Boxing's Strangest Fights by Graeme Kent

Author:Graeme Kent
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910232439
Publisher: Pavilion Books
Published: 2015-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

The Monocled Heavyweight

London, May 1931

Boxers have formed a staple ingredient of boys’ comics. They have come in many different guises, from Rockfist Rogan, the boxing pilot, to Red Fury, the fighting Red Indian. There have been boxing peers, detectives, scientists and school-teachers.

In reality, of course, the truth has been much more mundane. The majority of boxers have been down-to-earth young men engaged in the hardest sport of all. Yet for a brief period in the 1930s there appeared a heavyweight who could have stepped right out of the pages of the Wizard or the Hotspur.

His name was Desmond Jeans and he was a character. An adventurer who seldom remained in one place long, when he burst upon the boxing scene in a blaze of publicity he was dubbed the ‘Monocled Boxer’ for the eye-glass he sported.

Jeans was educated at a public school and was the brother of the actress Ursula Jeans who was to marry Roger Livesey, the well-known stage and film actor, star of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

Desmond Jeans had been born in India, where his father was a civil servant, and educated at Sherborne. His mother had been on the stage and the restless Jeans embarked upon a career as a professional dancer as a protégé of the instructor and band-leader Victor Sylvester.

After coming fourth in the world ballroom dancing championships the wanderlust bug bit Desmond Jeans and he toured Australia in a series of stage shows, with time out to work as a dock labourer and to attempt unsuccessfully to set up a world record for non-stop dancing. Between these activities he managed to win an amateur boxing tournament.

Jeans returned to England in due course to appear in a small part in the West End production of Hold Everything, and then was on his way again, this time to New York to appear in Bitter Sweet, Noël Coward’s great musical hit.

Back in Great Britain, Jeans decided that his acting career was not getting very far. He decided to try his hand at professional boxing. His dancing had kept him fit and he had always been athletic, playing rugby for Richmond.

Desmond Jeans had a flair for publicity and soon the newspapers were full of stories of a mysterious heavyweight who was in secret training to bring the world title to Great Britain.

Desmond won his first two contests, at the Holborn Stadium and in Paris, by knockouts, and won a second bout in Paris on points. With his monocle and glamorous background, he became a great attraction and a dazzling future was predicted for the newcomer.

Unfortunately Jeans began to believe his own publicity, and although little more than a novice he allowed himself to be matched against the gigantic heavyweight Jack Pettifer.

Pettifer had been boxing only a year but had attracted a great deal of attention with his enormous 6 feet 6 inch physique. He had been discovered by a manager washing dishes in the kitchen of Lyons’ Corner House in London. He was basically too

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