THE FIRST NICOLA ADAMS

Long before Nicola Adams became a national treasure, there was Barbara Buttrick – a 98lb fighting machine who was confronted with astonishing discrimination. Ben Dirs catches up with Buttrick 57 years after she last punched for pay

Life for Barbara Buttrick was a world away from the one Adams now enjoys

HOW might a teenage Nicola Adams have reacted if she’d been described as repugnant and monstrous? Hung ‘em up and done something more ladylike? Baked a cake? Knitted a tea cosy? Pushed the feminine boundaries and turned her hand to croquet? Because of Barbara Buttrick, Adams never had to choose.

On narrow shoulders, Adams’ world was built. In her 1950s pomp, Buttrick stood 4ft 11ins and weighed 98lb. But the blows she struck for women’s boxing – and women in general – can be felt to this day. Almost 70 years on, some men are still red in the face and complaining that Buttrick’s blows were below the belt.

Staring down the lens in a Pathé newsreel from 1949, a 19-year-old Buttrick bristles with defiance. “I think all this talk about girls not boxing is oldfashioned,” says Buttrick, in a Yorkshire accent so thick you could spread it on a slab of Hovis. “Girls aren’t the delicate flowers they used to be.”

You would have thought people already knew, British women having done so much back-breaking work during World War II. But war won, convention demanded that women reapplied their makeup, tied on the aprons and climbed back into their boxes. In 1948, BBC boxing commentator Peter Wilson described the idea of women boxing as “degrading and disgusting”. Added Wilson: “A new vicious cult might start among those who would enjoy seeing two girls, stripped to their brasserie and a pair of flimsy knickers, digging each other violently in their breasts or smashing soggy leather gloves against each other’s bleeding lips.” Wilson’s vision is so lurid, you suspect he secretly wanted to be the cult’s leader. This was the society that Buttrick was born into and the attitudes she had to contend with. Luckily for Adams and all women boxers since, Buttrick’s tiny frame was covered with the hide of a rhino and contained the heart of a lion. Born in the village of Cottingham, near Hull, in 1930, Buttrick was scrapping with boys on the cobbles from an early age. She wanted to play football but a lack of interest from her female friends meant she was unable to raise a team. “There weren’t a lot of girls that wanted to play,” says the 87-year-old, who spoke to Boxing News in Hull, where she was talking at the Women of the World Festival. ➤

IT WAS A TOUGH EXISTENCE. SOMETIMES YOU WERE BOXING 15 OR 20 TIMES IN ONE DAY”