By Ron Historyo
Wrestling Heritage welcomes memories, further information and corrections.
Time and time again Ron Historyo has delighted us as he’s gone On The Trail of the background story of many wrestlers. Occasionally even Ron is stumped, and here he reveals some of the mysteries that remain.
Uncovering the history of British wrestling is an on-going process and since this piece was written some of the mysteries have been solved.
Bert Boratti
Since around 2008 I have been delving into anything old that I could get a lead on. Many hours in Manchester Library for a Manchester series, searching high and low through Stampede reports for our men in Canada, collecting bills along the way, covering the beginning of wrestling in many towns and on the Trail of eye catching names mainly of pre war wrestlers.
t’s been loads of fun and an easy to read style.
To come this far you can’t take it too serious or you would give in with frustration. For every story there are probably several failures. That is to say, I shone the light, but just could not quite get enough info and in some cases virtually non at all.
Bert Boratti. Who the hell is he? I never could find a picture.
You would think he could be Bert Assirati. I have seen him billed as Bert, Benito, Luigi and the Great Boratti, but not a shred of evidence that it was Bert.
He is described as six feet and trained by Pop Charnock. He does wrestle mainly in the north and sticks around for about three years. You could say that the war finished him, never to be seen again.
How the hell does he get to headline against Jack Sherry at Southampton?
Like I say no photo and nothing new on Google.
That’s the way it goes sometimes, I am not here to solve mysteries today, I am throwing them out there to our Heritage readers.
Wild Tarzan
Another one on my list, Wild Tarzan. They billed him from Canada and on some bills they had him in brackets as Jack Ridyard.
He was around for about four years at the end of the 1930’s and never seemed to be far from Lew Faulkner. I must have found a dozen matches with him fighting Vic Hesselle.
I just get the feeling he lived in Industrial Lancashire.
Genuine Canadians I could usually find in shipping/migration records, and most declared their occupation as a wrestler. No I could not find a Jack Ridyard wrestling in Canada or travelling to England. Could he be a coal miner from St Helens who could not tell his employer about his night life?
Again no picture, but I believe he did the Tarzan Jungle call when entering the ring and in 1939 perched a gas mask on his corner ring post.
I am stumped.
Does anyone know?
The Masked Marvel
And while I am pushing the fact that Wild Tarzan and Vic Hesselle looked as though they travelled together a lot, I can show you another frustration. The bill at the Preston Majestic featured a Masked Marvel.
We all know there have been a few but if one or two were very famous wrestlers I am pretty sure this one was just a copycat.
I found a newspaper report of the bill (left) and this marvel clad from head to foot in black was knocked out by Vic. Nothing wrong with that of course and the advertising no doubt drew a good crowd.
Nobody promised anything, but sadly there was no unmasking. Well I feel a bit cheated and I expect the people of Preston did back in 1937.
Same thing happened again at Grantham where the Masked Marvel just wore a red mask and was rendered “Hors De Combat” by some sort of Johanfesson sleeper.
Yes, despite the advertising of “Who is he, this prominent member of London Society?” there was never a hope in hell that there would be an unmasking.
The 1935 Photo
A different kind of a mystery is contained in a photograph dated 1935.
There were four bouts that night which meant eight wrestlers and also a guest in Reggie Meen. I assume that the two seconds were not on the picture which would leave the two men on the left as Promoter Jack Callaghan Jr and referee Rue Morris.
The bouts were Chopper Simms v Ronnie Marshall. Eddie Hurst v Carl Ferdinand. Ted Bell v Leo Lightbody. Phil Siki v Guardsman Wilkinson.
Now the big question is can we name them? For sure bottom left is Leo Lightbody and the coloured guy on the back row is Phil Siki who wrestled for a time as The Black Arrow. I think the guy on the extreme right is Reggie Meen.
Pure guessing from here on in on my part.
Bottom right might be Ted Bell who was sometimes called Candy Kid.
Next to end Top right might be Guardsman Wilkinson because I would expect him to be tall.
As for the other four, well I will throw it open if anyone want to tell me on the Forum.
Bill Benny
I really thought I was in for another big investigation when I found three wrestlers travelling to Australia in 1939. I had got used to working duel continents and wrote about Doug Clark and Mitchell Gill going to Australia and Sam Burmister coming the other way.
I discovered on 14th April 1939 a forty six year old veteran no doubt in charge of two other young wrestlers, age twenty four and nineteen, bound for Sidney on the Strathmore. I am talking about George Modrich who went out and billed himself European Champ and Harry Rabin and a young William Behene. All gave their address as 39 Mornington Terrace which I believe to be in Camden.I could find only minimum evidence of Rabin over there and nothing on Behene. Who could he be?
For a while I kept looking at the name Behene and turning the silent E at the end into a vocal one and I thought of a Young Bill Benny.
My imagination was working overtime.
