COCKNEY COOPER
Ronnie Cooper fought on the cobbles, at the war-torn London Olympic Games in 1948, and under the watchful eye of notorious East End villains. Here, in his first interview with Boxing News since 1951, Cooper takes a sumptuous trip down memory lane with Ben
Ronnie regales us with his riveting tales about East End tear-ups
ONNIE COOPER feints with his left, throws a right cross and suddenly he’s back at the Mile End Arena. “I can hear the crowd now – ‘Go on, Ron, hit ‘im with that left hand!’ I’d let ‘em go – bop, bop – and they’d all be effing and blinding. There was no roof, so if it was raining, we’d be slipping and sliding around the ring. I had some terrific fights there, it was like you were back in the 1800s.”
Cooper doesn’t actually remember the 1800s – he’s only 89 – but the world he describes has more in common with fairgrounds and boxing booths than boxing shows in sterile modern venues. If you didn’t have a ticket to see Cooper fight, you squeezed through a hole in a wall. And if there was no hole, you made one. The dressing room was a shed of corrugated iron and there was no running water. After a couple of fights, Cooper stopped wearing his suit.
“My brother would say to me: ‘What you doing wearing a nice suit in a s***hole like that?!’ So I started wearing more casual stuff, which wouldn’t get pinched. It was an old, East End, knuckle-dust arena. My girlfriend would be sat ringside, with her hands over her ears. After a fight, she’d say to me: ‘Oh Ron, why do you box?’ And I’d say: ‘Do you want to get married or not?!’”
In a pub in Wanstead, a few miles down the road from Mile End, Cooper rattles through his life in boxing, peppering his recollections with countless ‘bops’ and ‘boshes’. If he’s not bopping them in the ring, he’s boshing them on the cobbles. Take a liberty and he’ll put down his stick and bosh you even now. Cooper’s boxing world was full of crooked managers,
Rcorrupt promoters, pitiful pay days and not much glamour. It was, Cooper says, “a hard, nasty old business”. In the 65 years since he hung ‘em up, nothing’s changed much. Cooper thinks he could have been a contender, with a bit more luck. And he still looks back and wishes things could have been different. But, in common with so many old fighters, he can’t help loving the game. “Boxing was good to me,” he says, “in a certain way.” If ever a quote summed up boxing, that’s it.
Cooper grew up so poor, he jokes that his mum used to paint his feet white so that it looked like he was wearing plimsoles. At least I think it was a joke. The youngest of 10, and born premature by two months, Cooper soon learned to look after himself on the streets of Poplar, when men were men, boys were boys and if anyone tried anything on, you punched them square on the hooter.
“I was always fighting on the cobbles because I never liked liberties being taken,” says Cooper. “I never gave anyone a right-hander for looking at me funny, but if they started shaping up, I’d go ‘bosh, get hold of that then’. All my brothers could have a knuckle. I remember my brother Frank coming home on leave and his mate said to my mum: ‘Thank God he’s on our side.’”
Cooper, a talented footballer as a kid, fell into boxing when a trainer noticed him punching a bag in the gym. “He said to me, ‘Do you box?’ And I said, ‘No, I play football’. He said, ‘Anyone in your family box?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, my father boxed for seven and sixpence’. He said, ‘Would you like to box Monday?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, put me down’. Two days later, I was boxing in the London Federation of Boys’ Clubs Championships at the Royal Albert Hall.
“They put me in the draw and someone went, ‘Who you boxing, mate?’ I said, ‘Bloke called Charlie Tucker’. He started laughing. I said, ‘What you laughing for?’ And he said, ‘Charlie Tucker don’t half knock ‘em out!’ Charlie Tucker had won it three times before, but I took him the distance and he didn’t put me down. That was 1946 and I won the rest of my fights that year.
“I got called up to the Navy, won the Combined Services Championships and got to the final of the ABAS in 1947, before winning it in 1948. And that meant I was selected for the Olympic Games in London.”
Cooper, an apprentice boilermaker, was given three weeks’ paid holiday by his boxing-loving guv’nor and travelled with the rest of the team to a camp in Wargrave, Berkshire. But while Britain’s modern Olympians have an army of support staff beside the coaches – including physios, video analysts and nutritionists – Cooper trained for his tilt at Olympic glory on jelly and custard.
“We never had special food, we were still on rations. But jelly and custard was like steak to me. If there was any custard left over, someone would shout: ‘Give it to Ronnie Cooper!’ I was like Popeye with his spinach, just without the pipe.”
London in 1948, three years after the War had finished, was still a bombsite. Cooper remembers everywhere being “blown to pieces”. After his first fight, so was his right hand. “I had hopes of getting a medal, but I fought a Dutch boy in the first round, let one go and split my knuckle, right down the middle. They wanted to pull me out, but I said, ‘Don’t you dare, I’ll fight with one hand’.
“Second round, I got matched with an Irishman, Maxie Mccullagh, the hardest puncher in the lightweight division. That was the first time I ever got put on the deck. I don’t remember going into the ring, I don’t remember coming out and I don’t remember anything in between. They had to tell me I put him on the deck as well. But he beat me on points and that was that.”
