The Great White Hopes Read online

  In addition, boxing was immensely popular in Australia, and in Squires and Lang the country had just produced a pair of formidable heavyweight boxers of its own. So highly were these two regarded by their fellow-countrymen that the world’s leading big men, Jack Johnson and Tommy Burns, had been imported in the hope that the favoured home-grown boxers would defeat them. Unfortunately, both Australians had been crushed by Burns, while Johnson had compounded the national disappointment by thrashing Lang. These impressive results had led to a public outcry for Burns to defend his title against the black challenger, and Johnson had been allowed to return to meet him.

  The black fighter’s subsequent victory was a watershed in the history of sport. For the first time, boxing left the sports pages and was featured all over the world in major news stories on the front pages of the contemporary tabloids and broadsheets alike. Typical was the New York Evening Journal, which published a picture of Johnson occupying most of the front page, unprecedented coverage for a sporting personality. Caucasian supremacy had been publicly challenged and humiliated. The fact that the breakthrough had occurred in the haphazard and often crooked world of professional boxing made matters even worse. What, people wondered, appalled, would happen to the established order with the scarcely known and unpredictable ogre Jack Johnson now bestriding the sport like a colossus, a figurehead for his oppressed race?

  In the immediate aftermath of his victory the new champion felt that, under the circumstances, he would be more popular on a tour of the remoter areas of Australia than he would in the large cities. He cashed in on his new title by touring Western Australia, fighting exhibition contests and making public appearances. In the outback, with his outgoing personality, gold teeth, shaven head and colourful ring attire, he was a great success. By the end of his short small-hall tour of the Antipodes, he had almost doubled the money he had been paid for fighting Burns. If he had been self-confident before, Johnson was now positively ebullient.

  An example of his strong self-worth and refusal to buckle under white pressure occurred in the gold-mining town of Kalgoorlie, when he stopped for a drink in the Palace Hotel. While he was there, one of his many new-found instant friends admired Johnson’s superb defensive qualities but remarked that it would not have been much of a fight at Rushcutters Bay if Burns had not done most of the attacking. Johnson disagreed in lordly fashion, stating that his ability was such that he could force any opponent to lead, while picking him off with his devastating counter-punches. At this, a 61-year-old respectably dressed gentleman with luxuriant mutton-chop whiskers stepped forward from the back of the crowd and informed Jack Johnson crisply that never in a million years could the new champion force him to lead unless he wanted to.

  A murmur of recognition went round the bar. The challenger was Larry Foley, the father of scientific Australian boxing, the man who had learnt his trade from Jem Mace, the Swaffham Gypsy, and who had passed it on in turn to such ring luminaries as Peter Jackson, Frank Slavin and Bob Fitzsimmons. Now a local politician, he was in Kalgoorlie for an assembly of state councillors.

  Lazily, Johnson unpeeled himself from the bar to face his affronted elderly opponent. He raised his massive fists and started swaying gently, his feet planted firmly on the floor. For three minutes, by the watch of one onlooker, Charlie Rose, who described the odd confrontation in his autobiography, Life’s a Knockout, Johnson feinted, punched the air and made fake attacks. It was all to no avail. The vastly experienced Foley just stood his ground stolidly, refusing to respond to any of the champion’s overtures.

  The crowd began to grow restless and jeer at Johnson. The black fighter was not disturbed. Suddenly he bent forward and murmured a scatological remark about Foley’s parentage. The Australian veteran flushed, spat an oath at Johnson and lashed out with his right hand. Johnson deflected the blow easily by placing a massive hand across Foley’s biceps at the crucial moment. Calmly he murmured to the still outraged councillor that the drinks were on Foley.

  It was Johnson’s first public exhibition as the champion of how he could always get under the skin of self-important members of the establishment. However, Jack Johnson knew that the big money lay back in the USA, and that, scarred by his experiences, confrontational, self-assured and afraid of no one, he was about to return and make the whites pay dearly if they wanted the title back.

