Читать книгу Freddie Foreman - The Godfather of British Crime - Freddie Foreman - Страница 11

The slogan before and during the war was: Your Country Needs You. Now that the war was over, you needed the country; I was young enough not to be disillusioned with the way the system worked and old enough to be aware that those with nothing got nothing. My four brothers, and our father before them in WWI, had been willing to lay down their lives for their country. When the war was over, though, they got very little in return. On being demobbed, you had the choice of either a Prince of Wales checked suit or a blue pin-striped suit and a gratuity of about £60 to £80.

Everybody you saw those days was dressed in the checked suit and I could sense some of the bitterness and resentment that accompanied their paltry reward. My brothers George, Wally, ’Erbie and Bert were only skilled at killing the enemy, so the jobs they were offered were quite lowly: digging trenches at the top of Northcote Road and building prefabricated houses, mostly made of asbestos. The boss didn’t like them, so they got the sack after two weeks.

My brothers Wally and George then put their money together and, with a little extra from my father’s meagre savings, bought a stall, and a horse and cart. They parked it on the corner of Princess Head, Battersea, and sold fruit and vegetables with a sideline in logging. I helped them, although I was still at school, and we went scavenging on bombsites, dragging out old rail sleepers, cutting them up with large cross-saws, then chopping them up into bundles to sell as firewood. I was in my element working with my brothers.

But a freezing winter and an impoverished neighbourhood did not make for good business, so George went back to work doing what he was used to in the navy. He shovelled coal off barges on to a conveyor belt in the Thames for Nine Elms power station. That was a terrible job, breathing in all the grime and dust in a hold full of coal, and the tough existence was etching lines into his face. He was a good-looking chap, with fair skin and blond hair, but he was ageing prematurely. There must have been a couple of kilos of coal dust in his lungs and he still suffers with his chest today.

The war had done nothing to dispel people’s mistrust of uniforms – those of coppers and authority in general. You trusted no one. Officers shot you in the First World War if you lost your nerve or were slow getting out of the trench and they, in turn, were executed by the soldiers. Shot in the back. My father told me about that. So, if someone came out of the army and saw someone thieving, they would look the other way as long as the victim wasn’t one of their own. That attitude was very prominent in the period after the war.

We had lived on the edge. A German bomb could have ended our existence at any moment, but in our youth we felt we were invincible. We were too busy enjoying the excitement and exhilaration of discovery – and Milky.

Milky Big Tits was a good sort. Big busted, with blonde hair down to her waist and nice long legs. Just the type of girl I always fancied. I was 14 and a virgin when I met her. Milky (her real name was Olive) was a couple of years older than me. She was brazen and adventurous. Nobody could wish for a better introduction to manhood than spending some sticky moments with a girl as eager to please as she was. ‘Catch me and I’m yours,’ she’d say. From time to time she would allow one or two other boys to catch her but she was physically able to resist our advances if she didn’t fancy the outcome.

Milky went beyond the call of duty. The more we indulged, the more she enjoyed it. It was a lot like the film Once Upon A Time In America! The backdrop to this nonsense was anything but romantic. We had a kiss and cuddle ending in a knee trembler against a brick wall within the compounds of a bombed-out school at Larkhall Lane, just around the corner from our old council flat in Wandsworth Road, which was being rebuilt.

Sharing these sexual encounters with mates extended Milky’s horizons even further. After I’d had my wicked way, I would talk her into letting a pal have a go. Without too much persuasion, she would say, ‘All right, but just this once.’

Then they would start queuing up: Johnny Brindle, Ronnie Mitchell and the Long brothers – George, Teddy, Tommy and Jimmy. Jimmy was only a little kid at the time, probably about nine or ten. When it came to his turn, the big boys would shove him to the end of the queue and Milky would snort, ‘He’s too little. He can’t do it!’

But little Jimmy was determined. ‘Yes I can, yes I can,’ he’d insist. Every time he was pushed out of the queue he’d race to the end and wait patiently for another chance.

Taking pity, we’d plead, ‘Come on, let him have a go. At least he’ll shut up.’ Eventually she’d relent but it was all over in a wink and none of us ever discovered whether Jimmy had made it, or not, or whether Milky was aware of the fact.

Milky, like the rest of us, had experienced the ravages of war. Two years earlier, sharpnel had smashed through a brick and grazed her breast, so perhaps enjoying life meant that much more to her.

With the war, very few schools were left standing and I left mine at the age of 14, with few qualifications, and got a job with South Western Railways as a driver’s mate delivering goods in London and all over southern England. We started off with an old Iron Horse, a three-wheeler petrol-driven truck that you would hook up to a horse-box and use to take the horses to different stables. We then graduated to a Bedford truck, which had tarpaulin sheets on the back and could hook up to trailers, some with containers already loaded. The jobs were diverse. We could be delivering fruit to Covent Garden one day, and gold to the Bank of England the next. Sometimes we’d take a load of metal drums filled with coins to the Royal Mint. When delivering bullion, we were paid an extra £2 on top of our £5-a-week wages for the heavy work involved.

