Freddie Foreman - The Godfather of British Crime. Freddie Foreman
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,