The Great White Hopes (3 page)

The 14-year-old McLaglen dearly wanted to follow him, but his father forbade it. McLaglen, who captained the Tower Hamlets schools’ football team, was already tall and looked older than his years. He ran away from home, lied about his age and joined the Life Guards, in the anticipation of being sent to the war. The attestation book of the 1st Life Guards for this period records that he enlisted on 30 July 1901. He gave his age as 19, his trade as engineer, and claimed to have been born in Stepney, London. His complexion was dark and his eyes were hazel.

To his chagrin, Trooper McLaglen, instead of fighting the Boers, found himself spending most of his time on guard duty outside Windsor Castle. It was here that he first learnt to box and took part in his regimental heavyweight championships, fighting grown men when he was only 15 or 16.

For a future professional fighter McLaglen had joined the Army at just the right time. The first independent Army championships had been held only seven years earlier, in 1894. In the following year the sport was given an enormous fillip when Field Marshal Lord Wolsey, the Commander-in-Chief of all Britain’s armed forces, attended the Guards’ boxing competition at Chelsea Barracks and was so impressed by the fighting spirit he saw in the ring there that he declared that in future he wanted to see every soldier a boxer.

Wolsey was just the man to be impressed by a public display of aggression. As a young subaltern he had decided that the fastest, if riskiest, way to promotion was to place himself in harm’s way at every conceivable opportunity. At a speech at the Brigade of Guards’ championships in 1899, before a wildly cheering audience, he stressed the importance of boxing for soldiers: ‘It is conducive to endurance and pluck, and makes men of them – the sort of men who alone can defend us against our foes.’

Efforts to make Army boxing socially acceptable, however, were less successful. When Colonel G.M. Fox, Inspector of Gymnasia at Aldershot, invited a number of ladies to attend the Army finals, the first contest they witnessed was such a bloody one that they swept out en masse, and the experiment was not repeated. But Wolsey’s imprimatur was all that the sport needed in military circles. Officers everywhere did their best to accede to the field marshal’s expressed wish, and placed boxing high on the agenda of training exercises. By 1900, there were 137 entries for the Army championships for other ranks. The officers had their own less-well-supported championships. In the championships for privates and NCOs, entries included seventeen sailors and a number of members of the part-time militia, an early form of the Territorial Army. They were allowed to enter because many of the militia were on standby to leave their civilian occupations to be shipped to South Africa.

The standard in Army boxing was quite high at this time. In one championship final, Private Ham of the Ninth Lancers, a former professional who had boxed under the name of the Bermondsey Boy, was outpointed over three rounds by Sergeant Collins of the Guards. Afterwards Ham protested indignantly that he could not get going in the limited time provided. With the connivance of his officers and the tacit approval of Lord Wolsey and the War Office, the soldiers were rematched over ten rounds at the National Sporting Club. This time Private Ham won.

Like many later boxers, McLaglen found that boxing was a passport to a relatively easy life in the Army. He was excused many of the fatigues that were the lot of his less athletic comrades. He was still only a boy, fighting men, and it was during this period that he began to accumulate some of the battered features which were to serve him well as a ‘heavy’ in his later Hollywood pictures.

The Boer War ended in 1902 without having needed McLaglen’s services. After three years of home soldiering, bored and disillusioned and still, at 17, too young to serve, he was at last discovered by his father, who promptly informed the authorities that his wayward boy was still under age and would have to be discharged immediately. The Life Guards agreed and McLaglen was released. The official reason given was ‘Discharged in consequence of him having made a misstatement as to his age on enlistment’. McLaglen’s service conduct summary was adjudged to have been very good.

Army service had not made McLaglen lose his taste for adventure. ‘By this time, my brothers, all of whom were as tall as I, had scattered all over the world,’ he recounted in a later newspaper interview. ‘I decided I wanted to go to Canada.’

When he was 18, McLaglen crossed the Atlantic steerage and found work as a farmhand at ten dollars a month in Ontario in south-eastern Canada. He had not been there long when he heard of a silver strike at Cobalt, not too far away. McLaglen abandoned the farm at once and joined in the rush. Only seven years had passed since the famous Klondike gold rush in the Yukon had made wealthy men of some itinerants.

