Referees who laced up the gloves themselves

By Miles Templeton

UNLIKE many other sports, notably football, a significant number of our boxing referees were ex-fighters themselves. Anyone who has fought competitively in a professional boxing ring is bound to bring a unique dimension to the skills required to control a contest as ‘third man’. Of our current crop of star referees, of which there are now 12, I can think immediately of Michael Alexander and Bob Williams, both of which were experienced fighters during the 1980s and 1990s, and are now excellent referees.

This trend has long been the case. During the late Victorian and throughout the Edwardian era it was more usual for a referee to come from a middle-class background and to officiate in an authoritative and brusque manner and very few of them had boxed in the pro game. If they had boxed at all then it was likely that they had competed as gentlemen for an amateur club. After the first world war things changed.

At the Ring, Blackfriars, for instance, three of the leading referees were Jim Kenrick, Johnny Summers and Alec Lambert and they had all boxed at the highest level. Kenrick, a flyweight who turned professional in 1898, had around 200 professional contests, many of them in the United States. He was an early claimant to the British Flyweight title in the days before the division had become properly established.

Johnny Summers was the British and Empire welterweight champion during the same era and he also had a long, tough career boxing the world’s best fighters in far-flung venues in the States and in Australia. Lambert boxed Ted Kid Lewis in 1913 for the vacant British featherweight title and was the 1909 ABA champion at the same weight.

One of the best referees during the golden years that immediately followed the ending of the second world war was the Scotsman, Eugene Henderson. He was the referee for both the 1946 battle between Freddie Mills and Gus Lesnevich and for Randolph Turpin’s unforgettable win over Sugar Ray Robinson in 1951. Although Henderson never reached great heights as a professional boxer, he did win the Scottish amateur title and fought for the Scottish welterweight title.

I featured Birkenhead’s Wally Thom in a 2019 article and mentioned that, as well as winning the British welterweight title in 1951, he later refereed five contests for the same title. During the 1960s and 1970s, the two leading referees in the UK were Harry Gibbs and Sid Nathan.

Gibbs only had a handful of professional contests in 1948, but he was a very good coach, and he owned the ring as third man. He was a very large man in contrast to little Sid, who boxed at flyweight immediately before the war, losing only two of his 14 contests. Between the two of them, this pair seemed to dominate most of the great British bouts of the 1970s and what a contrast they were, little and large in stature, but giants amongst the referees of the time.

While Sid and Harry were more likely to be officiating at the Royal Albert Hall and the Empire Pool, Wembley, where all the top bouts were fought, in the small halls and sporting clubs that provided the backbone of the sport men like Benny Caplan, Mark Hart, Harry Paulding and Frank Parkes were to be found, controlling the six and eight-rounders.

All four were good pros, Benny boxed for the British and Empire featherweight title in 1938, losing out to Spider Jim Kelly at the King’s Hall, Belfast. Hart, from Croydon, boxed for the British light-heavyweight title in 1950. Parkes and Paulding both boxed at a high standard during the 1930s. Parkes, from Beeston, had a 22-year professional career and he was one of only three men still boxing in 1956, who had competed in the 1930s, the other two being Albert Finch and Jackie Horseman.

It might not have been essential to have boxed to be a good referee, but it definitely helped.