Alfie, my driver, was not backward when it came to nicking loads of fruit from the market. We’d take luxury items like lovely Cape grapes and peaches and fruit. In those days, you never saw anything like that at local shops, and down it would go under the seat in the front cabin of the truck, hidden by a blanket. Alternatively, we’d deliver a load and damage some of the parcels, pulling out some of the contents, like shirts perhaps, from the middle. Everybody was doing it: crane drivers in the docklands would always drop a load on purpose. If it was a crate of whisky, they would nick a few bottles of Scotch that had remained intact and write off the whole load.

Never had my senses been as aroused as by the sight of all the gold we had volunteered to collect from King’s Cross when I was still a lad of 14. We backed the Southern Railway Iron Horse – with tarpaulin sides and a sheet at the back with leather straps to close it from prying eyes – right up to the railway carriage. Inside was a fortune in wedge-shaped gold bars, two on the bottom, two across, one on top, neatly packed so you could get your fingers underneath each precious bar. All together, the load would have been worth several million pounds.

And all we had guarding this lot was a 14-year-old boy (me), two coppers and a government official next to Alfie, the driver, who was one of a family of well-known greengrocers in those parts. We would drive from King’s Cross to the Bank of England in Threadneedle Street or, if we had coins, we took them to the Royal Mint on the north side of Tower Bridge. Snatching the gold would have been the easiest bit of work ever for anyone with a little bit of enterprise. I fantasised even then about nicking it: at today’s prices, each bar would have fetched £100,000, and I lovingly cradled those bars like I would a child. The deliveries were made on a fairly regular basis and because of the heavy work were unpopular, and word quickly got around because everyone was asked to volunteer. It would have been easy for us to tell someone where it was coming from, but, those days, people weren’t that way inclined. They didn’t think of thieving big lumps of money. For me, though, a seed was sown.

My next job was at Pannet and Eden, as a warehouseman. They were based in Wandsworth and did herbs and stuffing as well as hair cream and associated products. One job involved carrying hundredweight sacks full of breadcrumbs up ladders and stairs, which built up my strength. Another part of the job was handling 56lb boxes of lard or fat intended for the stuffing – so, needless to say, my mother’s family and friends were never short of hair oil, mint sauce, stuffing or lard. Nor were many of the women working in Pannet and Eden. I would wrap chunks of lard in greaseproof paper and slip it into their open handbags. I never charged them a penny for this, although a number showed their appreciation in different ways – usually among the empty sacks in the loft above the storage rooms. We were still on ration books shortly after the war and limited to only about an ounce of lard per person, per week, so I became the most popular young male among 45 women workers.

People always go on about men on building sites, but you have to see it to believe what women get up to in factories. The old ones were the worst. They’d grab your dick and get a little too excited. If you gave them a playful kiss, you’d get a tongue down your throat.

With a wage of £4.50 a week, I’d nick anything to make up for the hard work I had to do. A good line was women’s make-up, which would get you a few quid on top of your wages. I stayed at Pannet’s for about a year, the longest I’ve had in any job, and eventually got sacked when someone grassed me up for giving cooking lard to one of the women. The sack came out of the blue, but it didn’t worry me very much and I went to work for Stevens and Carter, a scaffolding firm. Onwards and upwards!

The only person to be really upset at my abrupt departure from Pannet’s was a lovely spinster of about 40 called Gladys. She cried when she heard I’d been dismissed. Gladys lived with another, more elderly woman. She was tall and thin with dark hair swept back and wore glasses. While she was no beauty, her nature made her a lovely person. She didn’t have a bad word for anyone and was always kind and laughing. Gladys had a lovely little twinkle in her eye and I think she got quite attached to me – not sexually, you understand, but in a maternal way, like an affectionate aunt. I used to chat to her quite a lot, and we got on well together. I would help her tie parcels and lift them off the bench after she’d packed them up. She talked to me about life in general and liked to see me enjoying myself.

Gladys was well aware of what I was up to with some of the young girls working on the factory floor. In fact, she became my accomplice and would leave me in the warehouse with the girls, shut the door, and say, ‘You two stay there…’

I last saw Gladys when I was 15 and was very upset some years later to learn that she had committed suicide. I was too sad to ask the details, but she must have been a troubled soul, or very ill, to do that.

Years later, a very strange set of events involving her took place. Gladys made what I can only describe as psychic contact with me during moments of great stress. I was 37 years old and in the depths of despair after being charged with the murder of Frank Mitchell – of which more later – when Gladys ‘spoke’ to me. I swear I could hear her voice saying, ‘It’s all right, Fred. Calm down. Take it easy. It’s going to be all right.’

