on, as the attrition rate in amateur boxing is notoriously high.

The training rotation was relatively strict, even for young teenagers – running, skipping, bag work and the speedball – and the methods of training had been handed down in the oral tradition, for there were few textbooks. The issue of diet was not a matter of particular scientific interest, particularly straight after the war and anyway, food rationing, in force until 1951, ensured that there were few unsuitably tempting items on offer to distract the ambitious athlete. Decent food could only really be discussed in the abstract.

Of course, at the most junior level, there was hardly any actual fighting done at all; Henry and George did not actually hit anyone seriously for some time, but they found the very fact of being fully fit satisfying enough to justify carrying on. They saw in boxing what Robert Hill had hoped they would and the Bellingham trainer, Matt Wells, had, in his time been British lightweight champion, so they
were in good hands. It was not all harmony at Bellingham, though; early on in their time there, one of the junior trainers was asked to leave, for a reason which Henry blandly described to me as being the usual thing’.

At 15, as soon as they left school, the twins joined the Eltham and District Amateur Boxing Club and were thus now in the care of head trainer George Page, who would act as both their trainer and mentor for the remainder of their civilian amateur careers. If anything, according to Henry, the casualty rate at Eltham was even higher:

What the amateur ring really taught was an inner core of discipline, the ability to successfully manage anger, a thing that generations of adolescents, then as now, have usually found quite difficult to do. ‘It’s good to have a training routine which provides a discipline quite aside from the obvious physical improvements,’ says Henry. ‘But where boxing is chiefly character building is in the ring, where no kid can afford to lose his temper. If he does, nine times out of ten he’ll be punished more. You go berserk and bonk! – your opponent is just picking you off.’

The difference between youthful anger and controlled
aggression is very large indeed. The discipline needed to bang a left jab into another boy’s face is not the same emotion as wishing to knock him over in the street. The narrow focus of the ring – that was a good punch, that was not – served to bring on a vast respect for the technical aspects of boxing itself, as opposed to a dislike or disrespect for the opponent, and success or failure would stem from there. Indeed, part of the ‘psyching out’ procedures of the professional ring really revolved about making the opponent angry as well as scared.

Henry enjoyed Eltham; both he and George were working hard at physically arduous jobs and the demands of regular training were even harder, so logically they were supremely fit, but Henry needed an indication of whether he was really temperamentally suited to boxing as a potential living; in 1951 he got it when he beat a PC Trevillion, then the national police champion at his weight (light heavy) in a four-round contest. He won the fight with his left jab, as he would so many, and the audience was appreciative.

These amateur fights carried prizes with them but, of course, no money. The prizes were typically things of some domestic utility: canteens of cutlery, toasters, coffee percolators and so forth. This was useful as Christmas approached, as the extended family was invited round to share the fruits of the twins’ labours.

This was fine, but they had to work, too. They had left school in 1949 with a joint sigh of relief in order to earn a living and make a useful contribution to the household economy. Their choice of work was governed by a simple imperative: money. Neither had any particular ambition, save to earn as much as possible in order to make life easier
for Lily as well as carry on their boxing – these two targets rather defined them. Initially they found that they could earn 9d (about 4p) an hour as labourers, stacking sheet metal for a firm called Burnham’s in nearby Sydenham – not very good for the hands.

Research revealed that the wages at Sydenham Gasworks, from where they had carried sacks of coal to Bellingham during the war, the wages were a halfpenny an hour better, and so they promptly tried that. But even higher wages were available quite locally, on Bellingham Estate itself, where a builder was allegedly paying 10½d (just under 5p) an hour. It was dangerous roofing work, 60 feet up, with no harness. It was during this time at Bellingham that Henry had a nasty accident, which would revisit him in later life. While attempting to ride a bicycle with a chimney pot under his arm, he fell off and broke his left elbow. It was, of course, extraordinarily painful, but he needed to work. Unfortunately, there was a three-month waiting list at the local hospital, so the elbow was simply bandaged and he merely rested it a little, until the pain receded, but it later transpired that a chip of bone had been knocked off it and worked its way into the joint. It would stay there as well, slowly being ground down to a fine powder, both by the heavy manual labour he was doing as well as the increasingly arduous work in the gym.

When the twins discovered that the 10½d an hour was actually a fiction (it turned out to be 10d), they left in high dudgeon. Ultimately, their search for useful employment came as a direct result of their membership of the Eltham club; George Page had a good friend called Reg Reynolds, who ran a successful plastering contractor’s business. It is a
trade that George would never leave; better still, much later on, Reynolds would become his father-in-law. So, finally they had found a business that they could learn, and that would actually start to financially support them. Settled at last, they concentrated on their boxing to the exclusion of almost everything else.

The trade was quite good for them; Henry plastered with his left hand, George with his right and the effort required to mix a fair-sized load was considerable. Even the arm movements developed the right muscles so, coupled with the gym work, both boys quickly became extraordinarily fit.

