Saturday, 11 June 2016
Friday, 10 June 2016
Thursday, 9 June 2016
Wednesday, 8 June 2016
Poetry reading at Newcastle's Mordern Tower to honour Basil Bunting
50th anniversary of Bunting's Briggflatts to be marked with Morden Tower reading
Basil Bunting's modernist masterpiece will be read in full at the famous Newcastle venue where Bunting himself once read
David Whetstone
2 June 2016
The 50th anniversary of Basil Bunting’s famous poem, Briggflatts, is to be marked with a series of weekend events which will see the reopening of Newcastle’s Morden Tower.
Bunting (1900-85) was born in Scotswood, Newcastle, and went on to lead a colourful life.
A Quaker, he was imprisoned as a conscientious objector during the First World War and then went to London where he encountered the work of poets including Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky.
Later, in France, he met Pound, a major figure in the modernist movement.
During the Second World War Bunting served in Military Intelligence in Persia (now Iran).
The 50th anniversary of Basil Bunting’s famous poem, Briggflatts, is to be marked with a series of weekend events which will see the reopening of Newcastle’s Morden Tower.
Bunting (1900-85) was born in Scotswood, Newcastle, and went on to lead a colourful life.
A Quaker, he was imprisoned as a conscientious objector during the First World War and then went to London where he encountered the work of poets including Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky.
Later, in France, he met Pound, a major figure in the modernist movement.
During the Second World War Bunting served in Military Intelligence in Persia (now Iran).
A Morden Tower reading by American poet Gregory Corso, centre, with fellow poets Laurence Ferlinghetti (hand on mouth) and Basil Bunting, right
Afterwards, back in his native North East, he earned a living working for The Journal and Evening Chronicle while writing poetry on his train journeys to and from home in the Tyne Valley.
Eventually his poetry was discovered by young poets including Tom Pickard.
In 1966 Briggflatts was published. Named after a Quaker meeting house in Cumbria, the poem is now celebrated as a modernist masterpiece.
In the 1960s, after the ancient Morden Tower on Newcastle’s City Wall had been pressed into service as a venue by Tom and wife Connie, Bunting read there with the American beat poet, Allen Ginsberg.
The 50th anniversary programme has been put together by Bunting enthusiasts including Alex Niven, who is editing the poet’s letters, historian Bill Lancaster and Tom Pickard.
Afterwards, back in his native North East, he earned a living working for The Journal and Evening Chronicle while writing poetry on his train journeys to and from home in the Tyne Valley.
Eventually his poetry was discovered by young poets including Tom Pickard.
In 1966 Briggflatts was published. Named after a Quaker meeting house in Cumbria, the poem is now celebrated as a modernist masterpiece.
In the 1960s, after the ancient Morden Tower on Newcastle’s City Wall had been pressed into service as a venue by Tom and wife Connie, Bunting read there with the American beat poet, Allen Ginsberg.
The 50th anniversary programme has been put together by Bunting enthusiasts including Alex Niven, who is editing the poet’s letters, historian Bill Lancaster and Tom Pickard.
Basil Bunting in Newcastle in 1970 with, from left, fellow poets Barry MacSweeney, Stuart Montgomery and Tony Harrison
It will take place on June 24 and 25, beginning on the Friday evening with an anniversary reading of Briggflatts at the Morden Tower.
Bill Lancaster said American poet August Kleinzahler, a distinguished former student of Bunting, would start the reading which would be shared with Tom Pickard, Newcastle Central MP Chi Onwurah and students.
At 10.30am on June 25, there will be a walking tour of Bunting’s Newcastle led by a city guide. Then, in the afternoon, Bill Lancaster, in a celebration of the City Walls, will talk to Yale University historian Keith Wrightson, who is from County Durham, about the notorious plague year of 1636 when the city lost half its population.
Finally a tribute concert will take place at the Mining Institute featuring readings and folk music performances in honour of Bunting’s love of music.
Keep an eye on Facebook (Briggflatts: 50) for further details. And also look out for Morden Tower developments.
Plans are afoot to bring it back into regular use. “It is one of the most internationally significant cultural venues in Newcastle,” says Bill Lancaster.
It will take place on June 24 and 25, beginning on the Friday evening with an anniversary reading of Briggflatts at the Morden Tower.
Bill Lancaster said American poet August Kleinzahler, a distinguished former student of Bunting, would start the reading which would be shared with Tom Pickard, Newcastle Central MP Chi Onwurah and students.
At 10.30am on June 25, there will be a walking tour of Bunting’s Newcastle led by a city guide. Then, in the afternoon, Bill Lancaster, in a celebration of the City Walls, will talk to Yale University historian Keith Wrightson, who is from County Durham, about the notorious plague year of 1636 when the city lost half its population.
Finally a tribute concert will take place at the Mining Institute featuring readings and folk music performances in honour of Bunting’s love of music.
Keep an eye on Facebook (Briggflatts: 50) for further details. And also look out for Morden Tower developments.
Plans are afoot to bring it back into regular use. “It is one of the most internationally significant cultural venues in Newcastle,” says Bill Lancaster.
Tuesday, 7 June 2016
Neil Young in Glasgow 2016
4/5stars
SSE Hydro, Glasgow
In an increasingly rousing show, the grizzled cat in the hat spans five decades with thunderous, heartfelt pleas to save the planet
Malcolm Jack
Monday 6 June 2016
After recent dalliances with combusting custom converted electric cars and less than highly praised high-fidelity music players, Neil Young is back on firmer and more familiar ground with his anti-agribusiness concept album The Monsanto Years.
“Look at Mother Nature on the run, in the 21st century,” sings the grizzled dude hunched over a beat-up old upright piano in a black fedora hat and T-shirt emblazoned “EARTH”, as he contemporises a lyric from 1970’s still miraculous sounding After the Gold Rush to roars of approval from the crowd. (The line “I felt like getting high” also gets its own telling ovation.) The 70-year-old Canadian folk, country and rock icon was writing about the embattled natural world long before most people had even heard of their carbon footprint.
SSE Hydro, Glasgow
In an increasingly rousing show, the grizzled cat in the hat spans five decades with thunderous, heartfelt pleas to save the planet
Malcolm Jack
Monday 6 June 2016
After recent dalliances with combusting custom converted electric cars and less than highly praised high-fidelity music players, Neil Young is back on firmer and more familiar ground with his anti-agribusiness concept album The Monsanto Years.
“Look at Mother Nature on the run, in the 21st century,” sings the grizzled dude hunched over a beat-up old upright piano in a black fedora hat and T-shirt emblazoned “EARTH”, as he contemporises a lyric from 1970’s still miraculous sounding After the Gold Rush to roars of approval from the crowd. (The line “I felt like getting high” also gets its own telling ovation.) The 70-year-old Canadian folk, country and rock icon was writing about the embattled natural world long before most people had even heard of their carbon footprint.
In an atypically theatrical start to proceedings, two men dressed like poor farm hands scatter seeds across the stage, ahead of a lassoing opening solo acoustic segment that includes Heart of Gold, still powerful anti-heroin anthem The Needle and the Damage Done and, performed on a wheezing church organ, Mother Earth (Natural Anthem). After a time, as the young bucks from Promise of the Real emerge – Young’s latest backing group and collaborators, a five-piece Californian jam band featuring Willie Nelson’s sons Lukas and Micah (the former rocks a kilt) – men in hazmat suits pretend-spray pesticides about their feet.
GM foods, corporate greed and America’s busted rural economy are clearly on Young’s mind at the moment, although strangely he largely eschews songs from The Monsanto Years, save for the inclusion towards the end of weary country love song to a wounded planet Wolf Moon, and the record’s supermarkets-spearing title track. (Its low choral drawls of “at Saaaafeway” sound like the most dissuasive advertising jingle ever penned.) But no matter, considering the diverse and career-spanning array of songwriting riches otherwise disbursed over two-and-half hours.
They’re arranged roughly on an increasing scale of heaviosity, from the harmonica-licked rootsy likes of Out on the Weekend and Unknown Legend through to a handful of Crazy Horse numbers starting with a sludgy-rousing Down By the River that lasts nearly 20 minutes by the time its droning strains finally fade. Promise of the Real prove very able accomplices, whether hitting levitational multi-part chorus harmonies, or clustering around their esteemed patron for a feedback-whacked guitar solos tossing wig-out.
Enjoyment of the show’s final act is substantially contingent on an appreciation of protracted instrumentals, but whether you’re a fan of long-form cosmic gnarl or not, you’ve got to agree that nobody does it quite like Young. Come a 15-minute Love and Only Love he’s lost in his own fretboard in front of 13,000 people, deafeningly coaxing out the final chord longer than entire songs had lasted in the show’s opening phase. After that it’s approving dad hugs all round for the band, and a short time later, a curfew-busting encore of Fuckin’ Up – a tractor-strength reminder why every generation that values howling riffs and angry dissent will find inspiration in Young’s evergreen natural anthems.