Gladys came to me again when I was kidnapped and brought back to England from Spain and I know she is always there to help me in times of crisis. She’s lovely, my Gladys. A guardian angel sent to comfort me in times of need. I hope and pray she is now at peace and that I won’t need her services any more.

Her death, like the death of my parents, possibly affected me more than it might otherwise have done, because I was never able to mourn for them. I was unable to attend the funerals of my father, mother and sister-in-law Nellie because harsh prison rules would not allow me out. The same thing happened to Tommy Wisbey after he was jailed for the Great Train Robbery. While he was doing his 30 years he lost his teenage daughter, Lorraine, in a car accident, but was not allowed out to attend her funeral. I was godfather to his other daughter, Marilyn, and he was godfather to my son Gregory. At that time I was unable to grieve their loss with the rest of the family and, somehow, your mind doesn’t accept they are dead if you don’t go through the ritual of a funeral service. I still wake up at times and, just for a moment, think I must go round and see if the old man and Mum are all right. And then it slowly dawns on me that they are no longer here…

But back to my youth.

Scaffolding was considered a macho job and attracted strong young men, including ex-soldiers. We were all south-London men working on a site at Hatfield College, near the Armstrong Siddeley aircraft factory in Hertfordshire. The college had received deliveries of a large amount of sheet copper in packs of one-hundredweight rolls. These were stored under lock and key in a large metal bunker at the back of the site next to some woods accessible only by a dirt road, and I immediately saw the potential of nicking them.

To help me with this enterprise, I engaged the services of an elderly man called Fat Joe and his partner Claude, an evil-looking bastard with dark, slitty eyes. Fat Joe weighed about 20 stone and he and his partner owned the right vehicles to get the load away. They told me they would be able to sell the metal in Croydon.

The ex-guardsman who was supposed to be minding the site was more often than not in the village pub with his big bastard of an Alsatian dog. The man was a bully and very unpopular with the locals and some of our lads who had already had punch-ups with him. Naturally, I timed the robbery for when he was at the pub. We drove up the dirt road and knocked off the paddy (padlock) to the steel shed; then, we loaded up two big old cars, a Ford V8 shooting brake and a Chrysler. It was all dense weight, but we cleaned most of it out. The operation was a success and proved to be a nice little earner.

Next day, when I returned to work, enquiries about the theft were already up and running. Stevens and Carter scaffolders didn’t suspect me but, as I was sitting eating in the canteen, the guard’s Alsatian walked up to me and started sniffing me out. As if that was not enough, he then plonked himself down in front of me and sat staring at me. Never suspecting anything, my workmates made a joke of it: ‘Are you sure you never nicked it, Fred?’ they asked and then jokingly added, ‘Look at the dog watching you!’

The bloody animal looked as if he was about to spring on me! This went on for a few days but, thank God, only the dog sussed me out.

While working as a scaffolder, I had a relationship with a little firecracker called Joyce who was separated from her husband. There were other girls too who were quite saucy, nearly one in every block on my estate, and I used to cop for quite a few of them. But Joyce was a bit special. I’d met her at a party and took her outside for a drink on the balcony: She was more forward than I expected. She took off her knickers, put them in her handbag and, without waiting, undid my trousers and jumped on me, wrapping her legs around my waist and clinging to my neck. Then she started bouncing up and down like a bloody rabbit. It had never happened to me like that before. My mother poked her head around the door and caught us at it while I was banging away like a good ’un. Later she warned me to stay away from that girl. But I found her a sexy little thing and she knew a lot more than I did; she taught me a thing or two. (Today, my wife Janice says this is an understatement!)

Joyce was a little bit on the tarty side – very attractive, with a nice body and cheeky eyes. I used to take her down a dark alleyway and she was quite as happy having it there as anywhere. She used to work at the button factory on the Wandsworth Road, where quite a lot of the young girls used to work. One of Joyce’s workmates I copped for once had acquired a strange reputation in the factory: she was always the first in at work and the last to leave. It was subsequently discovered that she liked to lean on a certain part of the machinery, which vibrated like hell, so that she could enjoy multiple orgasms all day long! But she was too much for me. As some might have said back then, I was like Superman: faster than a speeding bullet – and no match for the girl at the button factory!

Anyway, my relationship with Joyce thrived until I saw her with another guy walking down the same alleyway that I’d thought was ‘special’ only to us. Obviously I was wrong. She was not true to me, but I was infatuated with her. I was with Lennie Sunbourne, a relation of mine, when she walked past. I hadn’t seen her at first because I was buying a cup of tea and a hotdog sandwich at a stall. Then Lennie pointed her out and I pretended I didn’t care. But, of course, I did.

I went down there just as they were coming out of the alley again and chinned the geezer. He went spark out. I then gave her a backhander and called her a fucking slag. My ring had sliced open the geezer’s cheek and Joyce got down on her knees to help him. ‘Look what you’ve done!’ she cried.

