Henry Cooper (21 page)

Although he will still be the first man to volunteer to find a lost golf ball, he does so rather more carefully now, particularly because the Kent countryside where he lives is fairly liberally stocked with ‘narrow strangers’ as Emily Dickinson memorably christened them.

At this stage I am trying to work out if there is anything that will actually make him cross, apart from his professional disdain for awkward southpaws, particularly those who attempt to rearrange his dangly bits. I am
certainly very clear now how hard his team must have had to work to bring him to the appropriate emotional match fitness, but what actually enrages him?

Others, with much more reason to be confused about this than I am, have, over the years, asked the same question. In October 1958, Max Baer, world heavyweight champion for a year less a day after he demolished Primo Camera in June 1934, was visiting London as a guest of Jack Solomons at the Harringay Arena. Jolly Jack had been told that the owners of the arena saw a greater future for the site as a warehouse and he therefore knew that the game would shortly be up. It was a gathering of the great and the good, all in black tie, and given that it was also the occasion of Henry’s celebrated defeat of Zora Folley Baer was rather interested to meet him. Danny Cornell introduced them and Henry was his usual sunny self. As Henry wandered off, Cornell takes up the tale:

It was actually quite difficult for Cornell to give a useful answer, as you might imagine. But Max Baer, the Clown Prince of Boxing, as he was known, was himself something of a comedian, but clearly grasped, as his remarks reveal, that there must be an element of schizophrenia in every 
boxer. Marciano had it, for example, and so did Joe Louis; that the memory of their actions in the ring are a blur when compared to anything else that they do. Marciano could never believe his aggression in the ring, when watching film of himself, but he apparently accepted the contradiction willingly. So, to rephrase Baer’s question – What makes him mean? Albina tells me: ‘We were watching the news; an old lady had been beaten up by some thugs and they showed her picture on the TV I glanced over at him; his face had suddenly gone quite grey. He said, “If I could get hold of them, I’d feed them some of their own medicine.”’

Well, Lloyd’s riled him, too. He had been an underwriting member since his retirement, introduced to it by his friend Charles St George. Lloyd’s was perceived to be the ideal business for anyone affluent enough who was too busy to manage their own affairs. The principle is simple enough: ‘names’, as the underwriting members are known, sign a commitment of unlimited liability and put up their wealth as collateral in exchange for joining syndicates, which receive insurance premiums. Their share of those premiums constitutes their income. Over time, Lloyd’s had become known as a profitable but undemanding way of achieving respectably high returns; it had paid the school fees of several generations of that section of Britain that has always had assets but not necessarily any cash.

But, of course, nothing is for nothing. It was also known, in the City at least, that while there was clearly no great trick to this, Lloyd’s was not an institution that was necessarily blessed by a high frequency of PhDs among its workers. Nice people, some of them, but not necessarily
la crème de la crème
in the IQ department. It was held that it 
was the employer of last resort for someone who desired a career ‘in the City’. The last examination that many of them had passed, the standard joke went as I recall, was probably the cycling proficiency test. On a re-take. As an institution, it was also astonishingly lax, a fact well hidden behind a resolutely stuffy facade. Small minds and loose fiscal morals are dangerous, particularly in a place that works on the basis of unlimited liability and is – ahem – self-regulated. When one observer opined that the new stainless-steel building rather resembled a huge dairy, one who overheard drawled elegantly: ‘Yes, it does; those ****s inside it have been milking it for years.’

The punters were not to know that all was not well, of course, because no one told them; informed insiders (very few of whom actually suffered any serious financial loss) knew, however, that they were riding the tiger. Legions of glib salesmen were dispatched to the shires, with a simple purpose: to tap in to the emerging housing boom in order to top up the dwindling internal reserves of cash and assets that were being destroyed by a succession of disasters, particularly from America, as a series of class actions on behalf of victims of asbestosis started to have their impact. Lloyd’s was, in the parlance of the industry, ‘under-reserved’ – functionally broke, in fact.