  All over the world writer after writer began to stress the fact that Johnson had been completely superior to his outweighed opponent, and declared that a white contender must be found to wrest the title back from the black man. Jack London, the novelist, who had witnessed the bout, led the way. ‘There was no fight,’ he wrote in a New York Herald article syndicated across the world. ‘No Armenian massacre could compare with the hopeless slaughter that took place in the Sydney Stadium today.’ Australian writer W.F. Corbett, also present, demanded despairingly, ‘We now have a black champion of the world. Who will dethrone him?’ The Melbourne Herald said of Johnson’s victory, ‘Already the insolent black’s victory causes skin problems in Woolloomooloo . . . It is a bad day for Australia and not a good one for America. The United States has 90,000 citizens of Johnson’s colour, and would be glad to get rid of them.’

  The New York Times demanded the instant emergence of a white champion to undo what had happened in Australia and take the title back from Johnson. The black journal the Colored American Magazine, on the other hand, described the result of the bout simply as ‘the zenith of Negro sport’. It was rumoured in the USA that President Teddy Roosevelt himself, a keen follower of boxing and smarting from recent public condemnation after the disciplining of a black regiment involved in an uprising in Texas, had expressed his concern that a black man had won the supreme crown of pugilism.

  This was taking place at a time when blacks made up roughly 10 per cent of the population of the USA, and 89 per cent of the black population lived in the southern states. Only five months earlier there had been a major racial disturbance in Springfield, Illinois. A white man had died of razor wounds inflicted upon him by a black man, and a white woman had subsequently falsely accused a black man of raping her. In the riots that had ensued, businesses had been burnt to the ground, forty black men had been attacked and several killed. Armed militia had been called out and five white men had been shot and killed by the part-time soldiers. After matters had calmed down eighty people were indicted and brought to court. There had been only one minor conviction.

  As Jack Johnson prepared to leave Australia for home, more and more newspapers in Europe and the USA joined in the campaign to find a Caucasian heavyweight who would bring the title back to the white race. Johnson was vilified as newspapers devoted hundreds of column inches to the search. Competitions for big men were held in halls all over the world. Managers began to scour the factories, farms, armed services and even prisons for a behemoth who would be their meal ticket in the lucrative scramble to dethrone the black champion. The White Hope campaign had started. It was to lead to seven years of trouble and madness.

  2

  THE FUTURE ASSISTANT PROVOST MARSHAL OF BAGHDAD

  The first fighter that Johnson met after winning the title was probably one of the worst. He was also one of the most interesting and irrepressible. The name of the first White Hope was Victor McLaglen. He was a 22-year-old English soldier of fortune, the son of a South African bishop. For the previous five years, since 1904, he had been working his way optimistically around North America doing a variety of menial jobs. His fighting record was negligible. He was matched against Johnson as a lastminute substitute because the champion and his connections knew that the burly and willing youngster had no chance.

  McLaglen claimed to have been born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, in 1886, one of eight brothers and a sister, although his birth certificate gives the less salubrious East End of London as his birthplace. He had been brought up in South Africa, where his father became Bishop of Claremont. The family then returned to England in 1899, at the time of the Boer War. One o
f McLaglen’s older brothers, Fred, joined the colours and left for Cape Town.

  The 14-year-old McLaglen dearly wanted to follow him, but his father forbade it. McLaglen, who captained the Tower Hamlets schools’ football team, was already tall and looked older than his years. He ran away from home, lied about his age and joined the Life Guards, in the anticipation of being sent to the war. The attestation book of the 1st Life Guards for this period records that he enlisted on 30 July 1901. He gave his age as 19, his trade as engineer, and claimed to have been born in Stepney, London. His complexion was dark and his eyes were hazel.

  To his chagrin, Trooper McLaglen, instead of fighting the Boers, found himself spending most of his time on guard duty outside Windsor Castle. It was here that he first learnt to box and took part in his regimental heavyweight championships, fighting grown men when he was only 15 or 16.

