PANTHER CYRIL would make a few quid each week working as a sparring partner at the Thomas A’Beckett in the Old Kent Road.
By about 1980, the Beckett was one of the last remaining boxing pubs, a place where the diehards could watch a few rounds and drink a few rounds. The days of the Panther were gone forever. There were very few boxing gyms available in London to the professionals in the early Eighties, which is hard to believe now with a gym on hundreds of streets.
The Beckett is the place where Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Robinson once trained, the place where Dean Powell and Teddy Atlas once slept on the floor. It is a place of myths, tales, filthy mirrors and ghosts in our business. Powell ran the place as a kid of just 22; he was in charge of the last great years.
It was a secret retreat even during its heyday in the Sixties and Seventies; it was not a place that a stranger or unknown face could just visit. “Is he with you?” someone would ask if there was a new face. And there were men inside that old place with ancient connections to the boxing business; the Dog (matchmaker/trainer), the Scarf (local face), the Sword (Samurai enthusiast).
Most Beckett stories are just that – stories. However, enough are true and there remain a few men and women who witnessed some of the sparring, some of the sessions and then got to go downstairs to the bar. Not many, mind. And the smoke surrounding the ring was genuine.
There is very little film of sparring or just the gym in general. The history of the place is slowly being lost as generations die and just the beautifully framed black and white photographs remain.
There are the iconic images of boxers pounding the dirty bags in perfect pictures; Henry Cooper with a Lonsdale t-shirt and the tiniest pair of bag gloves hitting the bags with venom. Shorts, t-shirts tucked in and boxing boots.
That was the Beckett uniform and, obviously, old-school sweat suits when weight was an issue. There were always puddles and mounds of soaking clothing in the dressing room. I can vividly recall a meeting with Lloyd Honeyghan in the late Eighties when his discarded kit was steaming from between his feet when he sat and talked.
In so many of the photographs from the pub’s golden days, often in the background smiling and laughing, stood Beryl Cameron-Gibbons. Blonde and done, always. It amazes me to this day that nobody has made a film about Beryl. She was the first woman to hold a BBBof C promoters’ licence – she was just 35 at the time in the late Sixties.
She ran the Beckett for nearly 20 years; she was the Beckett. She was also – to use the vernacular from the time – a blonde bombshell. She was in charge until about 1983 and that means the Seventies belonged to her and every single quality British or American fighter trained there.
There are many Beryl stories and some are even true. Reg Gutteridge told me this old classic about a trip to Milan to watch Akan Minter in 1977; Minter stopped Germano Valsecchi in a European middleweight title fight. It seems the flight was lively and Beryl was “obviously well beveraged on arrival”. On fight night at ringside she looked like she had been “poured into a lace dress and some was spilling out.” Minter was a regular at the Beckett.
Beryl had Tommy Gibbons – not officially her husband – by her side when she took over the pub and gym in the Sixties. Tommy died young; after that she was treated like a queen by fighters, fixers and the gangsters downstairs. Not all wives and girlfriends were quite so fond of her. It seems the press pack loved her. And so did the faces.
The dumbest man in south London hit Beryl one night and Tony Lambrianou, a known associate of the boxing twins, Reg and Ron Kray, went in search of the ex-boyfriend. “I went to shoot him, but I think he emigrated,” Lambrianou said. The story is that the man did emigrate. She died in 1988.
Parts of the Beckett’s history are a bit murky; there were a lot of known and infamous criminals at the bar. It was not a place that encouraged snooping, but it was a place that thrived on tall tales.
it was a place from a lost time and back in the Seventies, it looked and felt like it was the Fifties. Men wore suits, ties, hats and smoked right on the side of the ring. It was quite intimidating being in that ring.
At some point in the Seventies, a little flyweight wandered in. He was local, he was chirpy, a rascal and he was in and out of the place until the doors closed at some point in the Nineties. Kellie Maloney, by the early Eighties, was the competition secretary at the Trinity Club, which was located a few minutes away from the Beckett. A lot of Maloney’s years were spent in the Beckett.
Maloney was a classic Beckett person; amateur boxer, trainee priest, apprentice jockey, boxing manager, publican and now she runs a little menagerie in Portugal. Beryl would be proud of her and all she achieved in the game.
Breweries and bad management killed the Beckett. It was a Vietnamese restaurant for a bit and in the late Nineties I made a pilgrimage there once when the gym upstairs was closed, but the small, dirty, smelly old ring remained. Pictures of Beckett legends like Mark Rowe and Jimmy Revie were still on the walls. I would like just one afternoon back at the Beckett with a tape recorder. Just one afternoon would be a joy, a search for the lost spirit of men like Panther Cyril and women like Beryl Cameron-Gibbons.