Cooper swapped his Olympic beret for a pair of stockings – “they were so sheer, when I gave them to my girlfriend she couldn’t see them” – but he can still fit into his blazer, and wore it regularly in the build-up to the 2012 Games. While Cooper’s amateur career was short and sweet, his time in the paid ranks was short and sour. Cooper’s dad had died just before the Olympics, meaning he was forced to turn pro at the age of 20, to support his mum. And it was his poor mum who unwittingly scuppered his career, with one stroke of a pen.
“A manager called Alf Jacobs went to see my mother. Because I wasn’t yet 21, she was still my guardian. So he said to her: ‘Mrs Cooper, you’ve got to sign this letter for Ronnie.’ My mother didn’t know A from B, so she did. And with that, she signed me away for five years. I never even saw the contract.
“I went before the Board of Control twice, to try to get my contract back. Jack Solomons [Britain’s biggest promoter] and his crew were sitting behind this long table. I said to them: ‘Excuse me, but have any of you ever done any boxing? I know you was a fishmonger, Jack, but did you ever box? I was brought up to say what was on my mind. But I didn’t get my contract back.”
It sounds like a scene from a 1950s’ boxing film noir, but Cooper’s career got even darker. “I had about 20 straight wins before signing to fight [former European champion] Al Phillips. I was sparring up at Earlham Street, near Covent Garden, and this bloke came up to me and said: ‘Ronnie, you looked fantastic, he couldn’t get near you.’ I didn’t know who he was, I was only a kid.
“When he left, my trainer Jimmy Scott said to me: ‘That was Jack Spott, and he wants you to go the other way.’ Jack Spott was an East End villain and very dangerous. I told Jimmy to p**s it up the wall. But Jimmy said to me: ‘They know where you live, Ron.’ That’s the first time I’ve ever told that story…”
Cooper winces at the memory. In comparison, the boxing was a breeze. He recalls the night he beat Irishman Danny Nagle, punching his gumshield down his throat, before punching him on the back of the head to get it out again. “I went back to my trainer and said, ‘Why don’t they stop it?’ And he said, ‘You’ve got a job to do, go out and do it!’ So I went back out, hit him with a left jab and a left hook – bosh, bosh – and sparked him right out. I could have killed him.”
It might have made sense if Cooper was being wellrewarded, but the most he ever earned for a fight was £275. “There was money going around, but the boxers didn’t know anything about it. The game was run by a
WE WERE STILL ON RATIONS. JELLY AND CUSTARD WAS LIKE STEAK TO ME. I WAS LIKE POPEYE WITH HIS SPINACH, JUST WITHOUT THE PIPE”
MY TRAINER SHOOK SO MUCH HE SLASHED MY WRIST ONCE TRYING TO PUT MY GLOVES ON. THE DOCTOR HAD TO STITCH ME UP”
little clique, all saying to each other: ‘You let him box him, I’ll match him with him…’ It was very dodgy, you didn’t know who was who and what was what.
“On top of that, I was badly handled. My manager had a stall on Petticoat Lane market and used to have me running errands. I was just a piece of meat to him. And a lot of trainers in them days had no clue at all. Terry Spinks’ trainer, Snowy Buckingham, couldn’t see further than the end of his nose. Terry was sparring once and when the bell went, Snowy started rubbing down his opponent. My trainer shook so much he slashed my wrist once trying to put my gloves on. The doctor had to stitch me up before I went in the ring.”
No wonder Cooper got out at 25, disillusioned and thoroughly fed up. “I’m not being flash, but people told me I was good enough to be a British, European and, maybe, a world champion. But I believe your life’s mapped out for you. And I still had my health, and your health is worth all the money in the world.
Cooper took a job down the docks and became a respected amateur coach, guiding, among many others, future British super-welter champion Jimmy Batten. “Even now, people shape up to me and I say: ‘The way you’re covering up, I’ll show you this one and I’ll drop one under the ribs – just bend my knees, turn my body and go in.’ The first thing I’d say to a kid who wants to box is ‘find a trainer who knows what he’s doing’.”
Cooper still watches the odd fight on the telly but all the modern nonsense leaves him cold. He would have liked the running water they have nowadays, but they can keep the rest of it. “All that razzmatazz doesn’t agree with me one bit. And all that staring at each other, what’s that all about? We’d get in the ring, shake hands, knock s**t out of each other, and shake hands again.” Cooper is still a regular at London Ex-boxers Association meetings, usually in tandem with his old mucker and former British featherweight champion Sammy Mccarthy, a man so well-liked “the screws cried when he left prison”.
And while Cooper is ambivalent about the hard, nasty old business, he’s proud to be part of it. “It’s nice to walk down the road and for people to say: ‘There’s Ronnie Cooper, he’s a fantastic guy.’ It’s good to be liked in the fight game.”
A phone rings and Cooper is up on his feet – “I thought it was seconds out!” – and we make our way to the car park. When I look back, Cooper is in animated conversation with two burly kids. I hope they don’t take liberties. Bop, bop.