I told Joyce not to come near me any more and walked back to the flats.

A short time afterwards, I heard an ambulance siren and then a worried Lennie tapped on my door. ‘Did you do him with a brick, Fred?’ he asked. ‘He’s in a hell of a state, hasn’t regained consciousness.’

I had a right dodgy night worrying about the cossers coming round. But it had only been one punch, a right hander. Anyway, the guy never grassed me to the police so I was OK.

Later, Joyce came to my local and tried to make up. I was nearly tempted but in the end I simply blanked her. I was hurt and felt she had done the dirty on me. In fact, looking back, she was just a lively and lovely girl who worked in the button factory. A good little jiver, too.

Anyway, there were always plenty of other girls about. I had quite a lot of romantic little flings, as you can imagine, and I know that there are one or two little Freddies about, but I can’t go into details as I don’t want to embarrass anyone who may be married with a family. The last thing I want is to cause any problems. I often feel that I would like to hire a hall and get all my old friends and family together for a big nosh-and drink-up and chat about old times and see the kids who have grown up.

I retired from scaffolding after falling from a second-floor level. Although I landed on my feet, I got pinned to a plank of wood with this rusty old nail. It went right through the sole of my shoe and into my foot. I was taken to Hatfield Hospital and given antibiotic injections. My leg felt like a war was going on inside. It throbbed like fuck for about a week. In fact, it was a good time to leave the scaffolding job: winter was coming on and scaffolding wasn’t much fun in lousy weather. I went to see George, who was still shovelling coal, and told him he had to stop that and do a bit of work with me.

We met a guy who said we could earn good money for a few months’ work pile driving. We needed two extra men to make up the work team, a steel fixer and another to control the pile driver and change the sections over as the holes for building foundations got deeper. It was a bit like drilling for oil. A big crane smashed down these metal and concrete tubes deep into the ground, some 25 feet or so, till it hit rock bottom. Then I would slip the steel cage that I had fixed and that fell to the bottom and the steel rods would stick out of the top, ready for the concrete. Once that was poured in and set, the foundations would be solid enough for blocks of flats, or flyovers. I suppose that’s how the stories of Ginger Marks’s disappearance came about – the speculation that he had been buried under a flyover. Mind you, if you did stick someone down one of those holes, they would have to pull the whole building down to find anything, so it’s not a bad idea, and it did cross my mind on one or two occasions years later…

On most Saturday nights, we’d go to the dances, for the big-band sounds. All the town halls put on English bands like Vic Lewis, Ted Heath and Ivor Kerchin, playing American big-band music. I remember seeing Ted and Barbara Andrews and their daughter Julie singing on stage at the Grand, Clapham Junction. Most of the upcoming stars would appear there too, including the Goons Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine. Harry Secombe’s farmyard imitations would bring the house down, as would Sellers’s impersonations of film stars. The Grand would also put on boxing exhibitions with the likes of Freddie Mills and Frankie Hough. The entertainment industry had started up again in a big way because during the war large numbers of people were prevented from congregating in one place in case they were bombed. Needless to say, manpower was at a premium.

We enjoyed the sounds of Ted Heath and his orchestra, the Squadronairs, Vic Lewis, and the Ray Ellington quartet. My mates at the time included Patsy Toomey, Lennie White, Jimmy Turner, Tommy Wisbey, Tony Reuter, Jacky Cramer, Arthur and Teddy Suttie, Billy Adams, Freddy and Dinny Powell, whom we called Nosher, because his father was a horse trader at the arches behind the Elephant and Castle. The name Nosher came from the ‘nosh-bag’ that hung around a horse’s neck containing food.

At the time, I was a member of the Battersea Boxing Club, run by a Mr Hall. One of his trainers was old Billy Whitely, who used to come to parties at my parents’ house and load me up with pennies. I introduced the gang to the club because they were all pretty keen to learn, as we often fought with other gangs in the streets.

One time, I had problems with a gang down the Wandsworth Road, so we got together to sort them out. During one street fight, a guy jumped out of an upstairs window on to my back while I was battling with his brother. He was a lot older than me, and in the navy, and he looked well muscled in his white vest. But I think he must have regretted coming home on leave from the navy, because some of us beat the shit out of him. We really fancied ourselves at the fight game. Patsy Toomey would ask, ‘Who’s the best fighter around here? Go and fetch him and I’ll have a straightener.’

On one occasion, we were at a stall down the World’s End in Chelsea. Patsy challenged this guy and I held their coats. There were five of us and about 30 of the other gang. Everyone crowded around to watch the fight with cups of tea in their hands. ‘Patsy, you better win this one,’ I said to myself. But he came unstuck: the guy he was fighting had him pinned down and sat on his chest punching his head in. I couldn’t stand seeing my pal hurt, so I interfered. I pulled the guy off and smashed his head against the kerb and the next thing I heard was running feet followed by blow after blow smashing down on me. They were laying into me with their boots. I rolled under a parked lorry and got up on the other side. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘let’s make this one-to-one.’

