BOXING fans will know Jarvis Astaire as one of the sport’s key figures in the UK since the Second World War – but to limit him to just “boxing promoter” sells him short by a considerable margin.
Astaire, who died on August 21 at the ripe old age of 97, was also a businessman, property developer, television visionary and film producer who for a while in the 1970s served as manager to Dustin Hoffman, then one of Hollywood’s hottest stars.
But it’s his career in boxing that will mean most to the readers of this publication – and that’s more than enough of a story for most.
Those of a previous generation will remember Astaire’s role in the quartet that effectively ran big-time British boxing from the 1960s until the early 1980s. The Sunday Times used the word “cartel” to describe a group that saw Astaire as the business brain, Mickey Duff the matchmaker, Mike Barrett the promoter with the Royal Albert Hall contract and Terry Lawless the trainer/manager.
The four men strongly denied that they were unfairly treating the boxers under their wing, and eventually a British Boxing Board of Control investigation concluded they had done no wrong.
Astaire was born in 1921 in Stepney, in London’s East End, to a Jewish family that ran a milliners business. A job for a company making surgical instruments and artificial limbs earned him exemption from active military service, and World War II was still raging when he promoted his first boxing show.
A step up came when he became the manager of fellow Stepney man Sammy McCarthy, who brought his big amateur following into the pros when he turned over in April 1951. “Smiling Sammy” proved a big attraction through the 1950s, holding the British featherweight title in 1954-55 and losing for the lightweight crown in 1956.
As a manager, Astaire also worked with other British champions in Billy Thompson (lightweight), Peter Waterman (welter), Bobby Neill (feather) and Evan Armstrong (also feather).
Astaire’s entrepreneurial skills earned him a role under Harry Levene, one of Britain’s two big promoters (with Jack Solomons) in the post-War period. One of their big stars was the crashing, bashing Terry Downes, world middleweight king in 1961 and still an attraction in 1964 when a UK shot at world light-heavy champ Willie Pastrano was arranged.
With no suitable London venue available, the fight was moved to Manchester – which meant Downes’ capital-based fans would be unable to travel (the show, as was common then, happened on a weekday). Astaire persuaded the General Post Office to relax regulations and permit the closed-circuit broadcast of the big fight to a London cinema.
The event proved a huge success and by 1966 the closed circuit idea was big enough to enable Astaire and colleagues to lure none other than Muhammad Ali to London to defend his world heavyweight title not once but twice, against Henry Cooper and Brian London (and also to Germany to fight Karl Mildenberger).
If all this seems quaint to the modern tech-savvy reader, remember that as recently as the late 1950s a fight film was precisely that – a reel of celluloid in a metal canister that a courier had to carry on a plane from New York to London, where the BBC or the ITA (later ITV) would broadcast it a few days after the fight happened. Astaire’s astute vision helped change all that.
He was also in on the ground floor of London’s 1960s property boom, specialising in shopping parades, and served on the boards of major companies before in 1984 becoming deputy chairman of Wembley Stadium. That venue, along with its smaller partners Wembley Arena (now SSE Wembley Arena) and Wembley Conference Centre, had staged numerous shows promoted by the Astaire-Duff-Barrett-Lawless group.
With the quartet also controlling the prestigious Albert Hall, and monopolising the only regular TV outlet (the BBC), they dominated the British pro scene from the mid-1960s until the early 1980s when they were finally challenged by a young upstart Frank Warren.
In late 1984 the Sunday Times and the News of The World revealed that in 1979 Astaire and his three partners had signed a contract in 1979 agreeing to share equally income from boxing-related activities. BN Editor Harry Mullan put the story on the front page, saying any such deal could not have been good for boxers under the quartet’s control, but the Board of Control enquiry exonerated them and the Office of Fair Trading took no action.
In later years Astaire took more of a backseat role in the sport, but he never lost his interest in it. As late as 1986 he was still a listed manager (with a posh London W1 office address) in the British Boxing Yearbook, and I remember seeing him at a 1996 show at Brent Town Hall (down the road from Wembley) featuring rising lightweights Colin Dunne and Billy Schwer in separate fights. He would have been in his mid-70s then but was, as always, immaculately turned out.
For many years he was associated with the Variety Club and young people’s clubs, doing charitable work for which in 2004 he was awarded the OBE. In 2006 he was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
Yet his boxing career was only part of his remarkable story. In his 1999 autobiography, Encounters, he insisted that boxing never accounted for more than 10 per cent of his business activity, and added he resented the media calling him “boxing promoter Jarvis Astaire.”