The recruitment drive had started in the middle of the 1970s as the potential horror of the asbestosis crisis made itself clear. There was no public discussion of the matter; it simply became a tightly guarded secret, the One Big Thing which was fully understood by the uniquely under-qualified stewards of this looming disaster. The level of liability as defined by the ever-generous American courts was 
astonishing; clearly something had to be done. When Henry joined Lloyd’s the organization had around 6,000 members; it had been growing modestly at around 200 or so per year since the war. From 1975, though, the rate of growth was startling, culminating in a peak membership of 32,400 in 1988. That arithmetic is self-explanatory. In truth, though, there was no big secret about asbestos, as the following anecdote suggests.

One friend of mine, an engineer by profession (we shall call him Brian, as that is his name) and a man a little older than Henry, returned from his National Service in the Royal Air Force in 1949. He went to work as an apprentice in the family firm and, full of enthusiasm, threw himself into a relatively simple task, the re-commissioning of an ancient asbestos-lined crucible. As he started to take it apart, the foreman, aged
circa
three score years and five, rapped sternly: ‘Don’t you touch that, Master Brian, that ****er will kill ’e.’

Brian queried, not the (permissible) over-familiarity, but the simple accuracy of the statement: ‘That there is asbestos, young Brian; it’s ****ing deadly.’

‘Who told you that?’ replied my friend.

‘My grandfather,’ replied the old sage shortly, suggesting that this intelligence had originated at around the time of the Great War (if not before), when the majority of these financially deadly (and perpetual) policies were being written.
*

So, there was no great secret about asbestos; it was a matter of shop-floor, if not public record.

It was held, as uncertainty grew, that these vast claims would dwindle eventually and the new money coming in would balance the overcooked books. In short, Lloyd’s of London became a giant Ponzi scheme, a task made easier by the fact that it had been permitted, ten years into its secret crisis, to remain self-regulating in the wake of ‘Big Bang’. Henry recalls, slightly agitated now: ‘As soon as those people signed on the dotted line, they were all completely broke, but they just didn’t know it; all their money was gone – all of it – before they even walked out of the door. It was outrageous.’

It certainly was. As the claims multiplied, the syndicate salesmen worked even harder, and with some success, as upwardly mobile punters, completely sold on the sheer respectability, the grandness of the place, were sucked in, and indeed persuaded their friends to join. As the crisis deepened and the news started to leak, the scandal finally broke, with expected results. A whole swathe of the population were financially wiped out as their assets were put under the hammer in an already uncertain economy battered by the delayed action effects of the 1987 stock market crash. The liquidation of so much real estate certainly contributed to the collapse of the housing market. Some investors were so badly clobbered that they were unable even to buy newspapers.

Of course, this being Britain, there was no particular public sympathy for this new underclass, which had been so instantly created, perhaps, indeed, until the news came that Henry Cooper himself had fallen victim to this unique fraud, one of the longest-running and cynical in history.

He was clobbered, but not as hard as some. He had, in his first career, been hit far harder than that and recovered. As he had been an active (if slightly nervous) member for over 20 years, he had learned the value of ‘stop-losses’, which can be used to put a floor under the level of liability, but there was still a huge hole in his finances. Friends, notably Jimmy Tarbuck, were quick to offer financial assistance, but his boxer’s pride asserted itself and he declined.

The original purpose behind Lord Lonsdale’s belts had in fact been primarily an economic one. If a fighter won a belt outright, he had not only a trophy but also an object that was a genuine store of value against hard times or the breadline. Henry famously owned the freehold on three of them and, despite an ardent lobbying by friends and family, he decided to sell them. ‘It was either that or risk losing the house, and I wasn’t going to do that,’ he told me.