• Neil Young and Promise of the Real play SSE Arena, Belfast (028 9073 9074) 7 June; First Direct Arena, Leeds (0844 248 1585), 10 June; O2 Arena, London (0844 856 0202), 11 June.
Our own correspondent thoroughly enjoyed the show and the whisky in The Ben Nevis, where a glass was raised to Terry. However, he points out that the two men dressed as poor farm hands were, in fact, rather attractive young women.
Monday, 6 June 2016
Dave Swarbrick RIP
Folk musician, singer and songwriter who was a member of Fairport Convention
Derek Schofield
Friday 3 June 2016
The folk music fiddler Dave Swarbrick, who has died aged 75, was a formidable and intuitive musician who first made his mark with the Ian Campbell Folk Group in the early 1960s. With the folk singer and guitarist Martin Carthy, Swarbrick formed the best-known folk duo of the 1960s, and as a member of Fairport Convention, he directed the band through its early folk-rock period, and emerged as a songwriter of distinction. Various other musical collaborations followed, but the duo with Carthy endured.
Swarbrick was born in New Malden, Surrey, to Mabel (nee Salkeld) and Frederick Swarbrick, but the family soon moved to Yorkshire, where he first learned to play the violin, and then to Birmingham. At 15, he became an apprentice printer and, with the fiddle confined to the attic, he played the guitar in a skiffle group, which won a competition. The prize was to meet the local folk musicians Beryl and Roger Marriott. Beryl was an accomplished pianist who had made recordings and radio broadcasts, and was playing nationally for folk dances. She told him that guitarists would soon be two a penny, but fiddlers would be hard to find.
Before long, Swarbrick, universally known as Swarb, was playing the fiddle in Beryl’s English folk dance band and they also paired up in the Emerald Isle Ceilidh Band, which introduced him to Birmingham’s Irish musicians. Swarbrick also played alongside Beryl’s close friend, the Scottish fiddle player Kate Graham and, within a short time, he was absorbing English, Irish and Scottish tunes and styles.
Swarbrick followed on from Graham as fiddle player for the Radio Ballads, the groundbreaking radio documentaries produced by Charles Parker, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger. He played on the coalmining programme The Big Hewer (1961) and The Fight Game (1963), about boxing.
The first meeting with the Ian Campbell Folk Group came earlier, in 1959, when he shared a railway carriage with the group on the way to a London concert. After a music session on the train, Swarbrick’s ability to pick up and play a tune came to the fore when he went on stage with the Campbells. He soon joined the group, performing at their Birmingham folk club, at concerts, on television and on several albums. Swarbrick’s presence marked out the Campbells from the other guitar-driven folk groups of the period. “We became the group with the fiddler,” Ian Campbell later wrote.
Through the 1960s, Swarbrick accompanied the singer and folklorist AL Lloyd on albums for the Topic label, including Lloyd’s selection of erotic songs, The Bird in the Bush (1966), and an LP of whaling songs, Leviathan! (1967). The two men had an instant rapport, with Swarbrick’s fiddle weaving in and around Lloyd’s vocals.
In 1965, Swarbrick quit the Campbells’ group and headed off to Denmark to get married. Turned back by immigration because he didn’t have a work permit, he returned to the friend who had seen him off on the ferry – Carthy – who invited Dave to join him on a folk club tour for half of the fees. The duo became permanent, and they took the folk scene by storm – Carthy’s singing and the often improvised interplay between his guitar and Swarbrick’s fiddle were heard on such traditional songs as Byker Hill, Jack Orion, Sovay and Bonny Black Hare. For contractual reasons, Swarbrick was given second billing on Carthy’s first three solo albums, but they shared the credits on the next album, But Two Came By (1968). The emphasis on songs on these albums did not accurately represent the duo live, because instrumentals were an integral part of the Carthy-Swarbrick performances.
Swarbrick’s first solo album, Rags, Reels and Airs, came in 1967, produced by Joe Boyd, with accompaniment from Carthy and the guitarist Diz Disley. Two years later, when the rock band Fairport Convention changed musical direction to embrace English folk music, their producer, Boyd, invited Swarbrick to play on their third album, Unhalfbricking (1969). He played electric fiddle on four tracks, most memorably for Sandy Denny’s singing of A Sailor’s Life. But it was playing alongside Richard Thompson that captivated Swarbrick, and by August he and the band were rehearsing the epic folk-rock album Liege & Lief.
Swarbrick made the fiddle a lead instrument alongside Thompson’s guitar, and immediately the two men were writing songs together. Swarbrick provided the tune for Crazy Man Michael, and the partnership resulted in classic Fairport songs – Walk Awhile, Sloth and Now Be Thankful. But when Denny, Thompson and Ashley Hutchings left the band, Dave found himself lead singer, main instrumentalist and songwriter. The influence of Lloyd and Carthy can be seen in the traditional songs that Dave brought to the band, while his early days playing with Marriott supplied many of the tunes.
Not quite sure whether they were a rock band or a folk group, Fairport went through some uncertain periods in the 1970s, and from 1976, Swarbrick released a series of solo albums, with accompaniment from musical colleagues.
Loud amplification having seriously impaired his hearing, Swarbrick left Fairport in 1981 and moved to Aberdeenshire. He performed in concerts billed as Dave Swarbrick and Friends, and in 1983, moved to Northamptonshire, and formed a new acoustic folk band, Whippersnapper, with three multi-instrumentalists. By this time, Fairport had established their annual festival in the Oxfordshire village of Cropredy, and Swarbrick became a regular guest, performing with the band and others.
Swarbrick left Whippersnapper in 1989, by which time he had been reunited, part-time, with Carthy. Their first reunion album together was Life and Limb, a live recording that included reworkings of some of their most memorable songs together, including Byker Hill.
By the mid-90s, Swarbrick’s health was failing – the result of years of smoking – and he emigrated to Australia. He continued performing, most notably in a duo with the Scottish singer-songwriter Alistair Hulett. He returned to the UK in 1997, but as he was unable to perform regularly, his financial position was precarious.
In 1999, a national newspaper printed an obituary piece about Swarbrick when he was still lying, ill but alive, in a Coventry hospital. “It wasn’t the first time I’d died in Coventry,” he joked. Its publication galvanised support for him, and SwarbAid was launched. At occasional concert appearances, Swarbrick appeared on stage with an oxygen cylinder to offset the effects of emphysema.
A double lung transplant in 2004 transformed his life and he continued to perform with Carthy, Hulett, and his new band – Dave Swarbrick’s Lazarus. In later years, the fiddler received many awards, including the gold badge of the English Folk Dance and Song Society and lifetime achievement and best duo at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards.
His most recent solo recording was raison d’etre (2010), which nevertheless featured a range of former musical collaborators.
Married several times, Dave found true love with the artist Jill Banks, who cared for him through his periods of poor health and who survives him, along with three children, Emily, Alexander and Isobel, eight grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
• David Cyril Eric Swarbrick, folk musician, songwriter and singer, born 5 April 1941; died 3 June 2016
Sunday, 5 June 2016
Saturday, 4 June 2016
Muhammad Ali RIP
Muhammad Ali obituary
One of the greatest heavyweight boxing champions the world has seen, with courage, conviction and wit that made him an inspirational figure
Frank Keating
Saturday 4 June 2016
Muhammad Ali, who has died aged 74, was acclaimed by many as the greatest world heavyweight boxing champion the world has ever seen. He was certainly the most charismatic boxer. His courage inside and outside the ring and his verbal taunting of opponents were legendary, as were his commitment to justice and his efforts for the sick and underprivileged.
Three times world champion, Ali harnessed his fame in the ring to causes outside it. He was a convert to Islam and the personification of Black Pride. He anticipated the anti-Vietnam war movement of the 1960s by refusing to join the armed forces.
He made goodwill missions to Afghanistan and North Korea, delivered medical supplies to an embargoed Cuba, and travelled to Iraq to secure the release of 15 US hostages shortly before the first Gulf war. Repellent though he found many aspects of US foreign policy – and repellent as the establishment found him when in 1967 it banned him from the ring for three years for refusing the draft – the nation embraced Ali as time passed, realising his unique ambassadorial value. In 2005, he received his country’s highest civilian honour, the presidential medal of freedom, from George W Bush, an incumbent whose views he must have detested.
