THE ‘PROFESSOR’S’ PLACE
Both Bill Klein and his gym were unique
YOU got off the Tube at Great Portland Street, walked round the back where they had the car sales market, and you went down the cellar into the gym. Many’s the time I’ve got me bag and I’m on the Tube and I’ve thought, I don’t fancy it today. But as you walked in Klein’s the atmosphere hit you and it was like putting a needle in your arm. Woah, you was there, mate!”
These are the words of the late Ted Berry, a Bethnal Green lightweight of the 1940s who left the pro game with a perfect 19-0 record. It was an interview for my 2014 book, Fighting Men of London, and Ted was telling me about Klein’s Olympic Gymnasium, one of British boxing’s lost treasures.
The proprietor was the self-styled “Professor” Bill Klein, an octogenarian with a bushy, white nicotine-stained moustache and a quirky life story. Born William Hugo Klein into a circus family in Bochum, Germany, on October 26, 1866, as a child he was a trapeze artist. On one occasion he narrowly escaped death when he fell 30ft onto safety nets, luckily landing on his left side. The doctor who examined him said that if Bill had his heart on his left side he would have died. “I’m one of those unusual people with their insides reversed,” he told Boxing News decades later. “Your heart’s on the left – mine’s on the right.”
Klein was taught to box by the English lightweight champion Bat Mullins, but made his name as a wrestler and weightlifter, billed as William Atories. He settled in London around the turn of the century, married, was twice widowed and fathered 22 children. In 1912, he took the British wrestling team to the Olympic Games in Stockholm. Wrestling was what he knew best, but Bill maintained a keen interest in boxing. He ran several London gyms, and in 1930 opened his famous base at 46 Fitzroy Street, having bought the premises from ex-pro Johnny Thomas. Klein ran the place for 27 years.
“I think Bill Klein had rheumatics,” recalled Ted Berry, “’cause he could hardly walk. How he managed that place I don’t know. His gym wasn’t modernised in any way. You had a three-sided ring – one side was mirrors and against a wall.”
The late Dagenham ex-pro Teddy Lewis, another Fighting Men of London interviewee, told me: “Bill Klein had a little chalet built in the corner that he lived and slept in, and he had some Great Dane dogs, and sometimes they had pups. You’d go down there some mornings and the dogs and pups had been running about and there was mess on the floor and you’d have to sweep it up before you could start training.
“It was only a small room with the ring at one end, enough room for doing a bit of skipping and ground work, and then this little tea bar with a woman serving teas over the back. There’d be fighters going in, having a shower, coming out with nothing on at all and she’d be pouring out tea!
“The changing room there was just a little dark bit at the back with a bench and the showers. You’d get in the shower and you’d be in there for a little while when all of a sudden it’d turn freezing cold and Bill Klein’d say, ‘You’ve had enough hot water!’ and you’d have to come out. He’d been an Olympic wrestler at one time, and he wanted to show you that he was still the guv’nor – ‘I’m in charge!’ sort of thing – and he’d walk about with these dogs behind him.”
Despite these Spartan conditions, many leading British pros trained at Klein’s. Bill ran the gym until his death in 1957, aged 90. After that, the place was kept running for several years by others, but it was still informally known as Bill Klein’s gym.
‘THE ATMOSPHERE WAS LIKE PUTTING A NEEDLE IN YOUR ARM’