  For a future professional fighter McLaglen had joined the Army at just the right time. The first independent Army championships had been held only seven years earlier, in 1894. In the following year the sport was given an enormous fillip when Field Marshal Lord Wolsey, the Commander-in-Chief of all Britain’s armed forces, attended the Guards’ boxing competition at Chelsea Barracks and was so impressed by the fighting spirit he saw in the ring there that he declared that in future he wanted to see every soldier a boxer.

  Wolsey was just the man to be impressed by a public display of aggression. As a young subaltern he had decided that the fastest, if riskiest, way to promotion was to place himself in harm’s way at every conceivable opportunity. At a speech at the Brigade of Guards’ championships in 1899, before a wildly cheering audience, he stressed the importance of boxing for soldiers: ‘It is conducive to endurance and pluck, and makes men of them – the sort of men who alone can defend us against our foes.’

  Efforts to make Army boxing socially acceptable, however, were less successful. When Colonel G.M. Fox, Inspector of Gymnasia at Aldershot, invited a number of ladies to attend the Army finals, the first contest they witnessed was such a bloody one that they swept out en masse, and the experiment was not repeated. But Wolsey’s imprimatur was all that the sport needed in military circles. Officers everywhere did their best to accede to the field marshal’s expressed wish, and placed boxing high on the agenda of training exercises. By 1900, there were 137 entries for the Army championships for other ranks. The officers had their own less-well-supported championships. In the championships for privates and NCOs, entries included seventeen sailors and a number of members of the part-time militia, an early form of the Territorial Army. They were allowed to enter because many of the militia were on standby to leave their civilian occupations to be shipped to South Africa.

  The standard in Army boxing was quite high at this time. In one championship final, Private Ham of the Ninth Lancers, a former professional who had boxed under the name of the Bermondsey Boy, was outpointed over three rounds by Sergeant Collins of the Guards. Afterwards Ham protested indignantly that he could not get going in the limited time provided. With the connivance of his officers and the tacit approval of Lord Wolsey and the War Office, the soldiers were rematched over ten rounds at the National Sporting Club. This time Private Ham won.

  Like many later boxers, McLaglen found that boxing was a passport to a relatively easy life in the Army. He was excused many of the fatigues that were the lot of his less athletic comrades. He was still only a boy, fighting men, and it was during this period that he began to accumulate some of the battered features which were to serve him well as a ‘heavy’ in his later Hollywood pictures.

  The Boer War ended in 1902 without having needed McLaglen’s services. After three years of home soldiering, bored and disillusioned and still, at 17, too young to serve, he was at last discovered by his father, who promptly informed the authorities that his wayward boy was still under age and would have to be discharged immediately. The Life Guards agreed and McLaglen was released. The official reason given was ‘Discharged in consequence of him having made a misstatement as to his age on enlistment’. McLaglen’s service conduct summary was adjudged to have been very good.

  Army service had not made McLaglen lose his taste for adventure. ‘By this time, my brothers, all of whom were as tall as I, had scattered all over the world,’ he recounted in a later newspaper interview. ‘I decided I wanted to go to Canada.’

  When he was 18, McLaglen crossed the Atlantic steerage and found work as a farmhand at ten dollars a month in Ontario in south-eastern Canada. He had not been there long when he heard of a silver strike at Cobalt, not too far away. McLaglen abandoned the farm at once and joined in the rush. Only seven years had passed since the famous Klondike gold rush in the Yukon had made wealthy men of some itinerants.

  The silver had been discovered in 1903 when two men employed to find suitable timber for the construction of a railway line had instead discovered rocks containing metallic flakes as they scouted the edges of a remote lake. They sent samples of the rocks to be analysed and were told that the gleaming flakes were silver, assaying 4,000 ounces to the ton.