One stepped forward and said, ‘I’ll have him.’

We started to fight and, being a strong kid, I held my own for a long time until, exhausted, we both ended up on our knees facing each other, still punching it out. By mutual agreement, whispered in each other’s ears, we’d had enough. That signalled an honourable tie-breaker. We stood up and shook hands and everybody went back to have another cup of tea. In a way, it was like history repeating itself: we began where our fathers left off.

The dance halls and pubs also became a major venue for our brawling. We’d go into the pubs and bars, get tanked up and, if anyone tried to chat up any one of our girls, you would have a row and the place would degenerate into a free-for-all. Going to dance halls in different parts of London was like going to a football match and meeting the other team’s supporters. If it was the Lyceum, you took a pitch in the corner and no one else was allowed there apart from us south-London and Elephant and Castle boys.

Before the end of the night, there’d be a row and the girls would get excited and want to go home with you afterwards. It was all very macho stuff. The next day, we’d dissect the fight, revel in our victory and relive the finer moments. Sometimes the fights would turn quite serious and tools like starting handles would be brought out. But, then again, you’d also end up respecting one or two of the opposition and get pally with them in the future.

One of our gang had been to a wedding in Dulwich and a crowd of lads had bashed him up and taken liberties with him. He asked for a bit of help and, as we were prepared to travel anywhere for a good row, we offered to sort things out for him. It was the done thing back then.

With our adrenaline flowing, we descended on the other gang at a youth club. A few got injured and the club was wrecked, but that was as much the fault of the other gang as it was ours. The main principals in this fracas, including me, got away while some of the lesser fry got nicked and stuck up all our names. A couple of days later, though, I was dragged off to the nick, charged with assault, GBH (grievous bodily harm) and affray.

The police found a few coshes, made from steel rungs from a barber’s shop chair, and a thick woollen sand-weighted sock belonging to a friend called Francis. I was too young to be put in Wormwood Scrubs Prison so they put me into Stamford House Remand Centre, where a few of the warders were nonces: they were into young boys and at the same time were sadistic bastards who wanted to beat the shit out of you with canes.

Police raised such a hue and cry over this case that it went to the Number One Court of the Old Bailey. It was my first time at the famous court, but little did I know I would be back there six times in total in the years to come – and always to the Number One Court. It should never have come to trial, let alone been heard in the Central Criminal Court. What a ridiculous waste of public money and police time. I was only 16 years old and already I was in the most famous court in the land! Such treatment served only to elevate me in the eyes of my peers. The trial in 1948, heard by Sir Gerald Dodson, the Recorder, was full of comic moments. The prosecutor ran through a list of weapons and then held out Francis’s smelly sand-filled sock at arm’s length, turning his head away from it as he spoke.

Each time he used the phrase ‘and one sand-weighted sock’, we lads in the dock – there were 11 of us – all repeated the phrase with our heads down, whispering the words with the QC: ‘and one sand-weighted sock’. Then we went redder and redder, exchanging looks and stifling giggles and fits of laughter.

The judge bound us over and fined us £5 each. We were also ordered to be taken down to the cells at the Old Bailey to experience ‘the feel of life behind bars’. ‘This experience should serve as a lifelong lesson,’ Sir Gerald told us. ‘When you come out, look up to the sky and be thankful you can see it.’

I wonder if he was aware that we had already spent time in prisons and remand centres awaiting this trial as well as many hours in the cells under the Old Bailey awaiting His Lordship.

With all the practice we were getting inside and outside of the ring, our little firm got quite skilled in the art of fighting. Eventually, I took Nosher’s brother, Freddie Powell, down to the Battersea Boxing Club; having a heavyweight champion from the army join your local club was a feather in your cap. He had several fights for the club and then turned professional.

The club officials got the horn when they saw Freddie, who was a big sun-tanned six-foot-three heavyweight. He was a real crowd-pleaser. Nobody left a show until they had seen him fight. The promoters always put him on last to keep the crowd and atmosphere alive. Nosher and Fred are still friends of mine today.

In my teens, I was a light welterweight at 10st 3lb. Patsy was two or three pounds lighter and Lenny White was only 9st 9lb. We all gave our best in bouts but did very little training: a couple of times a week at most. The rest of the time we’d go to the big bands, drink beer and go out with the girls. We would also train at a number of different centres: the Budekai Club, where I learned a bit of jujitsu, the Battersea Boxing Club (Latchmere) and Joe Jones’s gym in Islington.

