The Craven Arms pub and another Lavender Hill Mob
By Sally Sellers
A recent email to the Battersea Society pointed us towards a fascinating piece of Battersea’s sporting history – the Boxing Gym above the Craven Arms Pub, on the corner of Lavender Hill and Taybridge Road. Intriguingly, the message about the site had been sparked when a group from The Sweeney Appreciation Society were found outside it. These dedicated fans of the 1970’s TV police drama explained that the gym had featured in episode 1 series 2 so they’d come to see that location. From them it became clear how important Craven Arms gym had been to British boxing.
With the help of the Wandsworth Heritage Service and their newspaper archives, I found entertaining stories which evoked the spirit of London’s boxing world in the 1960’s and 70’s and the marvellous characters who inhabited it. It will be clear from what follows that I am by no means a boxing expert, and I apologise for any mistakes, that might jar with more knowledgeable readers.
Boxing Boozers
On the corner of Lavender Hill and Taybridge Road is a modern dental practice and few walking past today would know this was once the site of The Craven Arms pub or that, in its heyday, this was one of the most famous of London’s ‘boxing pubs’. Writing in the Sunday Mirror in November 1968, sportswriter Sam Leitch described the gym as “one of the best ever erected in London” where celebrated British fighters learned their trade and famous international boxers prepared for world title fights.
Such ‘boxing pubs’, with customers drinking downstairs while boxers trained, sparred and fought in gyms above, have largely gone now but for a while they were central to the sport. The Thomas A Becket on the Old Kent Road, where Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard and Henry Cooper trained, was known world-wide and others such as the Royal Oak, The Ring at Blackfriars and The Mason’s Arms also in Battersea were at the heart of London’s boxing life. The Craven Arms in Lavender Hill was one of these.
The emergence of boxing pubs had stemmed from the status of prize fighting as an illegal activity. Public Houses would secretly stage fights where bets could be placed and by the mid nineteenth century these became the basis for the development of modern-day boxing. A long tradition of ex-fighters opening pubs as their careers faded began, but active fighters benefitted too. A boxing presence at a local pub was a useful way to promote upcoming fights and sell tickets.
“Fighters are all idiots and I tell ‘em so”
The heyday of the Craven Arms’ gym was in the 1960’s and 70’s when the legendary trainer Freddie Hill operated there. Newspapers of the period provide lively and affectionate descriptions of this unique ‘trainers’ trainer’. In November 1977 Ken Jones wrote in the Sunday Mirror, “Hill is a 56 year old cockney with a colourful line in deliberate abuse and a gym up on Lavender Hill………Hill’s way is to make clear demands of the fighters he trains but the relationship is never less than paternal.” Jones went on “Hill with his flat cap, glasses and shafting wit gives the impression that he could have stood up there in the old music hall days and done the business himself.” His methods and relationships with his charges were unique but undoubtedly effective. In his obituary the gym in Battersea is described as “a mess - dirty carpets, some traditional boxing apparatus and gadgets that Hill had devised.” Yet British, Commonwealth and European titles followed and the famous manager Sam Burns said “Freddie is one of the few trainers who is greater than his fighters. He has got such charisma that he manages to instil it into his boxers.”
The Lavender Hill Mob
The Craven Arms gym, and Hill’s reputation, attracted many of the most celebrated names in boxing. Even to those who were not boxing fans the names of fighting brothers like George and Billy Walker and Chris and Kevin Finnegan were well known, along with world champions like Joe Bugner and Marvellous Marvin Hagler; all of these trained at the gym.
Hill gave everyone who boxed there a sweatshirt inscribed with ‘The Lavender Hill Mob’ after the 1951 Ealing comedy of that name. He publicly likened himself to Alec Guinness, the star of the film, but promoter Harry Levene told him he didn’t even look like a bottle of Guinness!
Chris Finnegan MBE, winner of the middleweight gold medal at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico, trained as a professional with Hill in Battersea, becoming British and Commonwealth light heavy-weight champion in 1971 and 1975, and European light heavy-weight champion in 1972. His sessions were described as excuses for him to swap jokes and insults with Hill. Meanwhile his wife Cheryl spent hours in the pub below chatting about boxing and cars, having had to drive there because of Chris’s driving ban. His younger brother Kevin also saw success as a boxer under Hill, becoming three times British and two times European middleweight champion. Both Finnegan brothers, like other fighters at the time, were known for their drinking. After training they would go to the pub below and have a Guinness or three and sometimes Hill propped up the bar with them. The Sunday People reported that in preparing for a fight in 1980 “Finnegan has to work off his regular intake of Guinness and lager by training in a full-length rubber suit despite the 85 degree heat in Freddie Hill’s Battersea gym.” But it was Freddie who recognised Kevin’s artistic talents, adorning the walls of the gym with his paintings.
Little more about the gym can be found from the 1980’s onward. Freddie Hill moved on and eventually died in April 2003 with a funeral attended by many of the best British boxers who had shared gyms with him. Changing attitudes, rising rents and prices, different lifestyles all meant that London’s old boxing pubs gradually died out and the Craven Arms with them.