But it all stemmed from boxing. His matchless magnificence, the self-proclaimed “greatness”, was invented early as a cheery prizefighter’s publicity stunt. It was a greatness that was to balloon and achieve near-universal acceptance as he became acknowledged as a beacon not only for downtrodden African Americans but for global Islam as well, not to mention the anti-war movement or poverty in developing countries. In the middle of press conferences, reporters would earnestly ask him about solving the Palestine problem, or if he could have a quiet word with Moscow about President Ronald Reagan’s star wars programme. Ali was a rebel with a cause – lots of them.
He played the sovereign to the hilt. He played the victim. He played the clown. He played the camera. But, above all, he played the sport. He was the best heavyweight boxer there had ever been since the Marquess of Queensberry set down his rules in 1867, undeniably the best since Kid Cain KO’ed Sugar Ray Abel. First as Cassius Clay, then as Ali, this remarkable boxer totally reset the marks, utterly changed all inviolate techniques and tenets. Four years after winning the light-heavyweight gold medal at the 1960 Olympic games in Rome, he won the undisputed professional world heavyweight championship, taking on all comers. He was to regain the title twice, an achievement that remains unmatched. His career in the professional ring spanned an astonishing 21 years. Of 61 contests, he lost only five, four of them when he was long past his majestic best. Thirty-seven victories were knockouts.
Ali’s fabled predecessors in his kingdom were Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano. Johnson was a puncher-boxer and dandy; Dempsey an uncomplicated hitter; Tunney had grace and nerve and fast feet; Louis’s fast hands punched in a blur of combinations, and he had a killer instinct as well as chivalry; Marciano had relentless oomph and steam-hammer cruelty. Ali had every single one of all those qualities in abundance, as well as timing, intelligence, wit and an extraordinary courage which, in the end, becursed his wellbeing. Yet, through the final third of the 20th century, rheumy-eyed, scarred and bent-nosed ancients would shake their heads at his virtuosities, sigh, and insist that the big, bold champions of their far tougher olden days would have ambushed, cornered, speared and most damnably done for the swankpot in no time. But as the fearless Ali strutted on, inventing new ways, new scenes, new angles, new endings, those croaking pronouncements of veterans petered out. No one believed them any more, not when Ali was in his prime, in his pomp.
He was born the eldest son of Cassius and Odessa Clay in Louisville, Kentucky, and named Cassius Marcellus after his father. His mother was listed on the birth certificate as a household domestic, his father as a signwriter. The family lived on Grand Avenue in the segregated city’s black west end. In the Kentucky state census rolls, all four of his grandparents were described as “free coloureds”. One of Odessa’s grandfathers, Tom Moorehead, was the son of a white man called Moorehead and the partner of a slave named simply as Dinah. Odessa’s other grandfather was a white Irishman, Abe O’Grady, born in County Clare, who married a “freed slave woman, name unknown”.
It was a small but happy family (there was soon a second son, Rudolph), in which penury was taken for granted. The brothers were both good boys, the neighbours recalled, unfailing attendees of the Baptist Sunday school. Odessa was a serene and saintly homemaker, though her husband was a rascally tale-teller and liked to drink. This led to occasional court appearances. He paid the fines and, as a self-imposed additional penance, painted religious murals for various Baptist chapels around the city. The two boys would sometimes help. “Louisville was more peaceful, less dangerous then,” Rudolph recalled many years later, “except if we strayed off-limits, then white boys would threaten: ‘Hey, nigger, get back to your own.’”
Young Cassius was no scholar, and by the end of his schooling, only an occasional attendee. He could scarcely read or write when he graduated from Central high school in 1960, and ranked 376th in the graduation class of 391. Long before then, however, his abundant energies had been devoted to boxing.
When he was 12, in October 1954, his cherished bicycle was stolen. The white policeman, Joe Martin, to whom he reported the theft, happened to be the organiser of a boys’ boxing club in the basement of the city’s Columbia auditorium. He never got his bike back, but it was a life-changing encounter. Encouraged also by a black trainer, Fred Stoner, within two months the spindly, sassy youngster weighing 90lb had won (on a split decision) his first official three-minute, three-round amateur bout against another rookie, Ron O’Keefe. Over the next six years he contested a further 107 junior bouts, won two national Golden Gloves titles and two national Amateur Athletic Union titles, and was chosen for the US team for the 1960 Olympics. He leapt to such glamour with relish – and a nerveless, original skill – and in the final of the 178lb (light-heavyweight) division, the 18-year-old defeated – and bewildered and perplexed – the three-times European champion Zbigniew Pietrzykowski, of Poland.
These were the first Olympics to be televised live around the world. And the world took notice. I did, for sure, and remember thinking: “This madcap kid doesn’t even hold up his guard. He just dances and sways – and punches in lightning flashes.” I still recall Neil Allen’s prescient report in the Times: “The American has given the impression of being so much a showman that we have waited throughout the tournament for someone to wake him up with a solid punch. Nobody has, and in the final last night Clay, like some loosely strung marionette, put his punches together in combination clusters and pummelled the Pole about the ring. Only great courage kept the triple European champion on his feet. We still have not seen whether the new gold medallist can take a punch but I expect him to be among the professionals next year so we shall know his worth soon enough.”
And so it came to pass. In 1960 a consortium of old-money Kentucky businessmen were ready to launch the young Olympian’s paid career – with a $10,000 down payment and a guaranteed $333 a month against ring earnings (the latter was split 50/50 for the first two years, then 60/40 for the next four of the six-year contract). It was a good, fair deal, and three days after signing, on 29 October 1960, Clay made his debut as a pro and defeated in six one-sided rounds Tunney Hunsaker, a former chief police officer, in Louisville’s packed Freedom Hall. Hunsaker lived off the history of it till his death 40 years later. The consortium hired a canny veteran, Archie Moore, as Clay’s trainer, but the two never got on and instead he went south to Florida, to Angelo Dundee’s celebrated Fifth Street gym in Miami. The skilled and caring Dundee was to be at Ali’s side and in his corner for the next 21 years.
As his fleet and rangy physique bulked up, his looks and build now matched his charm and cheek. The artist LeRoy Neiman observed: “Suddenly he resembles a piece of classical sculpture with no flaw or imperfection, his features and limbs flawless and perfectly proportioned.” The engaging nature, too, began to resonate as Clay cut a swathe through the well-selected heavyweights’ Second Division and he allowed his ego full rein on self-promotion. Imitating the white, vaudeville television love-to-hate wrestler Gorgeous George, his forecasts bragged the precise round he was going to win, sometimes combining such box-office larks with couplets of doggerel. One was: “I’ll Just Say ‘Boo!’/He’ll Go in Two” (Lamar Clark, KO 2); another was “Ol’ Mitt Likes t’Mix/He falls in Six” (Alex Miteff, KO 6). In 1963, Clay returned to Europe for his first foreign professional fight against Henry Cooper (“London’s a Jive/’Enery Lasts Five”), and although he was floored for the first time, he duly stopped Cooper in the fifth – as he had predicted.
Spring 1964 was momentous for Clay in several ways. Dundee, daringly, deemed him ready for Sonny Liston, the world heavyweight champion. Liston smiled for once. The boxing fraternity chortled. This, or so the knowing forecast went, would be the end of a half-diverting saga of an appealing loudmouth. We would hear of him no more, for Liston and his ogre status made both an art and science out of first, intimidation, then sadistically inflicted pain. Hadn’t Liston not long before humiliatingly laid to waste, twice inside six minutes, the Olympic champion of 1956, Floyd Patterson?
Liston was presumed invincible and the greenhorn, fresh-faced challenger was an unprecedented 8-1 underdog – odds that lengthened when, at the weigh-in, Clay’s apparent hysterics had doctors pronouncing him traumatised by fear. Come the bell, the upstart nervelessly played it cool, almost a laughingly gay matador, his speed of hand and foot totally nullifying Liston’s wicked jab, the key to his armoury. Dismantled brick by brick and tile by tile, Liston aged 10 years in less than 20 minutes and retired on his stool before the start of the seventh (the round in which the challenger had predicted “the ol’ bear would be trapped and wrap’t”). On 25 February 1964, Clay was crowned world heavyweight champion for the first time. In the rematch in May 1965, Liston keeled over in a fainting funk inside a round.
Two days after his first defeat of Liston, Clay announced his conversion to Islam, and on 6 March, he changed his name to Muhammad Ali. Liston later complained that the Black Muslims, a separatist sect, had threatened him in an attempt to throw the fight. Old ham boxing writers were happy to believe him, and so were America’s rightwing rednecks. Such a charge was at least given credence as the newly renamed boxer was a minister in the Nation of Islam, and the group’s self-proclaimed “messenger”, Elijah Muhammad, had, to all intents, become the boxer’s manager. (Ali was to convert to orthodox Islam in 1975.)