But there was some debate as to whether he could go to Helsinki for the 1952 Olympics, to represent Britain at light heavyweight division; he was the Amateur Boxing Association (ABA) champion and had been since April, when he had outpointed Joe MacLean in the final, but the six weeks loss of earnings, perhaps £25, which would be the result, was economically important to the Cooper household at Farmstead Road. If Henry didn’t go, then there were plenty of boxers who could. In the end Lily simply increased her work rate and, by dint of even more charlady work, financed the gap.

The Helsinki Olympics had originally been scheduled to take place in the late summer of 1940, while Henry and George were still living in Lancing, and the Olympic village really dated from then. The British boxing team had high expectations, in fact, and had every reason to be optimistic, but the boxing was to be dominated by America.

The 1952 Olympics were extremely political, taking place as they did on the borders of the Soviet Union; not only was the Korean War in full swing, there was a particular local
issue. Twelve years before, the Red Army had invaded Finland without declaring war, and the memories of that action were still fresh in the minds of the locals. As a result, security for the USSR contingent was strict, on the Soviet side to prevent defections and on the Finnish side to protect the athletes from being attacked, as the Finns had no reason to love its huge Eastern neighbour. It made for a rather tense Games. Henry’s first bout was scratched, propelling him forward, but in the second round he came up against the Russian Anatoli Perov, who, of course, he had never met, for security reasons, and who beat him on a 2:1 split decision. Two out of the three judges were from Warsaw Pact countries, one from France.

Henry’s defeat gave him plenty of time to watch the Games and even though he had no spending money to speak of he managed to enjoy himself and consider the prospect of his upcoming National Service as well as a rather bigger decision: the idea of turning professional.

He witnessed two future opponents, and the contrast between them was huge and certainly did not suggest to Henry that he would ever meet either of them, let alone that they would meet each other. The first was Floyd Patterson, at 17 one of the youngest competitors at the entire Games, fighting at middleweight. He won the gold medal and turned professional upon his return to New York. The second was a large and ungainly Swede, Ingemar Johansson, who put up such a lacklustre performance in the heavyweight division that he was thrown out of the competition for not trying. Given the large numbers of Swedes in the audience, this was embarrassing, to say the least, however much it may have amused the Finns.
Patterson, fast and flashy, had impressed, but Johansson had definitely not.

Before the Games Henry had had an interesting encounter with J.T. Hulls, the journalist who covered amateur boxing for the
Evening News
. It was Hulls’s habit to visit the Cooper household for a general natter every Sunday and inevitably the subject of turning professional would arise. Hulls’s advice was simple and sage: ‘There is only one man to manage you – Jim Wicks.’

Hulls knew his business; he was one of the most knowledgeable of writers and, as Henry would find out, extremely well connected. Neither Henry nor George knew Wicks, who actually lived in Eltham – if he had ever been to the club they had not seen him. He hadn’t, in fact, as it was Wicks’s general expectation that people would come to him. He was right: they did.

The business of turning professional can be a tricky one. BBBC rules mandated that a fighter had to have a manager of record, but it was well known that these men varied widely in terms of their professionalism and honesty. A poor choice of manager can shorten a boxer’s career just as surely as a detached retina, as many have discovered. The twins and George Page accordingly made their way to Footscray Road, Eltham, where this apparent paragon of virtue lived. Hulls had arranged the meeting. They were initially rather surprised. ‘…we didn’t know quite what to expect,’ says Henry. ‘I suppose we had visions of a boxing manager looking something like Noel Coward, with a cigarette holder and a silk dressing gown. But the Wickses seemed such a homely pair…’

Of particular concern to the twins was timing, for both Henry and George were scheduled to join the Ordnance Corps for their spell in uniform in the late summer of 1952, straight after Helsinki. Should they turn pro before or after National Service? Wicks’s counsel was straightforward, Henry remembers: ‘“If you go into the Army as professionals, you won’t get any concessions,” he told us. “If you box for them as amateurs, you’ll go here, there and everywhere. As a pro you wouldn’t be allowed to box for them”.’

It was good advice, as things transpired. Accordingly, Henry and George both stayed amateur and reported for duty at Royal Army Ordnance Corps (RAOC) depot at Blackdown Barracks outside Aldershot within a few days of Henry’s return from Helsinki.

Originally, when offered a choice of National Service destination, both brothers had opted for the Irish Guards; at 6ft 2in, they were well nigh perfect. And as Henry recalls: ‘Well, we were both tall, and the Irish Guards had never won the Army boxing championship.’

But they were cunningly diverted from their original purpose. At a boxing tournament before the Olympics a Captain Eastlake had introduced himself. Eastlake was basically the talent scout for the 4th Battalion RAOC, a unit that was the main reason why the Irish Guards had done so badly. The 4th was known as the ‘boxers’ battalion’ and with good reason. While it had a serious military function, which included the potential for dangerous overseas service in Korea, it had also established a rather proud tradition of the fistic art. Eastlake persuaded the twins to switch their allegiance – they did not regret it.

After six weeks’ basic training – ‘square bashing’ – at Blackdown, they were dispatched to take a driving course, after which they were inducted into the battalion proper. ‘I did very little soldiering, I must confess,’ says Henry. ‘Every morning after parade it was “boxers – fall out”. Straight to the gym…’