On Sunday mornings, we’d go to Jack Solomon’s gym in Windmill Street, Soho. He ran a nursery for a few young amateur boxers. And what an experience it was. Nat Sellers was the trainer then and Jack Solomon the fight promoter. Jack was a lovely man who was never without a big cigar in his mouth. Apart from American pros, we had people like Freddie Mills, George and Tommy Daley, Joe Carter, Tommy McGovern and Alby Hollister and the Barnham brothers from Fulham. Most of the active fighters in London worked out at Jack Solomon’s gym at one time or another. Exhibition matches were put on about once a month between ourselves, and they could turn nasty if you got hurt and sought revenge on your sparring partner.

Stewart Granger often came to Jack Solomon’s. He was then a budding young actor in the Gainsborough films with Margaret Lockwood and would often comment on our fights. He said of me, ‘Young Freddie Foreman is similar to Freddie Mills in his line of attack,’ and once handed out a prize of dressing gown and shorts. My father and brothers would proudly watch the proceedings from small wooden benches.

We kids were all protégés of Bud Flanagan of the Flanagan and Allen comedy duo. Bud was famous in those days and his voice is still heard on TV today – if you watch Dad’s Army, he sang the theme tune. Bud was a nice old boy: he used to give us free tickets for his West End shows and treat us to slap-up meals in Victoria before taking us to see his Crazy Gang show at Victoria Palace. (Today, the Leukaemia Foundation that Bud Flanagan set up is still running, and my son Jamie and I support it by attending various fundraising functions.)

Anyway, we had some tough contests when we did the rounds at the ‘bath fights’ – boxing matches arranged at venues like town halls and local baths. Our opponents were from other clubs and the three Armed Forces and we fought all over London. I must have had about 30 fights in all at venues, which included Nine Elms (lots of times), Tooting Bec, Manor Place, Victoria Park, Bermondsey baths, Seymour Place baths, Shoreditch Town Hall and Grange Road baths. Fights were held nearly every week in those days. I had a few wars with opponents much older than myself, old timers who had been around for years. I was only in my mid-teens and they were in their late twenties and early thirties.

It was quite hard work some nights, because you could end up fighting three different opponents. You might arrive for a novices competition at 6.30pm, fight an hour later, then go in the ring with the second opponent at 8.30pm and, if you got through the first two, then go on to the final at about 11pm. During all those excruciating hours, your black eyes would puff up more and your swollen nose become sorer and sorer. I had a couple of nights like those, only to get beaten in the final. I was so disappointed. I had set my heart on a beautiful cup and lost it to a guy I should have beaten.

At one fight in Nine Elms baths, two MPs (military police) had to bring an Army champ to fight me (apparently he was doing some chokey [imprisonment] in the stockades). He was all tattooed up, muscles everywhere. A right hard bastard. It was only a three-round fight in the welterweight division. A great but damaging fight: I really felt the pain afterwards. The girls we knew from the dance halls were there and they screamed the place down. It was the best fight of the night and they loved it. I gave as good as I got, but he edged it on points.

Some years later, during a prison spell in Wandsworth, I ended up in the same cell with Joey Carter, whom I had seen at Jack Solomon’s. He was featherweight champion of south London and had fought Ronnie Clayton for the British featherweight title but lost in four rounds. Then Tommy McGovern got nicked for receiving and was sentenced to six months, and I wound up with the two of them in my cell! I felt sorry for Tom, as he was basically a very straight person and couldn’t handle prison life. It seemed like the end of the world to him.

Tommy was an ex-lightweight champion of Great Britain. All he and Joey talked about was boxing and as I was quite well up on the subject it renewed my urge to do a bit of training and fighting again when I got out. After being locked up with these two I decided that on my release from prison I would become a professional boxer. Soon after my release, I turned professional under the experienced eye of Tommy Daly, training at the Thomas A’Becket in Old Kent Road, south-east London. (Tommy Daly’s son, John, was later to become a well-known film producer and formed Hemdale Productions with the actor David Hemmings.) Tommy got me fit with plenty of sparring and road work: I would run around Brockwell Park, Herne Hill, down to Camberwell Green, along to Loughborough Junction, under the arch and up Shakespeare Road and finish off in the park again. Then I’d run up Milton Road with my knees up to my chin for the last 10, as fighters call it, get indoors and do my mat work. Sit-ups, elbows to knees, all stomach work, wrap up and sweat it out. I got really fit. Tom used to put me in with a light heavyweight for three rounds, then a middleweight and a welterweight to speed me up. I was really banging hard, even with the big sparring gloves. I caught the light-heavy a shot and wobbled him after two rounds one day and they said ‘enough’: I didn’t take liberties in sparring, because we were in there to help and learn from each other.