The US of the mid-1960s was a nation seething with racial undercurrents. (Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965 and Martin Luther King three years later.) The rest of the world was comparatively oblivious to all of this, and while to a large, white tranche of the US, Ali became public enemy No 1, his televised contests with Liston had girdled the globe so, even by then, whatever name he chose, his sporting legend was assured.
However, for all his brilliance in the ring – hands as fast and deadly as a cobra’s strike, feet in a riverdance blur never before seen in a heavyweight – America’s inevitable white backlash to his religious defiance bit back with merciless retribution. This change of mood among white Americans coincided with Ali’s second US army call-up to serve in Vietnam. Although he had already failed in 1964 the draft’s preliminary intelligence tests in literacy and numeracy (placed at just 16 in an elementary attainment level of 30) – “I said I was the greatest, not the smartest” – fresh calls for his induction came in 1966.
Establishment outrage reached spittingly aggressive proportions when Ali, pleading deferment on religious grounds, told reporters: “I ain’t no quarrel with them Vietcong … no Vietcong ever called me ‘nigger’.” Within an hour, outraged, all US boxing bodies suspended his licence and stripped him of his title. In June 1967, a court confirmed the ban unanimously. Ali was prevented from boxing until 1970 – that is, between the ages of 25 and 28, which undoubtedly should have been the pinnacle and prime of his athletic resplendence. His really “greatest” years were arguably stolen. (The conviction for refusing to join the armed services was reversed in June 1971 by the US supreme court.)
When the three-year ban expired, he returned to the ring, in October 1970, with a three-round stoppage of Jerry Quarry in Atlanta, Georgia, although observers could already detect a glimmer of unease about his work. He knew the ravishing speed and the split-second timing of his punches were fractionally out of kilter. He never reclaimed the full package; lost property, stolen property. I was pleased, at least, to have witnessed his pre-ban splendours – say, against Cleveland Williams at Houston in November 1966, or Zora Folley in New York in March 1967.
Nor, after the ban, it must be said, was Ali’s passing, nasty and vindictive side ever again in evidence, such as when he bullyingly and hurtfully “carried” the hapless, injured Patterson in 1965, or malevolently taunted to painful humiliation for the full 15 rounds Ernie Terrell, who had addressed Ali as Clay at the weigh-in at Houston in 1967. Those were not pretty sights.
If the two fights with Liston, epic in their theatricality and outcome, had begun to compile the legend, then the three contests with the uncomplicated, brooding warrior Joe Frazier, in 1971, 1974 and 1975, clinched the immortal deal. Here was an unmissably dramatic, defining, second act. Only six months after the exile’s return against Quarry, Ali squared up to the remorselessly committed hitter “Smokin’ Joe” to challenge for his own usurped title. After a thunderously pulsating, draining 14 rounds it was dead-level. In the last, a fearsome Frazier hook crunched into Ali’s jaw, broke it, and dumped him on the canvas, sprawling on his back. Frazier deservedly won the decision – but the fact that Ali somehow gathered himself to his feet and attempted to fight back not only had the fans round the world swooning at the heroism, but it gave notice of the added, and unconsidered, ingredient that would embrace Ali for the rest of his life.
Should we call it adversity? Well, here is sheer, dauntless, leonine courage. Worldwide love of, and tributes to Ali today are not so much for his astonishing, upfront, youthful and winning talents, but for his bravery at heaving himself from the canvas that New York night in 1971.
Ali avenged that defeat by Frazier with a points victory in the return contest in the same New York ring three years later. In 1975, the last payday was generous enough for the two ageing fighters to meet for a third time in Quezon City, in the Philippines – “the Thrilla in Manila”. The venom and pain of it was excruciating. To all intents, it was a requiem for both men’s illustrious prizefighting. It ended with Ali collapsing but, by minutes, the winner because Frazier was mercifully retired by his cornermen at the end of the 14th and penultimate round. They had nearly beaten each other to death. The doyen of British sportswriters, Hugh McIlvanney, was at the ringside: “There was nothing morbid or sadistic about the thrill that their performances sent through the blood. What we felt was awe at the spectacle of two extraordinary men setting new limits for themselves, pushing back the boundaries of their courage, their physical and psychological capacity.”
A year before what should have been, by every doctor’s recommendation, the (sort of) triumphant last hurrah in the Philippines, Ali’s global ambassadorial obsessions saw him stripped for battle in the even more unlikely setting of Kinshasa (then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). The posters for this contest dubbed it “the Rumble in the Jungle”. It was probably the seminal boxing match of all time, the dramatic unities perfectly in place: perceived goodie v baddie, impossible odds, totally unforeseen outcome.
The 25-year-old George Foreman was cast as the behemoth beast, but boxing had not seen a hitter of such concussive, one-punch power, demonstrated in Jamaica when he took the title from Frazier. Ali might possibly have had an answer in his prime, but not now, not at a fading, spent-force 32 years old. But as well as his wilful courage, in this (what we thought) would be the last chapter of his glories, we came also to marvel at the brazenness. For seven sweltering rounds, against all prognoses, Ali allowed Foreman, the brutish, one-blow Goliath, actually to punch himself out on his arms, as Ali himself lay on the ropes, head back as if out of a bedroom window to check if the cat was on the roof. Ali called it his “rope-a-dope” trick – and the world caught its breath when finally he came off the ropes, feinted with his left and, with a single right hander, felled the bewildered Foreman.
Unaccountably champ again, Ali went on boxing. He had easily enough of a fortune left, however generous he was with it, and in the ring he was now being hit with increasing regularity and hurt. In February 1978, he lost the title to the workaday Leon Spinks and regained it once again that September – but tiredly, for now the feet were flat, the reflexes dull, the senses dimmed. His speech was slurring badly.
He retired, came back, retired again and was just short of his 39th birthday when he allowed himself to challenge the giant he-man Larry Holmes in October 1980. He was calamitously, cringingly, beaten up over 10 rounds by a mercifully unvenomous Holmes – but badly beaten up he still was. It was not till December 1981 – just five weeks off 40 – that sense and his friends coaxed him from the ring and quietly led him away after a last humbling from Trevor Berbick in the Bahamas.
Ali’s health nosedived almost at once. Soon he was seen scarcely able to talk or walk, his speech descending into inaudible mumbles, the once stimulating “Ali shuffle” becoming a harrowing shamble. It was pitifully obvious that Parkinson’s disease was severely debilitating his brain and limbs. Yet the soulful, mischievous brown eyes still spoke eloquently of his wit and charm. With pride, difficulty and a dignified, if silent, eloquence, he lit the torch to open the 1996 Olympic games in Atlanta. Thousands wept as he did so.
At the turn of the millennium, Ali was voted, far and wide and undisputed in umpteen countries, man of the century, sportsman of the century, and personality of the century. In 2005 he opened a museum built in his honour in Louisville. And in 2011 he made rare public appearance the funeral of his former opponent, Frazier. At last year’s opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in London, he seemed extremely frail and was only able to walk a few steps. However, he received a rapturous reception from the 80,000-strong crowd.
Ali is survived by his fourth wife, Lonnie; and by two sons and seven daughters.
• Muhammad Ali, boxer, born 17 January 1942; died 3 June 2016
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/jun/04/muhammad-ali-obituary
One of the greatest heavyweight boxing champions the world has seen, with courage, conviction and wit that made him an inspirational figure
Frank Keating
Saturday 4 June 2016
Muhammad Ali, who has died aged 74, was acclaimed by many as the greatest world heavyweight boxing champion the world has ever seen. He was certainly the most charismatic boxer. His courage inside and outside the ring and his verbal taunting of opponents were legendary, as were his commitment to justice and his efforts for the sick and underprivileged.
Three times world champion, Ali harnessed his fame in the ring to causes outside it. He was a convert to Islam and the personification of Black Pride. He anticipated the anti-Vietnam war movement of the 1960s by refusing to join the armed forces.
He made goodwill missions to Afghanistan and North Korea, delivered medical supplies to an embargoed Cuba, and travelled to Iraq to secure the release of 15 US hostages shortly before the first Gulf war. Repellent though he found many aspects of US foreign policy – and repellent as the establishment found him when in 1967 it banned him from the ring for three years for refusing the draft – the nation embraced Ali as time passed, realising his unique ambassadorial value. In 2005, he received his country’s highest civilian honour, the presidential medal of freedom, from George W Bush, an incumbent whose views he must have detested.
But it all stemmed from boxing. His matchless magnificence, the self-proclaimed “greatness”, was invented early as a cheery prizefighter’s publicity stunt. It was a greatness that was to balloon and achieve near-universal acceptance as he became acknowledged as a beacon not only for downtrodden African Americans but for global Islam as well, not to mention the anti-war movement or poverty in developing countries. In the middle of press conferences, reporters would earnestly ask him about solving the Palestine problem, or if he could have a quiet word with Moscow about President Ronald Reagan’s star wars programme. Ali was a rebel with a cause – lots of them.
