Battling Jack: You Gotta Fight Back

It is the remarkable tale of a man whose indomitable spirit has out-stared ignorance and prejudice, tasted triumph and celebrity, and endured hardship and tragedy. Jack's father, Lionel Turpin, came from British Guyana to volunteer for the British Army during the Great War. He was wounded on the battlefields of France and invalided to Warwick, the first black man to settle there. Lionel married a local girl but his early death left her struggling to raise their three sons and two daughters in pre-Welfare State England.

As young men, the gladiatorial glamour of the ring lured Jack and his brothers into professional boxing. From a home-made backstreet gymnasium, they punched their way into the record books and into the hearts of the British people. Battling Jack charts the remarkable life and times of the man who was once Britain's busiest featherweight. It offers a ringside seat at heroic battles and comic encounters as Turpin vividly recalls the sport, sex and slapstick of life in the now forbidden boxing booths of the travelling fairs. He takes us behind the scenes of a scandal that rocked the sporting world and into his confidence over the mystery that surrounds his younger brother's death by gunshot.

Complete with previously unpublished photographs, this is a wonderfully candid account of the life of a very singular man. Heartrending, raw, honest and funny, Battling Jack is a story that had to be told.

I'm standing on the corner of Willes Road, Lemington Spa, twenty or thirty yards from where we live at No.6. Me mum's warned me, 'Keep on the footpath, right against the wall.' I've obeyed her exactly and rubbed along the wall away from the bicylces and the carthorses in the road; away from the feet of the people walking home from work. I seem to have been waiting for ever. Suddenly, I see him coming slowly towards me from the foundry where he works as an iron moulder. He's wearing his tweed jacket and the billy-cock hat he sometimes folds up and puts in his pocket. I'm jumping up and down with excitement. He's holding up his hand like a policeman to say 'STOP! DON'T RUN TO ME' I'm a bit bumble-footed and inclined to fall over a lot. He's about eight foot tall. He's smiling a big warm safe smile as he's reaching down to swing me onto his shoulders. From high up in the air I can hear him talking to me as he carries me to the door of our basement flat. His voice is a soft as velvet. I can feel it on the outside of my ears like somebody stroking them. He's asking me how I've been today. He's playing the violin and making me laugh by lying on the floor and lifting his back off the lino so's only his feet and his head are touching the ground. The violin is singing a hymn. Me aunt Gert is picking me up and pretty near putting me in the coffin with him: 'Kiss him ta-ra'...

—excerpt from Battling Jack

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