By Miles Templeton
ONE often hears modern fans debating who is the best ever British fighter. Most of the names that crop up are of men whose career took place within the last 30 years. There seems to be a view that modern fighters, because of their access to better training resources and an improved diet, are better than their counterparts of 50 or a 100 years ago. They aren’t.
Tough times breed tough fighters, and the old champions often had to contend with a physically demanding job as well as a ring career. Few of them could afford to rely on their boxing earnings only, and most of them worked a full-time job throughout their time as an active professional. Many of them were coalminers, for instance, and there would be few takers for that sort of work today.
Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis is, for me, the greatest fighter to come from these shores in the period before the second world war. His only rival during that era is Jimmy Wilde. Ted was British featherweight champion at 19 before he travelled to the States where he really made his name. After winning the World welterweight title in 1917, he returned to the UK and, within the space of 12 months, won a further three British titles as welterweight, middleweight and light-heavyweight.
Terry Downes wipes a tear from Ted Kid Lewis’ cheek (Photo: Derek Rowe)
At the time there were only eight weight classes, and Ted picked up the British title for four of them, a remarkable feat. Ted grew up on the mean streets of London’s East End in the Edwardian era and, as an immigrant Jew from Eastern Europe, he had to fight to survive. He had close to 300 professional contests and he fought in the toughest era of all, on both sides of the Atlantic.
In February 1922, he boxed Tom Gummer of Rotherham in a 20-rounder at the Brighton Dome. In his previous two contests, Lewis had defended his British middleweight title against Johnny Basham also winning the European title in the process, and then he picked up the light-heavyweight title with a 14-round victory over Boy McCormick. The Gummer bout was to be for the British and European middleweight titles, but Gummer came in overweight, and the bout went ahead as a non-title affair.
Gummer knew a thing or two about hard times himself. Having lost his father at the age of eight, he had turned to boxing so that he could bring extra money into the house to support his mother. During the Great War he served with the Lancashire and Yorkshire Regiment and was twice wounded in action, and he was also awarded the Military Medal for his bravery in the trenches.
After being demobbed in 1919 he resumed his boxing career, winning the British middleweight title in 1919 in a contest with Jim Sullivan at the National Sporting Club. He was a great rival to Lewis, although he was far less well-known, and a contest between the two men became inevitable.
Lewis was a good sportsman as well as a terrific fighter and he refused to collect forfeit from the Gummer camp when their man came in overweight. He was disappointed not to be defending his titles, but he decided that retribution was best sought from within the ring. He was in devastating form that night.
Taking the fight to Gummer immediately, BN reported that “Lewis looked determined and most menacing, attacking fiercely from the gong and rushing in, head down, to send in a shower of punches at the body”. Gummer hit the deck for a count of nine halfway through the opening round and Lewis wasted no further time with him, hammering the Yorkshireman to the body, bringing his guard down, and then nailing him with a finishing left hook.
In his next contest, Ted suffered his worst ever defeat, a one-round loss to Georges Carpentier, when he was hit by a shot when he wasn’t defending himself, thinking the referee had called ‘break’. Lewis would be a match for anyone today at welterweight and he is an all-time great.