He played the sovereign to the hilt. He played the victim. He played the clown. He played the camera. But, above all, he played the sport. He was the best heavyweight boxer there had ever been since the Marquess of Queensberry set down his rules in 1867, undeniably the best since Kid Cain KO’ed Sugar Ray Abel. First as Cassius Clay, then as Ali, this remarkable boxer totally reset the marks, utterly changed all inviolate techniques and tenets. Four years after winning the light-heavyweight gold medal at the 1960 Olympic games in Rome, he won the undisputed professional world heavyweight championship, taking on all comers. He was to regain the title twice, an achievement that remains unmatched. His career in the professional ring spanned an astonishing 21 years. Of 61 contests, he lost only five, four of them when he was long past his majestic best. Thirty-seven victories were knockouts.
Ali’s fabled predecessors in his kingdom were Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano. Johnson was a puncher-boxer and dandy; Dempsey an uncomplicated hitter; Tunney had grace and nerve and fast feet; Louis’s fast hands punched in a blur of combinations, and he had a killer instinct as well as chivalry; Marciano had relentless oomph and steam-hammer cruelty. Ali had every single one of all those qualities in abundance, as well as timing, intelligence, wit and an extraordinary courage which, in the end, becursed his wellbeing. Yet, through the final third of the 20th century, rheumy-eyed, scarred and bent-nosed ancients would shake their heads at his virtuosities, sigh, and insist that the big, bold champions of their far tougher olden days would have ambushed, cornered, speared and most damnably done for the swankpot in no time. But as the fearless Ali strutted on, inventing new ways, new scenes, new angles, new endings, those croaking pronouncements of veterans petered out. No one believed them any more, not when Ali was in his prime, in his pomp.
He was born the eldest son of Cassius and Odessa Clay in Louisville, Kentucky, and named Cassius Marcellus after his father. His mother was listed on the birth certificate as a household domestic, his father as a signwriter. The family lived on Grand Avenue in the segregated city’s black west end. In the Kentucky state census rolls, all four of his grandparents were described as “free coloureds”. One of Odessa’s grandfathers, Tom Moorehead, was the son of a white man called Moorehead and the partner of a slave named simply as Dinah. Odessa’s other grandfather was a white Irishman, Abe O’Grady, born in County Clare, who married a “freed slave woman, name unknown”.
It was a small but happy family (there was soon a second son, Rudolph), in which penury was taken for granted. The brothers were both good boys, the neighbours recalled, unfailing attendees of the Baptist Sunday school. Odessa was a serene and saintly homemaker, though her husband was a rascally tale-teller and liked to drink. This led to occasional court appearances. He paid the fines and, as a self-imposed additional penance, painted religious murals for various Baptist chapels around the city. The two boys would sometimes help. “Louisville was more peaceful, less dangerous then,” Rudolph recalled many years later, “except if we strayed off-limits, then white boys would threaten: ‘Hey, nigger, get back to your own.’”
Young Cassius was no scholar, and by the end of his schooling, only an occasional attendee. He could scarcely read or write when he graduated from Central high school in 1960, and ranked 376th in the graduation class of 391. Long before then, however, his abundant energies had been devoted to boxing.
When he was 12, in October 1954, his cherished bicycle was stolen. The white policeman, Joe Martin, to whom he reported the theft, happened to be the organiser of a boys’ boxing club in the basement of the city’s Columbia auditorium. He never got his bike back, but it was a life-changing encounter. Encouraged also by a black trainer, Fred Stoner, within two months the spindly, sassy youngster weighing 90lb had won (on a split decision) his first official three-minute, three-round amateur bout against another rookie, Ron O’Keefe. Over the next six years he contested a further 107 junior bouts, won two national Golden Gloves titles and two national Amateur Athletic Union titles, and was chosen for the US team for the 1960 Olympics. He leapt to such glamour with relish – and a nerveless, original skill – and in the final of the 178lb (light-heavyweight) division, the 18-year-old defeated – and bewildered and perplexed – the three-times European champion Zbigniew Pietrzykowski, of Poland.
These were the first Olympics to be televised live around the world. And the world took notice. I did, for sure, and remember thinking: “This madcap kid doesn’t even hold up his guard. He just dances and sways – and punches in lightning flashes.” I still recall Neil Allen’s prescient report in the Times: “The American has given the impression of being so much a showman that we have waited throughout the tournament for someone to wake him up with a solid punch. Nobody has, and in the final last night Clay, like some loosely strung marionette, put his punches together in combination clusters and pummelled the Pole about the ring. Only great courage kept the triple European champion on his feet. We still have not seen whether the new gold medallist can take a punch but I expect him to be among the professionals next year so we shall know his worth soon enough.”
And so it came to pass. In 1960 a consortium of old-money Kentucky businessmen were ready to launch the young Olympian’s paid career – with a $10,000 down payment and a guaranteed $333 a month against ring earnings (the latter was split 50/50 for the first two years, then 60/40 for the next four of the six-year contract). It was a good, fair deal, and three days after signing, on 29 October 1960, Clay made his debut as a pro and defeated in six one-sided rounds Tunney Hunsaker, a former chief police officer, in Louisville’s packed Freedom Hall. Hunsaker lived off the history of it till his death 40 years later. The consortium hired a canny veteran, Archie Moore, as Clay’s trainer, but the two never got on and instead he went south to Florida, to Angelo Dundee’s celebrated Fifth Street gym in Miami. The skilled and caring Dundee was to be at Ali’s side and in his corner for the next 21 years.
As his fleet and rangy physique bulked up, his looks and build now matched his charm and cheek. The artist LeRoy Neiman observed: “Suddenly he resembles a piece of classical sculpture with no flaw or imperfection, his features and limbs flawless and perfectly proportioned.” The engaging nature, too, began to resonate as Clay cut a swathe through the well-selected heavyweights’ Second Division and he allowed his ego full rein on self-promotion. Imitating the white, vaudeville television love-to-hate wrestler Gorgeous George, his forecasts bragged the precise round he was going to win, sometimes combining such box-office larks with couplets of doggerel. One was: “I’ll Just Say ‘Boo!’/He’ll Go in Two” (Lamar Clark, KO 2); another was “Ol’ Mitt Likes t’Mix/He falls in Six” (Alex Miteff, KO 6). In 1963, Clay returned to Europe for his first foreign professional fight against Henry Cooper (“London’s a Jive/’Enery Lasts Five”), and although he was floored for the first time, he duly stopped Cooper in the fifth – as he had predicted.
Spring 1964 was momentous for Clay in several ways. Dundee, daringly, deemed him ready for Sonny Liston, the world heavyweight champion. Liston smiled for once. The boxing fraternity chortled. This, or so the knowing forecast went, would be the end of a half-diverting saga of an appealing loudmouth. We would hear of him no more, for Liston and his ogre status made both an art and science out of first, intimidation, then sadistically inflicted pain. Hadn’t Liston not long before humiliatingly laid to waste, twice inside six minutes, the Olympic champion of 1956, Floyd Patterson?
Liston was presumed invincible and the greenhorn, fresh-faced challenger was an unprecedented 8-1 underdog – odds that lengthened when, at the weigh-in, Clay’s apparent hysterics had doctors pronouncing him traumatised by fear. Come the bell, the upstart nervelessly played it cool, almost a laughingly gay matador, his speed of hand and foot totally nullifying Liston’s wicked jab, the key to his armoury. Dismantled brick by brick and tile by tile, Liston aged 10 years in less than 20 minutes and retired on his stool before the start of the seventh (the round in which the challenger had predicted “the ol’ bear would be trapped and wrap’t”). On 25 February 1964, Clay was crowned world heavyweight champion for the first time. In the rematch in May 1965, Liston keeled over in a fainting funk inside a round.
Two days after his first defeat of Liston, Clay announced his conversion to Islam, and on 6 March, he changed his name to Muhammad Ali. Liston later complained that the Black Muslims, a separatist sect, had threatened him in an attempt to throw the fight. Old ham boxing writers were happy to believe him, and so were America’s rightwing rednecks. Such a charge was at least given credence as the newly renamed boxer was a minister in the Nation of Islam, and the group’s self-proclaimed “messenger”, Elijah Muhammad, had, to all intents, become the boxer’s manager. (Ali was to convert to orthodox Islam in 1975.)
The US of the mid-1960s was a nation seething with racial undercurrents. (Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965 and Martin Luther King three years later.) The rest of the world was comparatively oblivious to all of this, and while to a large, white tranche of the US, Ali became public enemy No 1, his televised contests with Liston had girdled the globe so, even by then, whatever name he chose, his sporting legend was assured.