The silver had been discovered in 1903 when two men employed to find suitable timber for the construction of a railway line had instead discovered rocks containing metallic flakes as they scouted the edges of a remote lake. They sent samples of the rocks to be analysed and were told that the gleaming flakes were silver, assaying 4,000 ounces to the ton.

In the following year the two pioneers established a silver mine in the region. Any attempts they might have entertained of keeping their discovery to themselves were thwarted when a third man, a blacksmith called LaRose, also stumbled across the secret. Mining lore has it that one day, while working, he threw his heavy hammer at a fox which was annoying him. The hammer missed the animal but knocked a lump out of a piece of rock, disclosing signs of silver deposits. Whatever the truth of this, by 1904 it was known that there was silver in large and valuable quantities in the region of Lake Timiskaming. Even official reports emerging from the area were using such emotive descriptions as ‘pieces of native silver as big as stove lids or cannon balls lying on the ground’.

It was essential to get there before the lakes and rivers froze over and isolated the region for the winter. There was a newly constructed railway line heading northwards from Toronto, but the majority of prospectors came through the passages between the hills in great convoys of humanity, packers carrying their equipment on dog sledges at ten cents a pound, while the hopeful fortune-hunters trudged behind. McLaglen was among the hundreds of hopefuls who arrived among the first wave.

There was nothing in the region but snow, ice and flat rock. Even so, the mining camp sprung up on every level surface that could be found. Cobalt, so named for the mineral found lying interleaved with the silver deposits in the ground, was known as that most cherished of institutions, a ‘poor man’s mining camp’, because the silver veins lay so close to the surface, it could be mined with a pickaxe and shovel. A historian described the first shipments out as ‘slabs of native metal stripped off the walls of the vein like boards from a barn’.

McLaglen joined up with several other prospectors and started digging some way from the centre of the region. Although he was still only 19, he had achieved his full growth, being a muscular 6ft 3in at a weight of just under 14 stone, and was fully able to hold his own with his companions at digging or fighting off potential claim-jumpers.

For months they toiled under conditions of great hardship. Eventually they found silver and started to pile it up. It was then that McLaglen encountered his first great setback. It was discovered that he had no right to the claim. He was always vague about the exact details. The most that he would later ever say about the event was, ‘I was deliberately cheated out of my share of the silver after I had worked a year. We had found the ore but I had failed to sign certain papers that would have entitled me to my share.’

Whether or not McLaglen was defrauded by his partners is uncertain, although they would have been brave men to have attempted to cheat such a husky youngster. It is more likely that he fell foul of mining bureaucracy. A regulation was being widely enforced whereby a valuable mineral had to be found on the site before a claim could be registered. Many miners found that their claims did not belong to them because they had registered them before striking lucky, and this was probably McLaglen’s misfortune.

Whatever the cause, in 1905 the disillusioned 19-year-old was broke and in urgent need of money. For shelter he built himself a wooden shack on the shores of Lake Timiskaming. By this time Cobalt had become a boom town. Major mining companies and syndicates were moving in to work alongside the fortune-hunters. At its peak, 10,000 people were living in the town.

The tough miners were in urgent need of forms of relaxation on which to spend the fortunes some of them were accruing almost overnight. Saloons and brothels flourished, taking in thousands of dollars a week. One popular form of entertainment was the arrival of battered but experienced professional boxers and wrestlers, willing to take on all comers for a price. These were familiar sights in mining camps.

The pioneer in this field had been the veteran Australian heavyweight Frank Slavin. A few years earlier he had toured the mines of the Klondike gold rush in Alaska, interspersing his own efforts at prospecting with fighting before enthusiastic crowds for enough money for another grubstake. Slavin was past 40 when in 1902 he had engaged in his last mining-camp bout, and his example had opened the door for many others.

