By James Morton
It was my father who, suffering from the stigma that he was in trade whilst his elder and younger brothers were a doctor and an accountant respectively, determined I must have a profession. Within weeks of my entering articles, I realised I was not cut out for the law and began to cast around for what other profession might have me. A lack of mathematics at what was then O-level disqualified me from accountancy, medicine, architecture, a commission in the services and almost everything else except the church where I could have at least counted the Easter offering. I had, however, failed what was then called Scripture so that was ruled out. And so I decided to become a professional wrestler. It is true.
In fact, wrestling was just beginning to become popular again, with both ITV and the BBC starting to show bouts on a regular basis and I discovered the men could earn more in a week than did the ordinary newly-qualified solicitor.
As a child I had been taken to the Winter Gardens in Morecambe to see the great villain Jack Pye (known as The Doncaster Panther and the Uncrowned King of the Mat), then in his late 50s, be disqualified in short order for tying the referee and his opponent Sandy Orford in the ropes and bouncing off them. But not before his own hair had been similarly tied, he was threatened with having it cut and a lady in the front row, who looked like my churchgoing Aunt Ada, swore viciously before stabbing him in the buttocks with some sewing scissors. I was hooked. But how could I begin?
In my innocence, I did not know that many wrestled under assumed names and I struck lucky when I rang Vic Coleman of Bromley after finding his name on a poster and then in the telephone directory. ‘You don’t want to be like Jack Pye, son,’ he said, when I explained my mission. ‘Learn properly’. When I told him I lived in north London, he added, ‘Go to the Ashdown. They’ll teach you’
They were Bill Coleman and George Mostyn , who ran the club as an evening class in a school building in the Hornsey Road. The club itself had a great tradition. It supplied every wrestler for the British team at one Olympic Games and it boasted the great amateur George MacKenzie who carried the flag at the 1952 games in Helsinki.
Looking back, I don’t think I ever paid any fee for my tuition as I was taught to bridge, not to pin myself (a single second was a pin then), the Flying Mare and generally get myself fit. What was so good about them was their patience and the fact that there was no question of hours of boring theory. It was straight on the mat that’s how you learned.
They were also kind. When I damaged my wrist, Bill found some grips to strengthen it. Sixty odd years later, I still have them somewhere. If you weren’t actually wrestling, you were expected to do exercises and that was where I had a cruel lesson. I was lifting some weights when an old man who had been watching, and who introduced himself as the Middlesex Lion, said, “Son, you’ve got it all wrong. You’ve got the strength but you ‘aven’t got the technique”. Sometimes I wonder if it was a metaphor for my legal career.
As the months went by, I progressed, and I thought I was rather good until I was matched with members of the English amateur side who happened to be in the gym. That was when I learned my deficiencies. There was no question of them punishing me deliberately. I just went flying through the air and, when I picked myself up, down I went again. But Bill and George were always there to encourage me to have one more try. If they had been my law tutors, I might have done a great deal better.
It was that evening I wore an England track suit. The club acted as an unofficial security force and we were called out to deal with unrest in the classrooms and corridors. I was not working and Bill told me to put on the top —‘It’ll impress them’ — which was lying about and go with him to deal with the trouble makers. When we got there it was all over but at least for ten minutes I wore an England top.
There was no side to anyone there. At the end of the evening, Bill and George helped the lowest of us put away the equipment. There were no showers at the school and I don’t remember much in the way of central heating. Throughout the winter we shivered as we ladled pans of lukewarm water over ourselves and each other. Nowadays, social anthropologists or psychologists would point to the homo-eroticism of it all but we were just cold.
At the time I was playing rugby for one of the many Saracens teams they ran back then. Somedays I could be as high up as their third side and some days it was in the ninth. They thought I was risking myself wrestling. The Ashdown members thought rugby was the dangerous sport.
Towards the end of my second season, I thought I had progressed sufficiently and so rang up the big London promoter Dale Martin in Brixton to see if I could have a trial. ‘Sure, son, come any Saturday afternoon with your kit.’ That Tuesday I was working out with a man who said his father was known as Mick the Miller (although I thought that was a greyhound) and had indeed wrestled the great Jack, when I felt a searing pain in my right knee. An X-ray showed the kneecap had fractured. It was all a bit symmetrical.
And so in one split second, the prospect of Young Jim Morton v Mick McManus at the Royal Albert Hall was gone for ever. During the weeks in hospital, I had no excuse not to study for the law finals. But I still often regret I never even made it v Bert Smalls on a Monday evening somewhere in the sticks.
Page added 03/12/2023
From Morecambe to Montmartre.
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