However, for all his brilliance in the ring – hands as fast and deadly as a cobra’s strike, feet in a riverdance blur never before seen in a heavyweight – America’s inevitable white backlash to his religious defiance bit back with merciless retribution. This change of mood among white Americans coincided with Ali’s second US army call-up to serve in Vietnam. Although he had already failed in 1964 the draft’s preliminary intelligence tests in literacy and numeracy (placed at just 16 in an elementary attainment level of 30) – “I said I was the greatest, not the smartest” – fresh calls for his induction came in 1966.
Establishment outrage reached spittingly aggressive proportions when Ali, pleading deferment on religious grounds, told reporters: “I ain’t no quarrel with them Vietcong … no Vietcong ever called me ‘nigger’.” Within an hour, outraged, all US boxing bodies suspended his licence and stripped him of his title. In June 1967, a court confirmed the ban unanimously. Ali was prevented from boxing until 1970 – that is, between the ages of 25 and 28, which undoubtedly should have been the pinnacle and prime of his athletic resplendence. His really “greatest” years were arguably stolen. (The conviction for refusing to join the armed services was reversed in June 1971 by the US supreme court.)
When the three-year ban expired, he returned to the ring, in October 1970, with a three-round stoppage of Jerry Quarry in Atlanta, Georgia, although observers could already detect a glimmer of unease about his work. He knew the ravishing speed and the split-second timing of his punches were fractionally out of kilter. He never reclaimed the full package; lost property, stolen property. I was pleased, at least, to have witnessed his pre-ban splendours – say, against Cleveland Williams at Houston in November 1966, or Zora Folley in New York in March 1967.
Nor, after the ban, it must be said, was Ali’s passing, nasty and vindictive side ever again in evidence, such as when he bullyingly and hurtfully “carried” the hapless, injured Patterson in 1965, or malevolently taunted to painful humiliation for the full 15 rounds Ernie Terrell, who had addressed Ali as Clay at the weigh-in at Houston in 1967. Those were not pretty sights.
If the two fights with Liston, epic in their theatricality and outcome, had begun to compile the legend, then the three contests with the uncomplicated, brooding warrior Joe Frazier, in 1971, 1974 and 1975, clinched the immortal deal. Here was an unmissably dramatic, defining, second act. Only six months after the exile’s return against Quarry, Ali squared up to the remorselessly committed hitter “Smokin’ Joe” to challenge for his own usurped title. After a thunderously pulsating, draining 14 rounds it was dead-level. In the last, a fearsome Frazier hook crunched into Ali’s jaw, broke it, and dumped him on the canvas, sprawling on his back. Frazier deservedly won the decision – but the fact that Ali somehow gathered himself to his feet and attempted to fight back not only had the fans round the world swooning at the heroism, but it gave notice of the added, and unconsidered, ingredient that would embrace Ali for the rest of his life.
Should we call it adversity? Well, here is sheer, dauntless, leonine courage. Worldwide love of, and tributes to Ali today are not so much for his astonishing, upfront, youthful and winning talents, but for his bravery at heaving himself from the canvas that New York night in 1971.
Ali avenged that defeat by Frazier with a points victory in the return contest in the same New York ring three years later. In 1975, the last payday was generous enough for the two ageing fighters to meet for a third time in Quezon City, in the Philippines – “the Thrilla in Manila”. The venom and pain of it was excruciating. To all intents, it was a requiem for both men’s illustrious prizefighting. It ended with Ali collapsing but, by minutes, the winner because Frazier was mercifully retired by his cornermen at the end of the 14th and penultimate round. They had nearly beaten each other to death. The doyen of British sportswriters, Hugh McIlvanney, was at the ringside: “There was nothing morbid or sadistic about the thrill that their performances sent through the blood. What we felt was awe at the spectacle of two extraordinary men setting new limits for themselves, pushing back the boundaries of their courage, their physical and psychological capacity.”
A year before what should have been, by every doctor’s recommendation, the (sort of) triumphant last hurrah in the Philippines, Ali’s global ambassadorial obsessions saw him stripped for battle in the even more unlikely setting of Kinshasa (then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). The posters for this contest dubbed it “the Rumble in the Jungle”. It was probably the seminal boxing match of all time, the dramatic unities perfectly in place: perceived goodie v baddie, impossible odds, totally unforeseen outcome.
The 25-year-old George Foreman was cast as the behemoth beast, but boxing had not seen a hitter of such concussive, one-punch power, demonstrated in Jamaica when he took the title from Frazier. Ali might possibly have had an answer in his prime, but not now, not at a fading, spent-force 32 years old. But as well as his wilful courage, in this (what we thought) would be the last chapter of his glories, we came also to marvel at the brazenness. For seven sweltering rounds, against all prognoses, Ali allowed Foreman, the brutish, one-blow Goliath, actually to punch himself out on his arms, as Ali himself lay on the ropes, head back as if out of a bedroom window to check if the cat was on the roof. Ali called it his “rope-a-dope” trick – and the world caught its breath when finally he came off the ropes, feinted with his left and, with a single right hander, felled the bewildered Foreman.
Unaccountably champ again, Ali went on boxing. He had easily enough of a fortune left, however generous he was with it, and in the ring he was now being hit with increasing regularity and hurt. In February 1978, he lost the title to the workaday Leon Spinks and regained it once again that September – but tiredly, for now the feet were flat, the reflexes dull, the senses dimmed. His speech was slurring badly.
He retired, came back, retired again and was just short of his 39th birthday when he allowed himself to challenge the giant he-man Larry Holmes in October 1980. He was calamitously, cringingly, beaten up over 10 rounds by a mercifully unvenomous Holmes – but badly beaten up he still was. It was not till December 1981 – just five weeks off 40 – that sense and his friends coaxed him from the ring and quietly led him away after a last humbling from Trevor Berbick in the Bahamas.
Ali’s health nosedived almost at once. Soon he was seen scarcely able to talk or walk, his speech descending into inaudible mumbles, the once stimulating “Ali shuffle” becoming a harrowing shamble. It was pitifully obvious that Parkinson’s disease was severely debilitating his brain and limbs. Yet the soulful, mischievous brown eyes still spoke eloquently of his wit and charm. With pride, difficulty and a dignified, if silent, eloquence, he lit the torch to open the 1996 Olympic games in Atlanta. Thousands wept as he did so.
At the turn of the millennium, Ali was voted, far and wide and undisputed in umpteen countries, man of the century, sportsman of the century, and personality of the century. In 2005 he opened a museum built in his honour in Louisville. And in 2011 he made rare public appearance the funeral of his former opponent, Frazier. At last year’s opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in London, he seemed extremely frail and was only able to walk a few steps. However, he received a rapturous reception from the 80,000-strong crowd.
Ali is survived by his fourth wife, Lonnie; and by two sons and seven daughters.
• Muhammad Ali, boxer, born 17 January 1942; died 3 June 2016
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/jun/04/muhammad-ali-obituary
Friday, 3 June 2016
Bob Dylan goes shopping in Newcastle - and other strange tales...
Bizarre stories featuring a potted head, a turtle hat and Dylan on a shopping spree might just make you think twice about Newcastle’s past
Emily Merritt
2 June 2016
So you think you know Newcastle? Well, think again. Even the most ardent Geordie will be stunned by the hidden history of Newcastle.
Hidden Newcastle reveals twisted and unexpected tales from the city’s past.
Bizarre stories featuring a potted head, a turtle hat, Queen Vic’s unpaid bill and Dylan on a shopping spree might just make you think twice about Newcastle’s history.
These tales from across the centuries are drawn from old books and documents housed in Tyne & Wear Museums & Archives and also feature in the Hidden Newcastle app developed with help from NE1 Ltd.
Take a step back in time to discover things you never knew.
Hidden Newcastle reveals twisted and unexpected tales from the city’s past.
Bizarre stories featuring a potted head, a turtle hat, Queen Vic’s unpaid bill and Dylan on a shopping spree might just make you think twice about Newcastle’s history.
These tales from across the centuries are drawn from old books and documents housed in Tyne & Wear Museums & Archives and also feature in the Hidden Newcastle app developed with help from NE1 Ltd.
Take a step back in time to discover things you never knew.
The shirts they are a changin’
Shoppers and staff at Marcus Price, Newcastle’s premier fashion store, would have been forgiven for thinking someone was playing a joke on May 6, 1965 – because in walked Bob Dylan. He was accompanied at the Groat Market shop by his manager and musician Alan Price, where he bought a black jacket, pink shirt and multi-coloured tie. Owner Marcus Price said: “Good sellers were three-buttoned, straight-fitting jackets with narrow lapels and muted stripes, ‘flower power’ shirts and ties to match.” Shop manager David Bell recalls that Dylan was very well-mannered and polite. He said: “The teenage assistants were very excited, but didn’t hassle him for autographs.” Keen observers said Dylan wore the jacket that night on stage at the City Hall.
