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Jack Lang was a powerfully built twelve stoner from Nantwich who had a background as a weightlifter with local honours to his credit. He was a very strong man with an enormous chest, neck and shoulders.
After leaving school he became a butcher’s assistant and joined the Crewe Barbell Club. In 1953 he founded the Nantwich Physical Culture Club at the Olympic Gym in Albert Street, Nantwich, a body building and wrestling club. The club’s humble appearance, a large unused garage, belied it’s success. It was said that the club looked more like a shed and couldn’t afford a ring for training, which meant members wrestled on a tarpaulin stretched over the ground.
Wrestler Jack Lang’s birth name was Henry Green, always known as Harry, and he was born on 8th February, 1932. He chose the name Jack Lang when he turned to professional wrestling in 1958. He had been a second for Wryton Promotions at Crewe Town Hall for some time and asked Stoke’s Jim Mellor to train him for the professional ring.
He wrestled in the Midlands and North in the 1960s and 1970s, mainly for Independent promoters but occasionally for Wrytons Promotions His opponents included Pete Lindberg (billed as the Clash of the Strongmen), Llew Roberts, Gordon Corbett, Jack Martin, Eddie Rose and Paul Mitchell.
Llew Roberts, who was to become a good friend, remembered Jack with some bitterness, for Llew had his first bout with him and shown no mercy. Llew told us Jack dished out a fairly savage beating. Llew then joined Panther’s Gym in Manchester where a couple of the local hard men took him under their collective wing and showed him how to even the score with Lang which he did two years later when he broke Lang’s nose in a bout described as ” a bit of a ding-dong” by promoter Jack Cassidy.
Jack went to Australia for several years and wrestled extensively, his robust style earning him a good reputation. He was a serious-minded wrestler who was not interested in anything else but overcoming opponents with his great strength. Eddie Rose told us that outside the ring he was a cheerful man with a hearty sense of humour, a contrast to his ring personality.
After retiring from wrestling Jack trained as a Physical Therapist and set up practice in South Wales. Following retirement he returned to Britain and died in Cheshire in 2002.
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