I well recall the giant collective sigh of dismay that this announcement triggered, whether from those who realized full well how hard he had worked to achieve this unique accomplishment, or from what we can happily refer to now as his ‘general fans’; it was a huge wrench, and when the belts went under the hammer at a country auction in June 1993, they realized a modest £42,000, against an estimate of £100,000, which was the cause of further sympathy. But their sale provided a necessary stopgap, saving him from the unwelcome clutches of the stone-faced hardship committee at Lloyd’s, a body which had already made a reputation for itself as one which took few prisoners, despite the essential rottenness of the institution which it represented. He was also pleased that the three belts had stayed together, a unique memento of a unique career, whoever it was who 
now owned them. It was the sad result of one well-known British institution cynically ripping off another.

Unsurprisingly, his knighthood, announced in the 2000 New Year’s honours list, pleased him hugely. Rather as Buckingham Palace had come to the rescue after his controversial loss to Amos Johnson with a decent lunch, now here they were again after the embarrassing snakebite episode. It was, he recalled to me, his pride in his family aside, the highlight of his life: ‘I was a bit sad that Mum and Dad couldn’t have seen it, but the old heart gets thumping and the adrenaline gets going.’ Rather like the old days, in fact …’

What was particularly pleasing for Henry was the fact that although both his OBE and his papal knighthood had been for services to charity, his KSG was for services to boxing, which in these politically correct days was extraordinary, and therefore all the more to be appreciated, not the least by him. He was the first English boxing knight, although remember poor old Daniel Donnelly, who had been rather impulsively dubbed at the behest of the Prince of Wales the year before he became George IV Donnelly had of course at the time been a subject of the Crown, but, having died a year later, in circumstances already described, was rather forgotten, except apparently in Co. Kildare. So, Henry Cooper was not the first boxing knight, rather that honour had fallen to the man whose heroics, passed down to him in song, had so inspired little George Cooper in the 1870s. The connection is pleasing.

So, after an Odyssey through this fighter’s life, it is a relief but, I confess, no particularly great surprise, to discover that 
the public Henry Cooper is also the private one. There is no spin there; he is the natural inheritor of the mantle of all those other great British champions, and the British public, which can so often be entirely correct in their collective assessment of a person, have maintained their respect and regard for him for two generations, ever since that evening in London in 1963, which has passed into history, for the general public at least, as the most memorable fight in British heavyweight history. He lost it, but nobody cared then, and they certainly don’t care now. They can easily forget his successors, and probably will.

As this book was being finished, we suffered a family tragedy when my wife’s poor mother lost her battle with cancer. I was sitting with the nurse as the shifts changed. We were in the kitchen, drinking some of my execrable coffee, as her colleague started work upstairs. She asked me what I was up to; I told her that I was finishing the biography of Henry Cooper. Her tired face lit up a little and she smiled: ‘Ah, my son will look forward to that; so will I, actually.’

Pleased, I asked her how old her son was.

‘He’s ten,’ she replied, ‘he’s a great fan of Henry’s.’

As the sport of boxing has re-invented itself in Britain after its slump in the wake of Henry’s retirement, many things about it changed. The
Thomas à Becket
is still there in the Old Kent Road, and it is still a pub, but its
once-famous
upper room, with the gym, the skipping ropes, the punch bags, the speedballs, the whole place redolent of sweat, pain, effort and liniment, not to mention Jim Wicks’s ratty little office where so much business was
done, is no longer. It is now an art gallery, which some might find entirely appropriate.

Peter Mario’s restaurant, along with Jack Isow’s, closed some time ago, and Sheekey’s is now re-invented and relocated – still excellent, though – but you can still go to Simpson’s in the Strand to eat; they will serve you, with impeccable courtesy, from a very similar menu to the one from which Jim Wicks chose so gravely all those years ago, ensconced in his usual stall in the first-floor dining room.

Jim Wicks died, nine years a widower, on 10 December 1980 and until he fell ill with the cancer that would plague him for the last 18 months of his life, he and Henry would continue their traditional culinary progression around the West end. Towards the end, Henry asked him why on earth he had never written down his life history: ‘Well, son, it’s simple,’ the old man had wheezed, in his unique Bermondsey patois. ‘The bigger the truth, the bigger the libel suit.’