The self-proclaimed genius of William Martin
William Martin, brother of the printer John Martin, was a man of science and established himself as a local eccentric in the early 19th century.
He became publicly known for denouncing famous inventors of the day and famed for his unusual hat – a turtle shell framed in brass. Martin falsely claimed to have designed the High Level Bridge.
Queen Victoria's unpaid bill
When it was announced that on September 27, 1849, Queen Victoria would be passing through Newcastle by rail on her way from Balmoral to London, city dignitaries decided to use the occasion for a Royal opening of the newly-completed High Level Bridge. The city had never seen a monarch since Charles I in 1647. But Victoria’s train was late and although she listened to addresses from the corporations of Newcastle and Gateshead in the centre of the bridge she would only look out of the west-facing window – much to the disappointment of the majority of the 60,000 crowd who had waited in the rain for hours. A civic reception and lunch had been organised in the Banqueting Room of the Old Castle where a window had been removed to provide an entrance from the bridge via a platform. The queen, however, had lunched at Howick in Northumberland. Indignant councillors, aldermen and burgesses nevertheless went ahead with the celebrations – and sent the bill to the royal household. It was never settled.
When it was announced that on September 27, 1849, Queen Victoria would be passing through Newcastle by rail on her way from Balmoral to London, city dignitaries decided to use the occasion for a Royal opening of the newly-completed High Level Bridge. The city had never seen a monarch since Charles I in 1647. But Victoria’s train was late and although she listened to addresses from the corporations of Newcastle and Gateshead in the centre of the bridge she would only look out of the west-facing window – much to the disappointment of the majority of the 60,000 crowd who had waited in the rain for hours. A civic reception and lunch had been organised in the Banqueting Room of the Old Castle where a window had been removed to provide an entrance from the bridge via a platform. The queen, however, had lunched at Howick in Northumberland. Indignant councillors, aldermen and burgesses nevertheless went ahead with the celebrations – and sent the bill to the royal household. It was never settled.
Potted head on Amen Corner
“Ann Seth respectfully informs her friends and the public that she has begun to make sausages, black puddings and that she prepares potted head and various other articles in the eating line. Customers may rely on the utmost neatness and cleanliness being observed in dressing and victuals; and all favours will be gratefully received and punctually attended to. Newcastle - 1802”
A gunboat takes up position
A general strike was called by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) on May 4, 1926, to support the miners in their quarrel with the mine owners, who wanted to reduce their wages by 13% and increase their shifts from seven to eight hours. Huge numbers of transport workers, dockers, printers, builders, steel and power workers stayed off work. The government declared that Britain was “threatened with a revolution” and attempted to take control of the BBC, while the Roman Catholic Church called the strike “a sin”. On May 5, a warship was despatched to the Tyne in a demonstration of authority. A few days later, police had to quell a major riot in the Bigg Market and strikers in Northumberland derailed the Flying Scotsman train.
A tragic rooftop chase
In the early hours of August 29, 1932, street musician Robert William Hall died after a dramatic rooftop chase by police. He fell from the Benwell Hotel, on the outskirts of Newcastle city centre, after an attempted burglary. During the pursuit, Hall – also known as Robert Dodds and William Jones– had knocked down a chimney pot and threw slates and masonry on to the crowd gathered below. In attempting to knock off another stack, he fell into the hotel’s back yard, fracturing his skull. An accomplice was arrested. Hall’s criminal career included a shooting in Chicago for which he served an 11-year term in Sing Sing Prison in New York, and threatening police with a razor during a break-in at The Forth Hotel.
Lewd houses and night walkers
Men and women suspected of living off immoral earnings and criminal gains in the 1700s were listed in what was called The Rogue’s File. They included alleged prostitutes, “brothel keepers” and publicans who lived around Castle Garth, Castle Stairs and the Quayside.
At one house, “lewd persons pay 12d for the use of beds in the daytime plus half-a-crown for the night”. Jane Turner, “common and of low plight”, was reputed to visit soldiers frequently at the Guardhouse but the later companionship of “gentlemen” led to her adopting “an improved appearance”. John Reed Smith of Bank Side reported “he has several times lay with her”. John Reed Smith was obviously no gentleman.
Mary Smith kept the “very disorderly” Goat Ale House at the Quayside and on marrying Charles Cadwell, moved to Gateshead where they opened another tavern “with the sign of the Goat” (now displayed in the Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead). It was “not only a bawdy house but a residence of Cadwell’s gang and other thieves and pickpockets”.
Howay the president
On May 6, 1977, Jimmy Carter, 39th President of the United States received the honorary freedom of Newcastle. The Civic Centre, where the presentation was made, had seen nothing like it – the president had been in the White House for only a few months when he elected to make Newcastle his first stop on a European tour.
To a huge roar of appreciation, Coun Hugh White, Lord Mayor of Newcastle, welcomed Mr Carter – whose roots are in Georgia– saying: “Mr President, sir, you are a Georgian; you have now become a Geordie.” An even greater roar went up when the president, clearly relishing the occasion, replied: “Howay the lads”. He continued: “I’m very grateful to be a Geordie now, and I’m deeply grateful at the tremendous welcome that you’ve extended to me.”
Skipper Clarke - the gormandiser
A Newcastle joiner was challenged to an eating and drinking wager at a public house in 1742. Skipper Clarke, “the gormandising eccentric”, tucked into a 10lb (4.5 kilos) leg of mutton, a large loaf and six pints of ale – the last of which was laced with snuff. Undeterred, he polished off the lot inside two hours. On another occasion, at a Christmas dinner, he was presented with seven sheep’s plucks (internal organs) originally intended for the family’s dogs, plus a pound of bread, three quarts (3.4 litres) of broth mixed with an ounce of jalap (a laxative), a quart of small beer – low alcohol normally given to servants and children – and a pint of ale.
He ate four of the plucks and had he been alone, Clarke would have finished all seven, but was deterred by his host’s scrutiny. From then, people with a voracious appetite were known as Skipper Clarke.
He was found dead in 1779 in Folly Chare, Sandgate, “through want and the inclemency of the weather”. He had by then been long regarded as a mean and miserly beggar, but in his room, hidden in a marrow bone, were 95 guineas and £24 in Portuguese gold.
A Newcastle joiner was challenged to an eating and drinking wager at a public house in 1742. Skipper Clarke, “the gormandising eccentric”, tucked into a 10lb (4.5 kilos) leg of mutton, a large loaf and six pints of ale – the last of which was laced with snuff. Undeterred, he polished off the lot inside two hours. On another occasion, at a Christmas dinner, he was presented with seven sheep’s plucks (internal organs) originally intended for the family’s dogs, plus a pound of bread, three quarts (3.4 litres) of broth mixed with an ounce of jalap (a laxative), a quart of small beer – low alcohol normally given to servants and children – and a pint of ale.
He ate four of the plucks and had he been alone, Clarke would have finished all seven, but was deterred by his host’s scrutiny. From then, people with a voracious appetite were known as Skipper Clarke.
He was found dead in 1779 in Folly Chare, Sandgate, “through want and the inclemency of the weather”. He had by then been long regarded as a mean and miserly beggar, but in his room, hidden in a marrow bone, were 95 guineas and £24 in Portuguese gold.
Miss D Jeck - the Siamese elephant
As an opener for a stage show, an elephant walking from Edinburgh to Newcastle takes some beating. It took four days for Miss D Jeck the Siamese elephant and her entourage “preceded by her keeper without rope or chain and with perfect indifference”, having set off from Edinburgh on August 25, 1830. Bad weather had prevented her being brought by sea.
Crowds had gathered all along the 120-mile route to witness the unique occasion and several thousand greeted her arrival in the town at Barras Bridge. Straight away, “this noble animal” was taken to the Theatre Royal (then located on Mosley Street), entering through a specially-widened stage door.
That evening “she exhibited her wonderful performances” without showing any signs of fatigue. Included in Miss D Jeck’s daily diet were 76 pounds (34 kilos) of potatoes, 60 pounds (27 kilos) of hay, 11 quarter loaves and a bushel (36 dry litres) each of bran and oats. As well as water, she was allowed as much beer and wine “as anyone chose to give her”. After her Newcastle performances, Miss D Jeck was taken by steamer to her next engagement in London.
The Spanish Crown
The Spanish mistress of a pub landlord on Side, Newcastle, is celebrated in several ways. He changed the name of the Crown to Crown Posada – Spanish for inn or lodging house – while, hidden under the wallpaper, are paintings depicting flamenco dancers and other Spain-inspired scenes. The murals, painted in 1927 by an unknown hand, come to light only when the pub near the Quayside is being redecorated.
