Jack Scarrott’s Prize Fighters – Memoirs of a Welsh Boxing Booth Showman by Lawrence Davies

Jack Scarrott’s Prize Fighters – Memoirs of a Welsh Boxing Booth Showman by Lawrence Davies

"Fifty years I’ve been in the game, mister, and all that time I’ve been right here in the mining valleys.  I know every town and village in South Wales, and I knew every boxer worth calling a fighting man they ever turned out.  Dai St. John, Tom Thomas, Jim Driscoll, Freddy Welsh, Johnny Basham, Jimmy Wilde, Percy Jones, and many more that were before their time.  I knew them all, and a good few started with me in my booth.  I was scrapping for a living in a boxing booth before I started a booth on my own, and I was only about twenty one when I started on my own.  Believe me, the life of a booth boxer in those days was tough.  Mountain fighters! That’s what they called the miners who used to fight bare-knuckle on the mountains.  To tell you the truth, mister, we booth boxers were afraid of them. They used to come to the fairgrounds from the collieries with their gangs with them, most of ’em half drunk, and the very sight of them was enough to freeze the heart out of a bull terrier. Broken noses, black eyes, cauliflower ears, lumps knocked off ’em.  If they heard that there was a well-known champion in a boxing booth at a particular fair they’d walk fifty miles to have a go at him......"

( Jack Scarrott speaking about his life in 1936 )

Jack Scarrott’s Prize Fighters – Memoirs of a Welsh Boxing Booth Showman by Lawrence Davies
Published by Peerless Press, Cardiff

ISBN : 978-0-9570342-3-5
Price £14.99
Published : 31/8/2016
451 Pages, 56 black and white photos and illustrations