In McLaglen’s case it was a professional wrestler who arrived at the mining camp. The down-and-out McLaglen accepted the man’s challenge and defeated him before a large audience of miners. He won only a few dollars, but many of the miners had bet on him to win, a sign that the young giant already had something of a reputation as a fighter. After McLaglen’s success, the winning punters passed the hat for him, and he ended up with almost $500, more money than he had ever seen before.

For a man of his strength and size, fighting seemed an easier option than mining. McLaglen took the decision to become a professional – challenging anyone in the area at wrestling or fighting, either with the gloves or bare fists. Among the tough but untutored prospectors he proved a real handful, taking a share of the gate money for his bouts from any local entrepreneur who cared to make the arrangements.

Things were going so well that McLaglen sent for his brother Fred, the sibling who had fired his incipient wanderlust by going off to fight the Boers. By this time Fred had engaged in a few boxing matches himself and was able to impart such skills as he had to his brother and to act as his sparring partner. It was during this period that McLaglen developed his main training exercise. He would saw logs of wood at chest-height for long periods. He never became a skilful boxer, but he was strong and his exercise routines helped him to develop a fair right-hand punch. He also enjoyed boxing. ‘I always loved the flicker of the gloves,’ he once reminisced, ‘the tap of feet on the canvas, the snort of breath as the punches beat home.’

For a time, he and Fred toured the thriving mining areas, challenging all comers at boxing or wrestling. When no one accepted their challenges they put on exhibitions of both sports. Fred soon tired of the rough-and-ready conditions of Ontario and decided to try his luck further south, in the USA, where he would fight as Fred McKay. Before he left, he saw McLaglen fixed up as a professional wrestler with a touring circus, where the young man accepted challenges from the audience, paying twenty-five dollars to anyone who could last three rounds with him. McLaglen’s main venue was the Happy Land Park in Winnipeg. Here his most notorious and highly publicised stunt was to defeat an entire football team in the ring, taking its members on one at a time.

This job did not pay very well, and although it got him away from the dangers and hardships of the mining camps McLaglen soon became fed up with it. He quite liked the ambience and the relatively easy way of show-business life, but aspired to something a little higher up the evolutionary scale than the small circus with its cowed animal acts and unfunny slapstick clowns. At some time during this period he worked as a barman, then as a railway policeman driving hobos away from the sidings and dissuading them from ‘riding the rods’.

Next, with a partner called Hume Duvel, he put together a physical culture and strongman act that entailed being clad in silver paint and involved displays of muscle-flexing and strength, including the lifting of impressive weights which were perhaps not quite as heavy as they looked. McLaglen’s speciality at this point, and one he was rather proud of, was to lie in a wrestler’s bridge on the stage with an anvil balanced on his chest, while his partner used a sledgehammer to break a rock placed on top of the anvil. The new act, calling itself the Great Romanos, was almost immediately successful once they started looking for work.

The two of them were booked for a tour of the Pantages circuit. This was a chain of vaudeville theatres running down the Pacific coast of the USA and Canada. When McLaglen joined it, the circuit had only been in operation for four or five years, but it had a good reputation. It was definitely to be preferred to the notorious ‘Death Trail’, another chain of Pacific seaboard halls, or, even worse, the Shitty circuit, as the underfunded east-coast Sheedy circuit was known to artistes unfortunate enough to be booked on it.

On the Pantages circuit there were between eight and ten acts on a typical bill, including acrobats, contortionists, comics, singers, dancers and speciality performers. Admission cost ten cents. Shows seldom lasted more than an hour, and in order to make the maximum amount of money the next audience was shoehorned in just as the last one departed.

The Great Romanos was a so-called dumb act, meaning that the protagonists did not speak. Usually they were in the lowly regarded first or last positions on the bill, sometimes known as ‘walk-in’ or ‘walk-out’ acts, as spectators either arrived or departed during their performances. These spots notoriously went to the strongman and alley-oop, or acrobatic, artistes. They performed in front of the curtains while the scenery was set for the more expensive ‘flash acts’ involving a large number of performers. Bottom-of-the-bill acts like McLaglen’s were lucky to earn twenty dollars a week and to work for thirty weeks in the year.