Harry Hotspur - football’s hot-head
A Scots army led by the Earl of Douglas entered Newcastle in 1388 only to be met by the forces of Henry “Hotspur” Percy – renowned as a fierce warrior and son of the 1st Earl of Northumberland. The two sides engaged in a skirmish at Barras Bridge, which included hand-to-hand combat between the leaders.
Douglas captured the Percy family pennant before riding west to join the rest of his army. Harry Hotspur – so called because of his impetuous nature – became the hero of Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part One and gave his name to Tottenham Hotspur FC – the Percy family had an estate in London. Hotspur died at the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, shot in the eye by an arrow – a scene portrayed on The Hotspur pub sign on Percy Street.
Get well soon
Long before it was marketed as an energy drink in several flavours, Lucozade was aimed at people who were ill. Lucozade was created by chemist William Owen in a shop in Barras Bridge, Newcastle, in 1927. He already operated a mineral water factory and had worked for several years developing the glucose syrup carbonated tonic drink to provide a pleasant tasting, easily digestible, quick source of energy. It was soon made available in hospitals throughout Britain under the name Glucozade until 1929 when its name was altered to Lucozade.
The world’s first dog show
The regular Poultry Show at the Town Hall and Corn Exchange was boosted on June 28-29, 1859 with the addition of a Sporting Dogs section. What has become to be recognised as the world’s first dog show was restricted to setters and pointers only, judged on symmetry of shape and purity of breed, and attracted 60 entrants from across the country.
Local gunmaker William Rochester Pape supplied two valuable guns as prizes. Winner of the best setter was owned by William Jobling of Morpeth and best pointer belonged to J Brailsford of Knowsley in Lancashire. Later that same year another dog show was organised in Birmingham.
Police mount chastity patrols
Freezing early-winter weather wasn’t going to stop 4,000 Beatles fans queuing for a whole weekend to buy tickets to see the Beatles. They started lining up at the City Hall on October 25, 1963 for the concert that November – and waited patiently for the next 48 hours. While friends and families kept up a constant supply of soup and sandwiches, worried parents asked police to mount “chastity patrols” to protect the morality of the young girls camped out on the pavement. When the box office finally opened, 130 people were hurt in the stampede.
Ali meets the Geordies
During the 1970s the official most recognisable face on the planet belonged to Muhammad Ali. So, on July 16 1977 Eldon Square Recreation Centre became the centre of the earth’s recreation when the world heavyweight champion came to town. His “Ali Meets The Geordies” live television interview with commentator Reg Gutteridge was part of a whistle-stop tour of Tyneside which included sparring with young boxers at Newcastle boys’ clubs and the blessing of his and his wife Veronica’s marriage at a South Shields mosque. Celebrated poet and playwright Peter Mortimer was moved to commemorate the visit in rhyme; one verse going:
“With your butterfly stance
And your sting like a bee
The Geordies say welcome
To Muhammad Ali.”
At Eldon Square, Ali said that Geordie welcome was the one of the greatest he’d ever experienced – anywhere – and the people made him feel like a king.
“With your butterfly stance
And your sting like a bee
The Geordies say welcome
To Muhammad Ali.”
At Eldon Square, Ali said that Geordie welcome was the one of the greatest he’d ever experienced – anywhere – and the people made him feel like a king.
Women in men’s clothing
Women are undeniably entitled to be regarded on equal terms to men – although we all agree their legal and moral rights still have some way to go, even in the 21st Century. So, what of the two women in 1417 who dressed in male clothing to enable them to approach the shrine of St Cuthbert at Durham Cathedral closer than was legally permitted for females?
Matilda Burgh and Margaret Usher’s bold plan was thwarted and the punishment handed down was for them to walk on three holy days in front of the procession in St Nicholas’ Church and on three other festival days at All Saints Church “habited in the dresses in which they committed the offence”. Both women were in service to Peter Baxter and his wife in Newcastle and the pair were ordered to attend the spiritual court at Durham to answer a charge of being complicit in the affair.
The Barras Bridge bombers
An explosion at Barras Bridge Post Office in the early hours of June 10, 1913 bore all the hallmarks of an attack by suffragettes. Alterations were being made to the building and the timing of the incident suggests that damage to property to raise awareness of their cause was preferable to human casualties.
Two policemen in the area saw a bright flash “followed by a report”. Burnt fuses and gunpowder were later discovered, as was some damage to stone facings and brickwork.
The attack was part of a long campaign for equal rights for women and Newcastle at the time was a breeding ground of radical activity. In 1909, Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, had a visit to the city constantly interrupted by protestors, as did Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George a few months later.
An explosion at Barras Bridge Post Office in the early hours of June 10, 1913 bore all the hallmarks of an attack by suffragettes. Alterations were being made to the building and the timing of the incident suggests that damage to property to raise awareness of their cause was preferable to human casualties.
Two policemen in the area saw a bright flash “followed by a report”. Burnt fuses and gunpowder were later discovered, as was some damage to stone facings and brickwork.
The attack was part of a long campaign for equal rights for women and Newcastle at the time was a breeding ground of radical activity. In 1909, Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, had a visit to the city constantly interrupted by protestors, as did Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George a few months later.
The family who bought freedom
On August 3, 1846, escaped slave Frederick Douglass, invited by the Newcastle Anti-Slavery Society, gave a talk in the Salem Methodist Chapel on Hood Street. Douglass, born into slavery, had borrowed papers from a free black sailor to escape to New York and from there sailed to Britain.
At the lecture, “Slavery, the Free Church and British Agitation against Bondage”, the influential audience included Quakers Ellen Richardson and her sister-in-law Anna who were so moved they set up a fund and began negotiations to buy his freedom from slave-master Thomas Auld.
Douglass later wrote: “Without any suggestion from me, they… bought me out of slavery, secured a bill of sale of my body, made a present of myself to myself, and thus enabled me to return to the United States and resume my work for the emancipation of the slaves.”
And the price of freedom? £150 (then $750).
If you enjoyed this, why not try out Hidden Newcastle City Walk, or our ghoulish Hidden Newcastle Halloween special, featuring even more tales of the bizarre and the unexpected.
And my own favourite, sadly not mentioned in the Chronic:
Characters of Old Newcastle Number 25: Jimmy Giblets
Andrew 'Jimmy' Gibbons, known to one and all as Jimmy Giblets, was, for many years, the toast of Victorian Newcastle. This Jarrow-born lad rose to the top of his trade as a butcher and his store dominated the Grainger Market for over two decades. His chicken pies were nominated to represent the city in the prestigious Tartes du Monde competition in Paris in 1882 and he was rewarded for his services by receiving the royal stamp of approval when he was made Pie-Maker to the Queen in 1884, after which he revelled in his local nickname, the Butcher of Newcastle.
He was a personable, not to say jovial, man and many people swore by his products. No-one thought anything of his high turn-over of staff, until the morning that young Alice Fentiman, who, it was claimed, had a crush on Mr Giblets, arrived early for work to help him prepare for the day. To her horror, she saw him slipping an eyeball into one of his famous chicken pies. She screamed for help and the rest is history.
In court, when asked to account for 13 missing members of his staff, he sought to blame his behaviour on the pressures of the job, but his sort always do, don't they?
Sentenced to death by hanging, he was being transported to Durham Jail when a wheel came off his coach and it crashed into an embankment. In the ensuing melee, Mr Giblets made clean his escape.
No-one knows for sure what happened to him, but it was rumoured he boarded a packet steamer for Morocco where he threw in his lot with the Barbary Coast pirates.
It is not thought that he ever returned to England, though if you are inclined to believe in the supernatural, the fate of Miss Fentiman might interest you. Shortly after her unfortunate discovery, she had moved out of Newcastle to the countryside around Hexham where she met and married a young farmer, James Henderson, but it would seem she was never able to exorcise those visions of horror that she had witnessed and she took to alcohol and then to the road. On the 13th of April, 1927, A local rector, walking to church, heard screaming from a field and when he looked up he saw, as he later described it, a black convulsing mass - so black it seemed to absorb daylight - covering the corner of a field. He ran towards it, but his vision was at first obscured by trees and when he entered the field, a ragged clamour of rooks broke in alarm from their scavenging and scattered into the sky. Curious as to what had attracted their attention, the rector, at first hesitantly, edged forward until he came upon the dead body of Alice Fentiman. Despite the undoubted presence of so many birds, he was careful to observe that the only signs of mutilation were that her eyes had been pecked out...
As late as the 1960s, renowned British folklorist Richard Mercer Dorson recorded young girls singing these words in a skipping rhyme in the Scotswood area:
"One, two, three, four:
Who's that knocking at the door?
It's Giblets Jim, Giblets Jim;
If there's eyes in the pies,
It's got to be him."
Food for thought, indeed...
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