THE MAN WITH TWO NAMES
Looking back on the career of Stanley Quashie, aka Danny Ashie
IHAD the great pleasure recently to have a chat with Stanley Quashie of Grenada. For a brief period towards the end of the 1960s Stanley was a real handful on the British middleweight scene. He was managed by Paddy Byrne, and it was Paddy who suggested that he would need a better ring name – so Stanley became Danny Ashie of New Cross. Paddy also knocked a few years off his age and although the records show that he was born in 1944 he was actually born on August 2, 1941.
Over the course of 10 months he stopped Chris Finnegan and Eric Blake, both Olympic representatives, and Brendan Ingle, who went on to great things as one of the UK’S leading trainers. All three bouts ended because of cuts, but with Ashie more than holding his own. The first of these encounters took place in July 1968 at the Olympic Ballroom in Dublin, where Ingle was beaten in the sixth round on a show promoted by a young Barney Eastwood. Both men received cuts to their eyes, but Brendan’s was the worst. This contest was the second of a trilogy of bouts that the two men shared – Ashie lost the other two on points.
Ashie met Blake in March 1969 at the Connaught Rooms in Holborn. Boxing News reported that “Blake looked the guvnor when he exploited his jab, but all too often Danny got him at the punchups and it was in one of these exchanges that the damage was done.” Blake retired in the third with a badly cut eyebrow. He had been the 1968 Olympic rep at light-middle and, as well as becoming Southern Area middleweight champion in 1970, he also boxed an eliminator for the British title.
The Finnegan contest occurred two months later at Shoreditch Town Hall and Chris, who had won five on the reel, was the golden boy of British boxing, having won Olympic gold the previous year. He was the obvious favourite. BN stated that “Ashie waded into Finnegan from the start and had success with rights to the jaw. The ex-olympian was prevented from settling down. He looked to be having more success with his straighter punches in the second before the injury ended an intriguing contest.”
Ashie was no respecter of reputation. He came to fight, whoever he was up against, and in a career of 20 professional contests, between 1967 and 1970, he won more than he lost and was known as a tough, uncompromising fighter who could hit.
Stanley came to the UK from Grenada, aged 19, in 1961 and was an excellent all-round sportsman. He started boxing as an amateur in Deptford and, when he began to show some promise, he joined the Stock Exchange BC. At the time this club was very successful, and Stanley remembers some heated sparring encounters with Sugar Bill Robinson, who older readers will recall as a two-time ABA champion who boxed at the 1964 Olympics and was a silver medallist at the 1965 European championships.
As a pro, Ashie did most of his training and sparring at the Thomas A’becket on the Old Kent Road and it was mine host at the pub downstairs, Tommy Gibbons, himself a very good amateur and a decent pro, who spotted some potential in the Grenadian. He suggested that Ashie should go to the States for a year or so to properly develop his obvious talent. Sadly, with Tommy’s tragic death at the early age of 32, this never happened, and Ashie was left to plod on, taking middle-of-the-bill contests at the sporting clubs and small halls that formed the backbone of the sport at the time. He eventually quit the game in 1970, having met and married Iris, the love of his life.
In later years, Stanley became personal driver to the High Commissioner for Grenada, and although he never boxed at Wembley or the Royal Albert Hall, he became very familiar with Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and the House of Commons. Stanley is now 77 and he is a delightful man with a warm smile, ready laugh and some boxing memories of which he can be very proud.