  In the following year the two pioneers established a silver mine in the region. Any attempts they might have entertained of keeping their discovery to themselves were thwarted when a third man, a blacksmith called LaRose, also stumbled across the secret. Mining lore has it that one day, while working, he threw his heavy hammer at a fox which was annoying him. The hammer missed the animal but knocked a lump out of a piece of rock, disclosing signs of silver deposits. Whatever the truth of this, by 1904 it was known that there was silver in large and valuable quantities in the region of Lake Timiskaming. Even official reports emerging from the area were using such emotive descriptions as ‘pieces of native silver as big as stove lids or cannon balls lying on the ground’.

  It was essential to get there before the lakes and rivers froze over and isolated the region for the winter. There was a newly constructed railway line heading northwards from Toronto, but the majority of prospectors came through the passages between the hills in great convoys of humanity, packers carrying their equipment on dog sledges at ten cents a pound, while the hopeful fortune-hunters trudged behind. McLaglen was among the hundreds of hopefuls who arrived among the first wave.

  There was nothing in the region but snow, ice and flat rock. Even so, the mining camp sprung up on every level surface that could be found. Cobalt, so named for the mineral found lying interleaved with the silver deposits in the ground, was known as that most cherished of institutions, a ‘poor man’s mining camp’, because the silver veins lay so close to the surface, it could be mined with a pickaxe and shovel. A historian described the first shipments out as ‘slabs of native metal stripped off the walls of the vein like boards from a barn’.

  McLaglen joined up with several other prospectors and started digging some way from the centre of the region. Although he was still only 19, he had achieved his full growth, being a muscular 6ft 3in at a weight of just under 14 stone, and was fully able to hold his own with his companions at digging or fighting off potential claim-jumpers.

  For months they toiled under conditions of great hardship. Eventually they found silver and started to pile it up. It was then that McLaglen encountered his first great setback. It was discovered that he had no right to the claim. He was always vague about the exact details. The most that he would later ever say about the event was, ‘I was deliberately cheated out of my share of the silver after I had worked a year. We had found the ore but I had failed to sign certain papers that would have entitled me to my share.’

  Whether or not McLaglen was defrauded by his partners is uncertain, although they would have been brave men to have attempted to cheat such a husky youngster. It is more likely that he fell foul of mining bureaucracy. A regulation was being widely enforced whereby a valuable mineral had to be found on the site before a claim could be registered. Many miners found that their claims did not belong to them because they had registered them before striking lucky, and this was prob
ably McLaglen’s misfortune.

  Whatever the cause, in 1905 the disillusioned 19-year-old was broke and in urgent need of money. For shelter he built himself a wooden shack on the shores of Lake Timiskaming. By this time Cobalt had become a boom town. Major mining companies and syndicates were moving in to work alongside the fortune-hunters. At its peak, 10,000 people were living in the town.

  The tough miners were in urgent need of forms of relaxation on which to spend the fortunes some of them were accruing almost overnight. Saloons and brothels flourished, taking in thousands of dollars a week. One popular form of entertainment was the arrival of battered but experienced professional boxers and wrestlers, willing to take on all comers for a price. These were familiar sights in mining camps.

  The pioneer in this field had been the veteran Australian heavyweight Frank Slavin. A few years earlier he had toured the mines of the Klondike gold rush in Alaska, interspersing his own efforts at prospecting with fighting before enthusiastic crowds for enough money for another grubstake. Slavin was past 40 when in 1902 he had engaged in his last mining-camp bout, and his example had opened the door for many others.

  In McLaglen’s case it was a professional wrestler who arrived at the mining camp. The down-and-out McLaglen accepted the man’s challenge and defeated him before a large audience of miners. He won only a few dollars, but many of the miners had bet on him to win, a sign that the young giant already had something of a reputation as a fighter. After McLaglen’s success, the winning punters passed the hat for him, and he ended up with almost $500, more money than he had ever seen before.

  For a man of his strength and size, fighting seemed an easier option than mining. McLaglen took the decision to become a professional – challenging anyone in the area at wrestling or fighting, either with the gloves or bare fists. Among the tough but untutored prospectors he proved a real handful, taking a share of the gate money for his bouts from any local entrepreneur who cared to make the arrangements.