But I then got another idea, you will see the name Pat or Paddy Muldoon working in Australia on the bill that mentions Rabin and also you see him the following year at Blackpool Tower working for William Bankier. He did a few shows in Newcastle and went missing for a couple of years and popped up in America in 1943.
The RAF service explains the absence and the age is an exact for for William Behene. But it remains a mystery and just a theory. Modrich was found easy enough headlining with strong man Sam Burmister.
So then I thought why not look at the origins of Bill Benny? We know all about the Manchester Night Club life, his fame and crowd appeal at Belle Vue and his early death.
What about his start in life? Well I found his death easy enough in the third quarter of 1963 in Manchester. Don’t know who reported it but he was stated to be age 45. That puts him born in 1918 plus or minus a year and would tie in with Behene.
Well nobody in England and Wales even seems to have a surname Behene and only one William Benny was born in 1918 plus or minus one year and that was in Redruth.
Was Bill from Cornwall or could he in in fact be Irish or Scottish?
He was even billed from, Canada, California and London up to 1950 and despite his reputation at Belle Vue did not seem to be billed there during the war. I found a Big Ben Sharpe and a Big Ben Jordan both from Canada but in the end I had no story to tell.
There would be no On The Trail Of Bill Benny.
Why don’t we know of Bill Benny’s origin?
Since writing this piece the 1921 census has been published and Ron discovered Bill Benny truly was as Cornish as they come. HIs dad was a cattle man. Very rare surname for his mother Menheniet(t)/ Menheniot an actual village in Cornwall. I think the name may have died out. When it comes to the census his mum ain’t there but Benny senior is claiming a step daughter of that name. Always unclear for these guys.
Alan Gutteridge
Never short of problems when researching wrestling I came across another one when having a look at early Jackie Pallo. Of course his real name was Gutteridge. There was no real story thus far, he started at the bottom with Dale Martins and lost a lot, I don’t know when the striped trunks came or when the pig tails started and the head swagger so that was it really. Trouble is, I spotted another Gutteridge.
Who was Alan Gutteridge, working on the same bill as Jackie?
From what I can see Jackie had no siblings, but Jackie’s dad Ernest had a lot of brothers, the whole family born Islington so I guess he must have been a cousin.
So Heritage readers, did anyone see or hear of Alan Gutteridge?
Golden Ace
Another mystery that has had me baffled is the Golden Ace. Originals are always interesting and of course it was the name adopted by John Naylor in more modern times.
Some bills have him winning the Perfect Man competition in 1936 and 1937 but I just can’t find such a competition.
Another clue is that Golden Ace was said to be a weight lifting champion. Golden Ace can be picked up from about1938 and works through the war billed from Leeds. If I was to go back to 1931 there had been another Perfect Man who had been a champion weightlifter. Sid Weston was actually from Heanor.
But of course this Perfect man was a Perfect man before 1936/37 He did though still wrestle right up to the war
So it’s another unsolved mystery.
Does anyone out there know the identity of the original Golden Ace?
Since writing this piece Ron has discovered Golden Ace was Laurence Arthur Chappell, with a date of birth registered as 27th October, 1898. He was the son of John Richard Chappell, a councillor in Leeds and owner of a sizeable painting and decorating firm. He’s in the A-Z.
The Wizard
Of course there are many wrestlers who nobody has ever found a photo of and also frustrating for me are all the wrestling halls that I have no photo of, such as the original Bolton Stadium, or Relwyskow’s Farrer Street Stadium, or the Stadium at Rotherham named after Sam Moreton, all of which I have written about.
Finally just to illustrate that sometimes you get a breakthrough, but what you find is not big enough to make a story. While trawling for info to write this article I found another one of those Mask v Mask matches with the loser guaranteed to unmask. Great for getting the customers in. Remember Unmasked in Hanley?
This could have been unmasked in Preston at the Majestic.
I give you the Wizard v The Brown Masked Marvel in 1939. It turned out to be true that the Wizard had travelled the world Wrestling. The Wizard succumbed to a double piledriver. This guy was born in Oregon and came here for about two years from 1937 and 1939.
His bouts with The Marvel must have been well practiced as there is another one shown in Nelson less than two months before with the Wizard working without the mask. They had no fear in billing him from Sweden or Norway. Within a week of the unmasking he was off to Montreal with his wife Doris. Not enough for a story but a good snip of info. His name Gilman Knutson.
Knutson had a good career in the states and went on to be a promoter.
One mystery leads to another because at the end of the day we have the question, Who was the Brown Masked Marvel? (Maybe it was Knutsons wife Doris !!!)
Well it was all local stuff and I know Billy Riley helped out at Nelson , so he would be one guess and for another perhaps Bob Silcock.
And that Heritage Readers is what it is like looking for stories. Some you win and some you lose.
Hope you enjoyed the ramble.
Historyo
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