Wrestling Heritage

By Ray Hulm

Wrestling Heritage welcomes memories, further information and corrections.

On the day that I retired from my final job as a lockkeeper I left the following on the wall. …… ” I started work at fifteen years of age. Worked on the river and at sea but I also worked in factories and fields, in the circus and in films. I never achieved much. But I never crossed a picket line. Never judged a fellow worker by their colour or creed Nor sucked up to the bosses for my own ends”….. Pretty much sums it all up.

Early Ramblings

London must have been a pretty grim old place in the autumn of 1942. The city had survived the blitz and the V1 and V2 bombardment was yet to come but rationing, the blackout, the news from abroad and the devastation of the blitz all around can not have made for an easy life. My dad, having survived a gas attack in World War One had re-enlisted as soon as the World War 2 broke out. He was stationed at a barracks in Hammersmith and my mother was a barmaid in the pub across the road. My mother had already had five children in a previous relationship. But somehow this odd couple, now in their forties, stuck together and made a home for me. Such was my start in life.

Hammersmith boy Chick “Cocky” Knight was in his prime at this time as was another wrestler who would become a boyhood hero, Bert Assirati. After the war we moved to Canvey Island in Essex, a strange marginal, “plotland” sort of place with wood and asbestos sheet bungalows, unmade roads and no main drainage. Most of it was below sea level.

My father taught me to box at an early age. Told me how he had known Peddler Palmer and had had sparred with Bombardier Billy Wells.  Told me how under the bare-knuckle London Prize Ring rules wrestling throws had been allowed. He also told me about Hackenschmidt  and Madrali the Terrible Turk. About Jack Johnson and Tommy Burns at Rush Cutters Bay.  The seeds  were being sown to turn me into a combat arts anorak. He also taught me that the straight left was the most important punch and that we must always be on the side of the workers.

One morning I was awoken early and told to get up straight away as the seawall had been breached, the island was flooding and we were all to be evacuated. Over forty people lost their lives on Canvey alone in the great East Coast floods.  We returned to the island briefly but my parents soon decided to decamp to higher ground and we moved to Leyton in East London.

It was in Leyton that I was introduced to the local boxing club. I was never any good but I loved the training and the atmosphere of the gym. Wrestling had started to be shown on TV. I read the wrestling posters on the walls on the way to school. I read everything there was to read on Bert Assirati, Spencer Churchill, and those larger than life Americans like Lou Thesz  and Buddy Rogers. It never crossed my mind that wrestling was anything less than 100% on the level.

A Kid For Two Farthings was shown at the local cinema Wow! That Joe Robinson was something else. I’m not sure who I was most smitten by, Joe or Diana Dors. When I started work aged fifteen I could afford to attend some shows at nearby Walthamstow and finally got to see the likes of Bert Assirati and Dara Singh climb through the ropes just feet away from me.

With my parents now retired they managed to get the money together for the deposit on a “two up two down” in the small Essex port of Brightlingsea. On my sixteenth birthday we upped sticks and moved. I went to Dale Martin shows at the Corn Exchange in nearby Colchester, got a job in a local boatyard, pumped weights in the backyard and dreamed of a life beyond this rural backwater.

By the time I was eighteen I was working in coastal shipping and river boats on the upper Thames. My own training was a thing of the past that would not resurface until my mid thirties. Life had moved on but I still maintained an interest in wrestling, boxing and physical culture. I remember one Scouse engineer that I sailed with who had been involved in the mat game as a youngster. When he had had a few pints of Guinness he would talk about being in Jack Sherry’s corner when he wrestled Man Mountain Dean and also fighting in the defence of Madrid with the International Brigade. I think he was surprised that I had heard about Sherry, Dean or the International Brigade. He also convinced me at last about the worked nature of wrestling. Looking back I’m so happy that my life was made the richer by people like this.

Tiring of those grim winters being bashed about in North Sea waters I decided give Mediterranean professional yachting a go. I don’t think that I was really cut out for dealing with the super rich but at least it was warmer. During that five year period I only attended one wrestling show, a floating wrestling fiasco in Monte Carlo. The ring was moored in the middle of an outdoor lido and the wrestlers rowed out to do the best they could on this very unstable platform. It was one of the very few time that I have walked out of any form of live entertainment half way through.

The best thing that happened to me was meeting the  attractive girl who was working on the boat next door to me in Antibes harbour. Fifty four years later we are still together. Returning to UK my new partner and I decided to have a go at back to the land smallholding. Later we would have our first child and live on canal narrowboats before eventually moving to a more settled life in Brighton. 

I started training again in Brighton and found that one of my schoolboy heroes, Tiger Joe Robinson, was running a small judo and karate gym in town.  I spent several years being scuffed around the mats but also listening to Joe’s many anecdotes about his father Professor Jack Robinson, the Grasmere Championships, working for Atholl Oakeley,  breaking into films and much more besides.  

A few years before we moved to Brighton Bert Assirati no less had been teaching wrestling at a local boys club. By the time I arrived on the scene there was a generation of ex students of the Islington Hercules working on the fringes of the mat game. One such group was sharing a gym with a kickboxing club that I was a part of which is how I started training with them. Eventually it was decided that I could take part in a show without being too much of an embarrassment. My opponent was Bobby England who did a great job of looking after me. I could not have been more nervous if I had been asked to do ten rounds with Frank Bruno.  Jackie Pallo and JJ were the main event on this show and provided all of the dressing room entertainment you would expect. This was all proving to be a mid-life crisis and a half but I would not have missed one moment of it. 

Now in my eighties I still train everyday, work the allotment, still dream about a smoke filled hall, the MC climbing through the ropes as the first two wrestlers make their way from the dressing room. 

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