When I had my medical, the doctor held his stethoscope to my chest and kept looking up at me making ‘um, ah’ sounds. He got me doing press-ups and listened to my heart again, saying, ‘Very strange, very strange.’ I wondered what the problem was. Perhaps there was something wrong with me and he was frightened to tell me? Just goes to show how ignorant we were in those days. My mother suffered with angina all her life. When I was a little boy, she used to collapse into an armchair, and say to me, ‘Quick! Can you fetch my bottle of salvelity?’ And I’d give her a spoonful of that until the pulse in her neck would go away. You could see it I her neck trying to pump the blood to her heart.

Years later, when I was in Full Sutton Prison, I was told what it was: I have a very slow heartbeat: the average beat for a person is 70 and mine is only 45 – and that is very much in my favour. Thank God, I’ve got something going for me.

All the local fighters from south London trained at the Thomas A’Becket: Henry Cooper, George Cooper, Freddie Reardon, Dave Charnley and Charlie Tucker, to mention just a few. Dave Charnley wound up British champion. Peter Waterman, Eddie Hughes, the Auld twins from Bermondsey and Fred and Dinny Powell also trained there.

Tommy had fixed me up with a guy from Croydon called Del Breen for my first professional fight at Manor Place baths. Del was experienced. He’d had about 20 pro fights, winning the last four on knockout, so I was cannon fodder. Stan Baker was the promoter. Topping the bill were Henry and George Cooper, Dave Charnley, Freddie Reardon and Charlie Tucker. Then there was Del Breen and little old me on the undercard.

It was a Tuesday evening, 23 November 1954. Normally, boys were given a few easy ones to get their confidence up and not get too hurt for about six or so fights. That’s the general rule of a manager. Tom may have had second thoughts about pitting me against Del, but, even if he had wanted me to pull out, it was too late, because I had sold so many tickets. I was quite well known and already had a bit of a reputation as a street fighter.

The place was packed: I looked at Del. You could see every muscle in his body. He was a fit man. The first two rounds were all Del’s. I couldn’t match his experience. In the third, he caught me with a good shot. I fell back on the ropes and the crowd went wild. I came back strong at the end of the third, though, and caught him with a left and right hook, bang on the chin. I felt it go right up my arm to my shoulder. He went down right in his corner.

The crowd went wild. I was the underdog of all underdogs and I’d knocked him out, I thought. But just then the bell went and he sat in his corner, his seconds feverishly working on him. They lifted him up and pushed him out for the fourth round. The baths were buzzing. He boxed his way out of trouble in the fourth and I couldn’t get a good shot in. His head cleared and his experience came to his aid. We both gave it our all for the rest of the fight. It was a war. Toe-to-toe stuff that the boxing crowd love to see. The final bell went and it was all over. Del won on points. If the bell hadn’t gone in the third, I would have won. That’s the luck of the game. The money started to pour into the ring. The seconds picked it up in a towel. I got £12 for the fight and Del and I shared £25 in nobbins (tips thrown in by an appreciative crowd).

Ernie Derfield, a promoter, was on the phone to Tommy: ‘We want your man on our next show; he’s a good ticket-seller and crowd-pleaser.’ So that was my moment of glory in the fight game. All the fighters up and down the country have had similar fights to mine. I hold out my hand to them for their courage and heart, because it takes a lot just to step into a ring.

My rating in the Boxing News went into the six stars, so now I would never have an easy fight, only wars with experienced fighters. Their report on my match noted, ‘Promoter Stan Baker can have every reason to be satisfied with the attendance and crowd-pleasing bill of fare in his first venture at Manor Place baths. Three former ABA champions Freddie Reardon, Henry Cooper and Dave Charnley all won their bouts and gave promise of great things in the future … “Nobbins” were showered into the ring after the first bout of the evening, in which Del Breen, Croydon (10–11), outpointed Freddie Foreman, Walworth (10–11 3/4), over six rounds. It was Foreman’s first pro bout…’

Stan Baker was asked about his best undercard fight and he mentioned mine. In the book Down Memory Lane With Stan Baker, he said of the fight, ‘It was right at the end of 1954 when I put on my first bill there. I had three ABA champions on the undercard, Freddie Reardon, Henry Cooper and Dave Charnley. Henry’s brother Jim boxed in one of the six-rounders and Charlie Tucker topped the show against Hanley’s Tommy Higgins. The entire bill cost me £300. Do you know what I paid Cooper? – 20 quid!

‘One guy who deserved to be paid 100 notes was Freddie Foreman, who had his one and only pro fight, against Del Breen. Best supporting scrap I ever saw! They hit each other with everything but the corner buckets. Nobbins were still coming in five minutes after the fight ended. After such a fistic baptism Freddie never again drew on a glove.’

As it happened, I did go back into training intending to carry on with the fight game but fate had other ideas in mind. The promoters wanted me on the next bill. I fought as a middleweight and was in really good shape, so much so that my trainer, Tommy Daly, made me a sparring partner to top fighters. I sparred with Peter Waterman, who was British welterweight champion, and even got into the ring with cruiserweights, whom I was bowling over with big gloves. Unfortunately, I had no sponsors to pay my bills and I still had to put food on the table for my wife and son. So, to support my boxing career I had to continue thieving. Then I got nicked and another stretch in prison ended my pro career – at least in the ring.

I sometimes wonder whether things might have turned out differently if I had done National Service. My brothers talked me out of joining up; the war in Malaya and Korea was beginning and they thought that, although the four of them had survived WWII, this time the family might not be so lucky. The problem was how to get out of it when I was in such peak physical condition. We decided I would become mentally deficient, and my brother George organised a medical certificate requesting a deferment on the grounds of my ‘schizophrenia’.

We went down to Chelsea Barracks, George leading me by the hand and complaining that he had to take the day off work to accompany me. My mum, who was not party to the proceedings, asked incredulously if I was going out of the house in my present state. My hair was unkempt, I had Bert’s clothes on (he was much smaller than me), which were tight-fitting with bits of wool hanging out of an old blue jumper, and some sticking plaster on my face. I had deliberately cut myself while shaving and was a complete mess. On top of what I was wearing, I’d donned an old air-raid warden’s overcoat. When we got to the barracks, I meekly did as I was told by George, not taking any interest in the surroundings but staring, open-mouthed, through the window. George bullied me: ‘Get over there and sit down. Get your socks off and hurry up, don’t take all day.’

Watched by the Army personnel, he then took my socks off himself. They must have thought, ‘We’ve got a right nut here.’

George never let up for a moment: ‘All he does is sit watching out the window seeing them trams run by. He won’t do anything. He just sits staring.’

The Army doctor said they would give me a deferment for four months before making a final decision.

George had a go at them: ‘I’ve got kids to support,’ he complained. ‘I can’t spend all my fucking days here. He’s a fit boy. He did a lot of boxing and sparring but fucked up his brain; he’s a bit scrambled.’

After going through my acting performance of being a nut-nut, I was getting dressed in a cubicle when the curtain pulled open and George’s head popped in. He told me he’d heard the panel of doctors talking about me.

‘What did they say, George?’ I asked.

‘They’re going to make you a fighter pilot!’

I creased up – it made it very difficult for me to keep a straight face back in front of the panel.

We had to come back a second time. Following George’s excellent tuition, I again sat on the edge of the seat, gaping open-mouthed, and the medical board obviously thought I needed help. ‘This young man needs some treatment,’ they told George. They assessed me as Grade 4, which exempted me from doing National Service, and recommended that I attend Cane Hill mental institution in Surrey for electric-shock treatment! Maybe they were right.

In some ways, I regretted not doing National Service with my mates. Lots of my friends were sent all over the world – like Micky Regan, who went to Suez, and Freddie Puttnam, who went to Malaya. Patsy Toomey and Lenny White joined the Army and became PTIs and fought in the Army Boxing Championships so, in a way, I later felt that I had missed out.

Money was in short supply back then, and most of my friends had secure jobs in Smithfield meat market, Spitalfields, Billingsgate or Covent Garden. Being a market porter was quite the ‘in thing’ to be those days, and I did it myself for a short time. I had bigger ambitions, though.

At around the age of 18, I teamed up with a load of girls known as the Forty Thieves. You virtually had to be born into it to become a member of this gang. All the girls were hoisters, and followed their mothers’ footsteps in professional shoplifting. (They used to call shoplifting ‘clouting’, which was Old English for ‘drawers’. The amount of goods those girls could stash away in bloomers under their dresses was unbelievable…)

My job was to graft with girls like Mae Mae Cooper, Annie Revel and Nellie Donovan, and make sure they got away after shoplifting from top stores like Harrods. You would bump into the guy who was going to give them a pull, or give him a right-hander if he got too clever. We met the girls in the local pubs. Their mothers, all from the Elephant and Kennington, were the original Forty Thieves. Though they had cockney accents, they knew how to talk lah-di-dah, putting on the upper-crust voice whenever the situation demanded. They wore their clothes better than titled ladies and really looked the part. They were stunning girls, well known throughout London.

When they got nicked, they got it hard. Some of these girls were sent to Holloway for two to three years, even though they were mothers with children. They were not treated gently but they were tough and did their lump of bird. Like fellas, they risked their liberty every day of the week to get a pound note.

A lot of them were scarred up, because they could also be vicious bastards and were often in fights and rows, cutting each other up. When they let their hair down, they were totally outrageous. Sexually, some of them were hot stuff. People who live on the edge can be – as I’ve said before, they lived life to the full and knew how to make a man happy. When they tired of their man, they’d kick him out and move on to the next one. They were real characters. I still see a few of these lovely ladies, beautifully turned out and probably still grafting. It’s in their blood.

Working with the girls was only a part-time activity. It was fun to do and I enjoyed the company of these larger-than-life ladies, each of them a colourful character in her own right. But there were bigger prizes to be had.